Turn off AI. Pick up a crayon.

Google Gemini offers “a new way to bring your imagination to life.” Adobe Firefly promises “The ultimate creative AI solution.” And Craiyon invites you to “Create AI Art.”

Don’t believe the tech hype. Close the generative AI window. And turn to the book that has sparked creativity for decades: Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. Published 70 years ago this fall, it is a manifesto for human creativity disguised as a children’s picture book—a message that’s even more relevant today than it was in 1955.

The opening pages of Harold and the Purple Crayon illustrate why throwing prompts into AI does not create art. Art begins by facing an empty canvas. Maybe you scribble a bit—as Harold does. Only after four pages of zig-zagging experiments does Harold pause and decide to take his line for a walk in the moonlight. Traveling along the line of your imagination requires your full attention. Resist the algorithm’s allure and become an active dreamer.

For Harold, as for most artists, drawing is a form of thinking. After drawing the moon for his walk in the moonlight, Harold makes “a long straight path so he wouldn’t get lost,” but he doesn’t “seem to be getting anywhere on the long straight path.” So, he leaves the path. But he had to create the straight path in order to realize that straight paths lead nowhere interesting. Making art is a process of discovery. Getting lost and making mistakes are part of the process.

A mistake might inspire a new direction or generate the art itself. Harold’s mistakes do both. Frightened by the dragon he has drawn to guard the apple tree, “His hand holding the purple crayon shook.” At this moment, the shaky crayon’s line oscillates between these different possibilities: a wavy scribble, or a series of conjoined cursive w’s, or the surface of an ocean in the visual language of the cartoon. So, as artists do, Harold grapples with uncertainty, and then has a realization: this line must be an ocean. When he recognizes that, the story can continue; Harold draws a boat and launches a several-page nautical voyage.

But AI’s risk-free, frictionless “creativity” launches nothing because friction generates the surprises that create art—the unpredictable results of an imagination in conversation with itself. For young people who may be dazzled by or even encouraged to use AI, let them also be encouraged to take the long road of doing things the “old fashioned” way because in doing these things ourselves, we learn, we grow, and we find our own voice.

It’s true that AI images can surprise us: that sixth finger or phantom arm in a photorealistic portrait of smiling people does make us look again. But art’s surprises emerge from a larger vision. Harold’s triangle-fingered, goggle-eyed policeman is Crockett Johnson gesturing towards the untutored abstractions of children’s art. It’s an intentional shift in the visual style. In contrast, AI’s extra fingers or limbs steer us into the uncanny valley—apt if the image illustrates horror fiction, but not if it’s supposed to represent, say, cheerful coworkers.

Drawing on decades of experience in the visual arts, Johnson’s aesthetic choices suit the story he is telling. Drawing from millions of works that feed its algorithm, AI can only imitate aesthetic choices. It cannot make them. And a statistically probable sentence or image can only gesture broadly towards the subtleties of human perception.

Because AI doesn’t understand why humans make art. Nor do the high-tech hucksters who are promising art without effort.

If you want to resist AI’s lure of frictionless creativity (and trust me, you do), open Harold and the Purple Crayon to experience the excitement of the creative mind at work. Johnson’s tale positions us as witnesses to the moment of artistic creation, watching Harold invent the story that we are reading while we are reading it. Although that’s not literally true, it feels true because the crayon—the embodiment of Harold’s apparent improvisation—is the engine of narrative. The story emerges from the path of a crayon which simultaneously generates and is inspired by the unfolding story.

The book’s ability to dramatize what creativity feels like is one reason it has inspired so many artists. Prince’s favorite childhood book, Harold is why Prince played purple guitars, favored purple fashion, and strongly identified with the color purple. Harold inspired Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Richard Powers to become a writer, and the name of Yale’s improvisational theatre group the Purple Crayon. Upon receiving the Caldecott Medal for Jumanji (1981), the classic picture book that would launch a film franchise, Chris Van Allsburg thanked “Jan Vermeer, for the way he used light; …Federico Fellini, for making films that look the way they do; …and Harold, for his purple crayon.”

Harold and the Purple Crayon has inspired so many because Harold’s journey is a story about what it means to be human—facing our challenges by thinking creatively, transforming problems into solutions, drawing new paths forward. When the scribble becomes an ocean, draw a boat. When it gets dark, draw a moon. To live is to improvise, and artists are our most gifted improvisers.

But developing our creative muscles requires the friction of crayon against paper, of imagination against impediment. If we delegate our dreaming to subcommittees of robots, humans’ unique strength—our capacity to imagine—will wither. If we outsource our creativity, we outsource our humanity.

And that is dangerous. Harold is in greatest peril when he slips from his unfinished mountaintop, stops drawing, and begins falling through space. These three pages mark the longest time that his crayon leaves the page. Put another way: he comes closest to his demise when, mid-adventure, he relinquishes the symbol of his creative mind. He stops thinking.

Then: “But luckily, he kept his wits and his purple crayon.” Harold presses crayon to page, draws a circle, which becomes a hot-air balloon that carries him to safety.

Johnson wrote the book while his own safety was at risk—under FBI surveillance and at risk of losing his livelihood due to McCarthyism. In daring to dream, he temporarily escaped surveillance and created a template for resilient, liberatory imaginations.

In these dangerous times, we might look to Harold’s crayon—or whatever that represents for each of us—and recognize the power of our imaginations. Rather than outsourcing our dreaming to machines, we can instead cultivate our capacity to imagine better futures.

And, come what may, remember what Harold would do: Always keep your wits and your purple crayon.

Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash.

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