Among all stages of creative work, feedback has always carried a psychological charge that is difficult to describe. It is both a confrontation and a conversation, a mirror and a compass. Great creators have long treated feedback not as approval-seeking but as a vital component of discovery. Francis Ford Coppola has spoken about showing early cuts to trusted collaborators not to validate choices but to observe where they wince, laugh or lean forward. Novelist Ocean Vuong describes sharing drafts to find “the tremors” that reveal where the work is alive. Even fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has said that critique is essential because “you cannot see your own silhouette from the inside.” Feedback is the mechanism that deepens perspective and sharpens intention.

Generative AI has made the production of creative material astonishingly fast. But velocity does not eliminate the need for critique. If anything, it expands it. When tools like Midjourney, Runway, Sora and Claude can generate sophisticated alternatives instantly, the volume of possibilities increases—but so does the risk of mistaking output for insight. The machine can generate dozens of options, but it cannot tell you which one contains a tension worth pursuing or which direction dilutes the emotional core of the work. It can produce variation after variation, but it cannot articulate why one version feels hollow and another feels inevitable.

This is precisely why the human voice in feedback has never been more necessary.

Critique is not simply about evaluation; it is about interpretation, framing and context. It is the moment when someone outside the creator’s mind places the work within culture, within emotion, within meaning. A model can describe patterns, but it cannot situate a concept within the lived world. It cannot feel when a narrative leans too heavily on cliché. It cannot sense when a visual direction fails to surprise. It cannot intuit when a project is drifting away from its own purpose.

Feedback requires the kind of sensory, experiential understanding that remains profoundly human. When Ava DuVernay sits with her editors, the conversation is not about what is possible—it is about what feels true. When choreographer Akram Khan invites collaborators into the rehearsal room, he asks them where the movement “lands” in their bodies. When musician St. Vincent seeks notes from peers, she asks not whether the song is correct but whether it “moves.” These forms of feedback operate in a dimension that GenAI does not access: felt meaning.

At Copy Lab, this aligns deeply with our philosophy. The sacred partnership between humans and GenAI depends on humans providing interpretation, reflection and critique that models cannot replicate. The tools can accelerate drafting, iteration and exploration, but they cannot perform the feedback loop that strengthens creative integrity. This loop requires empathy, cultural fluency, emotional intelligence and instinct—qualities that are not byproducts of computation.

GenAI challenges creatives to rethink how they give and receive feedback. Because the systems produce polished work so quickly, it becomes essential to resist the temptation to treat first outputs as solutions. Instead, AI-generated drafts should be treated as provocations: starting points that invite deeper dialogue. The goal is not to approve or reject but to ask richer questions. What feeling is missing here? What tension wants to emerge? Where is the trace of the creator’s voice—and where has it been overwritten by statistical likelihood?

Feedback in the GenAI era becomes less about correcting and more about calibrating. Less about identifying flaws and more about identifying meaning. The abundance of creative material makes the feedback stage not a later refinement but a structural necessity. Without it, the work risks becoming polished but empty—highly competent, technically impressive, but lacking the resonance that arises only from human judgment and emotional nuance.

When done well, feedback becomes a form of co-authorship. It strengthens the internal logic of the work. It protects the fragile early intuitions. It prevents the project from collapsing under the weight of unlimited possibility. It ensures that the creator remains in conversation—not just with collaborators but with themselves.

In this way, GenAI does not diminish the importance of human critique; it heightens it. The tools generate the raw material, but humans determine the trajectory. The tools expand the field, but humans define its shape. The tools propose, but humans interpret.

The future of creativity will not be led by frictionless production but by the depth of the conversations surrounding what is produced. And in those conversations, the human voice—curious, critical, discerning, empathetic—remains irreplaceable.

/Carl-Axel Wahlström, Creative Director Copy Lab, 2025