Designing Deeper Collaboration (with your brain)

Sometime in the near future, our kids will look back at this era of AI and laugh. Not at the tools themselves, but at how we used them. They’ll see us typing full sentences into 'superintelligent' systems, hoping for halfway decent replies. Like a toddler trying to zoom into a magazine.

We’re not here to optimize prompt tricks. We’re here to co-create. At EL FIN, we have treated AI Models not as an assistant, but as a creative partner since day one. One that challenges, iterates, reflects, and pushes our thinking forward.

Treating AI like a smarter search bar is the fastest way to miss its potential. Creative depth, not just speed, comes when you collaborate, not command.

Our Take

Most of what passes for AI use in creative work today is shallow. Ask a question, get a result, move on. But that’s not working with AI: that’s delegating, and it misses the point.

True creative partnership takes time. It’s iterative. You shape, test, refine. The same way you’d work with a strategist, a writer, an editor. The tools are fast, yes. But the work doesn’t have to be cheapened by speed.

Our best results with AI come when we:

• Treat it like a collaborator, not a vending machine.
• Feed it language we’ve refined, not generic prompts.
• Use it to challenge our own assumptions, not validate them.
• Build tools around it that reflect our actual workflows.

This shift, from efficiency to depth, is subtle. But it changes everything.

The Deeper Play

AI won’t replace creative work. It will transform it, but only if we stop thinking of it as a shortcut. The future isn’t about getting things done faster. It’s about getting to better questions, better structures, better language.

And yes—one day these tools will look prehistoric. But we’ll remember the moment we stopped typing at them like a search bar and started building with them.

What does deep collaboration with AI look like in your process? What’s the difference between asking it something, and building something with it?

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