For about a year, I have been running the same quiet experiment in my own work: keep swapping AI tools until one of them clearly wins. It never happens. A model that opens up beautifully in ideation chokes the moment I ask it to honor a spec. A model that nails the spec produces work so averaged it could have been made by anyone. I keep stacking subscriptions, hoping the next release will collapse the stack into one. It does not. After a while, I started to suspect the question itself was wrong. Last month, Contra Labs published the Human Creativity Benchmark: around 15,000 individual judgments across five creative domains, 93 prompts, and 80 sessions. They have a commercial stake in this work, so read their numbers as data, not gospel. But the central finding maps almost exactly to what I have been seeing in my own studio. No model in the study led all three phases (ideation, mockup, refinement) in any domain. Not one. Leadership shifts as the work moves. This is not a tooling problem.…