Quiver, don’t Quake

[PWR note: BookCAMP 2026, https://pwrbookcamp.com/ Keynote Nadim Sadek spoke about AI as an enhancement rather than a replacement for human creativity. Here’s his take.]

A reader who picks up a book a month, every month, from twenty to seventy, will finish around six hundred titles in a lifetime. Six hundred: roughly 0.0006% of every book ever published in English. We have built, between us, the most magnificent library in human history, and almost none of it will ever be opened. That is the ache at the centre of publishing today: superabundance, with too little discoverability to match it.

I spoke about this in New York [BookCAMP 2026] recently, and I want to be clear about where I stand. I am not a blind apologist for artificial intelligence. Many fears around it are entirely legitimate, and we correctly pay attention to them. De-skilling, as we hand our cognitive muscles to a machine. Homogenisation, as a thousand voices flatten into one statistical average. And the soulless, generic content we have learned to call spot and dismiss as ‘slop’. These are real anxieties, and deserve our vigilance.

There is, though, a more generous story available to us, and it begins with a simple observation: every human on Earth is born creative. The majority have simply never had the chance to express it. Eight billion of us, carrying feelings, philosophies, politics and art-forms that have never found their voice… What happens when they finally do?

This is where I portray AI as an ally rather than a replacement. I call it Allied Intelligence: something that works alongside us, complementing our strengths and compensating for our weaknesses, while the final judgement rests uniquely with us, applying our feeling and thinking to it. The machine can draft, iterate, format and research at extraordinary speed. The human still feels, dreams, imagines, and makes meaning from experience. No model can replicate that: it is the irreducible gift we have, given our morphology and psychology.

Creativity has always required craft, and craft has always been something to be mastered. Van Gogh was initially spurned. Digital photography was dismissed at its advent. The electric guitar was treated as a curiosity, shameful to many. We habituate only slowly to every new instrument, then often wonder how we ever managed without it. AI is simply the latest emancipator and ‘voice’ of our creativity, and like the others that came before it, it rewards those who treat it as a partner in dialogue, not a vending machine for answers.

So I would offer publishers and authors one principle above all: Calibrated Trust. Lean on the analytical power, the vast information, the rapid pattern recognition. Then verify every fact, question every specific, and trust your own taste absolutely. You are the director. You make the final cut. Let’s count our gut-instinct, our visceral responses, and our ability to think through things as the final arbiters. 

The danger we should watch out most for is our own passivity: over-relying, drifting towards the generic, losing the “why” that made the work ours in the first place. The remedy is to keep feeding the machine our eccentricity, our idiosyncrasy, our stubborn particular selves. Truly, the more you give in this relationship with AI, the more you get.

We stand at a threshold, with eight billion hearts ready to find their voice. The question I carried home from New York is the one I leave with you now.

Will you quiver… or quake?

© Nadim Sadek

These thoughts and many others flowing from there are explored in my latest boo, ‘Quiver, don’t Quake – how Creativity can Embrace AI’, found on Amazon and other platforms, as paperback, e-book and audiobook.