Passion Labs In Conversation with Quinn Zaffre: Why AI Needs Human Creativity More Than Ever

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Quinn Zaffre is a creative technologist with a rare background: formally trained in classical arts (painting, sculpting and traditional craft) and professionally trained in emerging technologies.

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Most recently, he served as Google’s Technical Program Manager for Creative Technology, working at the intersection of advanced AI systems, design and scaled creative problem-solving. From this vantage point, Quinn sees a future where AI and human creativity don’t compete , they evolve together.

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His view is clear: the strongest ideas in AI will come from people who understand their own creativity first.

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From Classical Art to Creative Technology: A Different Kind of Builder

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Unlike many who enter AI through engineering, Quinn began with brushes, canvas and sculpture tools. That grounding in form, composition and intuition is still at the centre of how he works.

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Today, he builds scalable creative solutions for brands and businesses, solutions that merge artistic instincts with emerging technologies.

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He describes creative technology as a practice defined by blending creativity with emerging tools to build solutions at scale. For Quinn, AI was a natural extension of that practice: its rapid prototyping capabilities, its open-ended generative potential and the speed with which it allows ideas to move from imagination to impact.

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Welcoming the Symbiotic Relationship Between Humans and AI

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Quinn is not worried about being replaced by AI, quite the opposite. He welcomes what he calls a symbiotic relationship between human and machine creativity.

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Too often, he says, we talk about AI as if it were an alien force. But AI isn’t something that descended from the sky.

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It is built by people with human assumptions, human data and human values baked into every layer.

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Framing AI as a human-made system changes how we think about responsibility.

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It forces better questions:

• What processes guide the people building these systems?
• What culture exists inside the teams steering them?
• How do we encourage those builders to think critically about environmental impact, cultural impact, bias and long-term consequences?

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For Quinn, these aren’t technical questions.

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They’re cultural ones.

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Creativity as the Missing Ingredient in AI Adoption

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Quinn believes the magic of AI emerges only when people understand their own creative processes first.

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If you know how you think, how you generate ideas, how you explore possibilities, you’ll use AI far more intentionally and produce work that is more unique and impactful.

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AI in this sense becomes an amplifier of identity rather than a replacement for it.

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He argues that we gain more by treating AI as a mirror for creativity than as a shortcut around it.

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Culture, Critical Thinking and the Future of AI Teams

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As AI accelerates, Quinn emphasises a need for stronger culture inside technical teams.

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That means:

• building processes that encourage reflection rather than velocity for its own sake,
• ensuring that people developing AI understand the cultural and environmental weight of their work
• grounding innovation in responsibility, not abstraction.

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If AI is to benefit society, its teams must think beyond performance metrics and speed.

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They must think about people.

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About Passion Labs

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Passion Labs is an AI research and development lab building technologies and thought leadership that amplify human potential. Through our In Conversation series, we spotlight diverse voices shaping the future of AI across industry, ethics and creativity.

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