It’s a warm summer day in Florence, Italy. The year is 1503.

A young man walks down the Ponte Vecchio with a roll of canvas tucked under his arm.

Little does he know, that piece of canvas will become the most famous painting of all time.

Leonardo DaVinci arrives at his studio, and sets his newly acquired canvas up on an easel, ready to paint.

The feeling of a blank canvas is one of infinite potential. If flipping a coin creates two new universes, painting a picture must create millions.

Maybe DaVinci had already sat the model down, and he was getting ready to paint her. Maybe he had no idea what that canvas was going to be used for, and just needed to restock.

But undeniably, he had to take a picture in his head and use paint and brushes to bring it into the world.

This is the pinnacle of human creativity, creating something from nothing.

Ira Glass talks about ‘the gap’ as the difference between your taste and your ability to execute. When DaVinci painted the Mona Lisa, he had already closed the gap.

If I tried to paint the Mona Lisa, you’d probably mistake it for a Jackson Pollock.

But I can tell you that the Mona Lisa looks good, and that if she was grinning ear to ear it would probably look worse.

Artificial Intelligence is going to change how we create things, and what it means to be a creative.

Right now, there’s still a gap. I can tell you that the Stripe website looks beautiful, but it’d take me a lot of time to design something that good.

What if I could just look at pages and pages of options for a new website, and just pick the best one out of hundreds of choices?

Most people could do that - if you show them some choices they can pick a good one.

There’s no gap in taste, even if people have bad taste.

The whole paradigm will shift, if computers can generate all the options, you only need to be good at selecting one.

Even beyond that, you may not need to select one. The stripe website may have a different design for each user.

The new paradigm is going to empower people to choose experiences and aesthetics that they love, without having to put in 10000 hours becoming good enough to build them.