This poet discovered AI and fell back in love with his creative career
Published on October 29, 2025
Iain Thomas is a poet, author, and the Chief Innovation Officer at Sounds Fun—an advertising and creative agency that he co-founded with the belief that human creativity could be enhanced, rather than diminished, with the help of AI. It’s a realization that actually began to dawn on Iain a few years prior, after his mother died. He wasn’t sure how to explain death to his children, so he turned to an early version of ChatGPT for help—and was so impressed by the poetry of its responses that he came away convinced of AI’s immense potential as a thought partner for his creative work.
On season two of the Dropbox podcast Working Smarter, Iain talks about using AI to make more space for the creative parts of your work, and why, in a world where everyone has access to the same tools, it’s never been more important to lean into the skills, context, and experiences that make each of us most unique—and most human.
You can read an excerpt of our conversation with Iain below.
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For someone like yourself who’s already really skilled at their craft, where does AI help the most?
AI is a really powerful second pair of eyes. If you're incredibly confident in your skills and don't think AI can match that, that's a perfectly reasonable expectation. I have a whole bunch of writer friends who write novels and short stories and they will often take a page that they've written and paste it into ChatGPT and say, “does this make sense? Are the themes that I'm trying to land coming through?” And you can do that across business—like, “Pretend to be this kind of customer. How would you respond to this? What are the things that I'm missing here?”
I think that when we talk about AI as augmented intelligence that's really when it comes into its own—where it can power your original thinking and pressure test it as you're exploring it. It's severely underutilized in that sense. A lot of people start with AI, whereas my personal opinion is: start with yourself. Start with your own novelty, your own originality, your own unique insights that you bring as a human. And then use AI to compound it and scale it and build it out, because that's what it's really, really good at.
Part of what you do at Sounds Fun is work with clients to bring their ideas to life. Is everybody you encounter immediately on board with using AI for that? Or do you sometimes encounter skepticism, fear, or resistance?
Yes. And often that person is me. When I walk into a room, I say that my job is to be the most cynical, skeptical person in the room. Because the nature of this technology is that it's so exciting and so energizing that you can kind of get carried away. You can forget what it's good for, and where it makes the most sense. Using it to augment your existing efforts, to streamline things, to be more efficient—that's great. But finding those new use cases, and then making sure that they make sense within your business context and the things that you're building for your audience, and for your customers—that's a really important part as well.
Dropbox Dash: The AI teammate that understands your workFor people who don't work in what we consider traditionally creative roles, what do creative uses of AI look like for them?
I think that curiosity, wonder, and creativity is about to become more important than it's ever been before. Because the double-edged sword of AI is that it makes anything possible—but it makes anything possible for almost everyone. So if everyone has access to the same technology that can accomplish all these incredible things, then how do you set yourself apart? And the primary method of doing that is through creativity, curiosity, and wonder. Your superpower going into the future, as far as I'm concerned, is your individualism—the thing that makes you, you.
I think sameness is my big worry and my big concern because like I said, if anyone can make anything, then it all kind of starts to feel the same. The reason that these tools are as incredible as they are is because they've been trained on these massive corpuses of text. But the truth of the world is that not everything has been written down. And you have experiences as an individual, as a human being, that are profound, incredible, and unique to you that happen every single day. If you pay attention to the world around you, you cannot quantify the amount of data that you take in every single day of your life through your eyes—the things that you smell, the feeling of sitting in your chair, the emotions that you feel when you see your wife or your kids or your husband, whoever it is. All of that is data and it's unique to you. You are the only person that experiences that.
And bizarrely as it sounds, that is something that in a business context you actually need to pay more attention to because novelty and ingenuity and the ability to form connections between things comes from there. It comes from looking at what you're working on. It comes from looking at your business. It comes from looking at the world around you and having a profound sense of awareness and being able to make new connections.
I don't want to live in a culture that is fundamentally defined by sameness, by boringness, and so I think creativity is a big challenge for the business world and for culture broadly. I think we're creating a society that fears boredom—but creativity comes from boredom. Creativity comes from going for a walk. Creativity comes from excess time, and I think that it needs to be something we center within ourselves and within our businesses and within our teams a lot more.
Do businesses spend enough time encouraging people to embrace individuality and creative thinking in the work they do? Is it something they should be encouraging more of?
Absolutely. The knee-jerk response right now to this technology is “how can we use this to be more efficient? What tools can we create? What systems and processes can we implement?” Which is great. That's a reasonable response. So then your job becomes, “how do we make better decisions?” And better decisions, to my mind, are often novel and useful, which is the definition of something that's creative.
The output you get from most AI tools is only as good as the input you give it. Could you talk a little bit about the role that creativity plays from a prompting perspective? What's your approach there to getting good responses?
I don't start with a prompt. I start with a blank piece of paper and a pencil, usually, in terms of what I want to accomplish.
You go analog.
I go analog. And I bring that unique human experience to the page in terms of what I want to accomplish. And then I will do something like go to ChatGPT and say, “Here's this idea I'm thinking of. What are three or four other examples of this? How else could I do this? And then what could go wrong with this idea? What are the different ways that I could bring this to life?” But I never start there. Because the nature of AI is it's incredible at scale. It's incredible at taking what you've given it and running with it. But you can't ask it to run from the beginning, because what it gives to you it'll give absolutely everyone else on the planet. And so you have to start with you. You have to start with your own abilities.
This interview has been edited and condensed. For more interviews and past episodes, visit workingsmarter.ai
The Author
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