THE DIFFERENCE
What is the difference between aphantasia and a bad imagination?
They are not the same thing, and mixing them up does real damage to how people with aphantasia see themselves. A bad imagination means struggling to come up with ideas. Aphantasia means no internal image appears when you try to picture something, and a person can have aphantasia while being wildly and relentlessly imaginative at the same time.
Creativity and visualization are not the same thing. Visualization is one route to a creative outcome, and aphantasia removes that route without closing the destination. People with aphantasia think in facts, patterns, concepts, and systems, building ideas rather than picturing them, and some of the most inventive people in science, animation, writing, and design have done exactly that.
The confusion runs deep because almost all of our language for imagination is visual. "Picture this." "See what I mean." "I can see it now." That language makes it sound like a working mind's eye is required for a working imagination, and it simply isn't. The brilliance of a thought is not found in the image it produces.