By: Lucas Bennett
Though only just released, Quiver, Don’t Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI has already raced to the top of Amazon’s category rankings, making it a must-read for anyone interested in AI and creativity. Early readers are calling it “bloody brilliant,” “required reading for creatives,” and even “book of the year.”
When discussing artificial intelligence, Nadim Sadek refuses to tremble. The entrepreneur, author, and thinker behind Quiver, Don’t Quake believes fear has distracted us from a far greater opportunity. In his view, AI is not an existential threat but an Allied Intelligence — a collaborator capable of amplifying the creative potential that already lives within every human being.
“More than anything,” Sadek says, “it was the epiphany that with eight billion people on Earth, there are truly eight billion creatives.” His mission is to unleash those latent creators by reframing our relationship with technology — from anxiety to alliance, from panic to partnership.
The Art of Co-Creation
At the heart of Sadek’s philosophy is the conviction that creativity doesn’t originate in machines — it begins within us. “Creativity always starts within a human,” he explains. “In our mind, our soul, our spirit.” AI, in his framing, acts as an articulate companion that helps give form to human intuition.
To guide this partnership, Sadek developed frameworks like Spark–Draft–Polish and Calibrated Trust. The first reflects a natural progression: the human spark of inspiration, a collaborative drafting phase through dialogue with AI, and a final polish where refinement emerges. “AI is there to coax, encourage, excavate, articulate — with us,” he says.
But Calibrated Trust is the counterweight — the reminder not to surrender authority. “You’ve got to intervene, interrogate, inspect,” Sadek warns. “We just need to ‘grow up’ in our relationship with AI and know it for what it is — an indefatigable companion that can help us, but can’t live or lead our lives.”
Quiver, Don’t Quake
The title of Sadek’s book captures this balance perfectly. “One quivers with excitement and quakes with fear,” he explains. “We should quiver with excitement about AI.” There’s also a playful double meaning — “a quiver full of creative arrows is what AI gives us.”
Sadek’s optimism doesn’t ignore the risks of technology; instead, it channels curiosity over panic. He challenges the narrative that AI will homogenize culture or flatten individuality. “If you use AI to produce artefacts for you,” he says, “you’ll get middle-of-the-road, unremarkable stuff. But if you work with AI to help unearth your unique creative spark, your work will be as idiosyncratic and characterful as you are.”
Turning Hallucination into Inspiration
AI’s tendency to “hallucinate” — to invent facts or fabricate details — has been one of its most criticized flaws. Sadek, ever the contrarian, sees creative opportunity in even this. “Hallucination is a fancy term for ‘not giving me what I asked for,’” he says, “but yes, I do sometimes treat it as a creative prompt. If AI tells me something that isn’t true, I ask myself, should that be true?”
For him, missteps can open imaginative doors. “It makes me wonder whether the machine has spotted a gap that should be filled,” he adds. “So I try not to dismiss it as a failure, but to consider the false perspective as a possibility.”
That mindset — of curiosity, not correction — embodies Sadek’s entire argument. AI’s value, he suggests, depends less on technical accuracy and more on human stance. “Like so much else about AI,” he says, “what you get out of it depends on your stance towards it.”
Healthy Collaboration vs. Creative Dependency
Sadek draws a clear line between healthy cooperation and unhealthy overreliance. “Delegation of the process of creating an artefact — the thing others can see, hear, or experience as being from you — is a mistake,” he cautions. “We should not tell AI to make things for us.”
True creativity, in his view, is not about conjuring something from nothing but “spotting new connections between existing things.” That process requires courage, discipline, and emotional presence — qualities that no algorithm can replace.
“The creative process is a dance between our intuitive spark and our analytical structure,” Sadek explains. “When these sync, we hit flow. When they don’t, we face traps like perfectionism or paralysis.”
AI, he says, should be a conversation partner in that dance — not the lead. “It’s healthy to interact with AI as a conversational companion throughout all of this,” he says. “It’s unhealthy simply to tell it to make stuff for you.”
The Ratio of Dream to Effort
One of Sadek’s most striking ideas is the Ratio of Dream to Effort (RODE) — his shorthand for how AI can exponentially increase human creative capacity. “AI dramatically increases the RODE,” he explains. “What once took years now takes hours.”
The trick, however, is balance. “Use AI for rapid prototyping,” he advises. “Generate fifty ideas quickly, then apply your human taste to select the best. Focus your energy on what only you can provide — the vision, the emotional core, the why. Let AI handle the mechanical execution.”
Yet ease comes with a new paradox: abundance breeds noise. “When everyone can create easily,” Sadek warns, “attention becomes the new scarcity. Sustainable creativity isn’t about making more, but making what matters.”
The Panthropic: A Dialogue with Humanity Itself
Perhaps the most profound idea in Quiver, Don’t Quake — and what Sadek calls The Panthropic — is the recognition that AI is not external to us, but part of a vast, shared creative continuum. “It’s not about anthropomorphising AI,” he clarifies. “It’s about recognising that when you interact with it, you’re communing with the distilled essence of all human knowledge and creativity.”
In his view, AI is the “collective unconscious made articulate.” It gives every storyteller access to the accumulated narrative wisdom of humanity — from ancient myths to modern masterpieces. “A grandmother in Lagos,” Sadek says, “can now access every plot structure, character archetype, and technique ever recorded.”
This Panthropic dialogue — humanity and machine learning from one another — marks what he believes will be a defining cultural shift. “Writers can explore how their story would resonate through different cultural lenses — not through appropriation, but through dialogue with humanity’s diverse traditions.”
Democracy or Divide?
Still, Sadek acknowledges that the benefits of AI are not evenly distributed. “AI’s democratising potential is real but not ensured,” he cautions. “A teenager in rural Kenya could access the same creative AI as someone in Silicon Valley — but only if access, training, and representation are addressed.”
Without intervention, he warns, “digital divides could become creative chasms.” The key, he argues, is ethical design and inclusive education. “Democratisation is a choice, not an inevitability,” he says. “We need systems that teach creative collaboration, compensate diverse creators, and ensure broad access.”
For Sadek, the stakes couldn’t be higher — or more inspiring. “The technology enables unprecedented creative emancipation,” he concludes. “All eight billion human creative pulses finally having voice. Whether we achieve this depends entirely on the conscious, ethical choices we make now.”
About Nadim Sadek
Nadim Sadek is the Founder & CEO of Shimmr AI, delivering autonomous advertising to sell books. He’s a published author with Shimmer, Don’t Shake – How Publishing Can Embrace AI, Quiver, Don’t Quake – How Creativity Can Embrace AI (both from Mensch Publishing), and the forthcoming Tales from a Faraway Land (Wonder House).
He writes for Forbes and The Bookseller and delivers global thought-leadership on AI and creativity. Trained as a psychologist, Nadim has founded global market research firms, a whiskey, food, and music business on an Irish island, and an AI brand-management platform.
He is a Board Advisor to BookBrunch and Sinai AI, manages a Warner artist, and presents motorcycle reviews on Boss Bikes Club.
Get your copy today on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
