Co-Creating with AI

TRENDS / INSPIRATION

In our work, there has always been a fertile tension between intuition and structure, between surprise and design, between the top-down logic of a brief and the bottom-up spirit of play. Artificial intelligence has entered this tension not as an alternative, but as a catalyst. It’s not a shortcut. It’s an amplifier. It doesn’t replace — it expands.

At leDehors, we chose to integrate AI into our process not to delegate, but to enhance. The concept of “shared intelligence” described by Ethan Mollick — where AI acts as a colleague, tutor, coach, or partner — resonates deeply with the way we work: through sensitive observation, tailored strategy, and hands-on experimentation.

We use AI to:

• Brainstorm and concept design, to explore scenarios, accelerate associations, and build coherent frameworks around a single intuition. AI helps us structure ideas — without caging them.

• Create images and videos that act as stimuli for clients or tools to visualize concepts. They are never finished outputs, but visual springboards on which to build setups, moodboards, and experiences.

• Develop objects, materials, textures, packaging, displays. Here, AI becomes an unexpected accomplice: suggesting palettes, testing color combinations, inspiring new narrative uses of matter.

• Design new experiences, especially where unusual connections, environmental storytelling, or subtle micro-interactions are needed. AI proposes — and we, with our sensitivity, experience, and brand knowledge, filter, select, and translate.

Our approach is hybrid, human-centered, creative. We use AI as one would use a new material: experimenting, contaminating, constructing. Because in retail, in marketing, in experience design, success doesn’t come from having more data — but from turning data into living presence, into a magnetic scene.

In a recent insight we quoted Lavoisier: “Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed.” Intelligence — both natural and artificial — follows the same logic. We don’t fear it. We transform it.

Between Creation and Perception

It’s not the tool — it’s the recipient that makes the difference. Calvino said it in Cybernetics and Ghosts. So does art critic Valentina Tanni, in her book Conversazioni con la macchina (Tlon), writing:
“We shouldn’t ask whether computers can make art (…) but rather whether humans — as recipients of the artistic gesture — can or should appreciate cultural artifacts produced by automatic processes.”

Can we say the same for creativity applied to communication and marketing?
Here too, it’s not about measuring how “artistic” or “original” a result may be, but about how much it resonates with those who see, listen, and read.
In this sense, technology is just an ally. What makes the real difference remains human sensitivity — the way we use tools to tell something meaningful and authentic to those in front of us.

What’s Next

Another reflection arises from a question we hear more and more often — from colleagues, clients, and even within ourselves: What kind of work do we really do? A question we came across in issue no. 187 of Koselig, Mafe de Baggis’ newsletter, and that — in the context of artificial intelligence — returns with force.

There’s an increasingly explicit trade-off: on one side, the fear that part of our work may be absorbed (or trivialized) by AI; on the other, the opportunity to create something richer — precisely through the relationship with it. It’s like being on a surfboard: the wave is coming, and you can neither stop nor ignore it. You can only learn to read it, to dance on it. To change it, by working with it.

The future of creativity won’t be a contest between humans and machines, but an emerging form of cooperation — built on mutual respect and process empathy. AI can generate combinations, but it’s up to us to imagine the context, read the subtext, feel the emotional climate. So yes, creative work in the future will often be the result of an interaction. But it will always be, first and foremost, a human choice — about what is worth showing to the world.

Imagining Together

As seen in projects such as Imaginaolgy by Samaritual — designed to teach the art of imagining with generative AI — the point is not just co-creation with AI, but accessing what Maurizio Goetz defines as a third creative space. This helps us refine the idea: it’s not exactly co-creation, since humans and machines don’t operate on the same logical plane. It’s better described as generative dialogue: a dynamic exchange, a question-and-answer mechanism evolving between human intuition and machine logic.

From this asymmetric symbiosis, a new kind of creativity often emerges — belonging to that third space: not purely human, not purely artificial, but the product of an interaction where empathy, diversity, and imagination multiply. That’s the space we love to inhabit. Where ideas don’t just add up — they transform.

leDehors designs experiences: moments where people encounter brands in ways that are authentic, memorable, and emotionally resonant. It’s work that seems simple, but isn’t — built layer by layer, through time, analysis, sensitivity, and a constant ability to adapt. Our creativity grows from research, daily study, active listening, and a strong professional ethic.

Technical skills matter, but the real value lies in the quality of relationships and the care with which we read contexts and people. Can all this be replaced? As always, the answer will come from the people we work with.

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Co-Creating with AI

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