AI & CREATIVITY
The AI-and-creativity debate has two dominant narratives, and both of them are wrong in interesting ways.
The first narrative: AI is destroying creative jobs, it’s doing so at scale, and the creative economy will never recover. The second narrative: AI is just a tool like Photoshop, creatives will adapt as they always have, and the sky isn’t falling. Both contain truth. Both miss the more complicated, more instructive reality.
What’s Actually Happened to Creative Work
The jobs that have been most affected so far are not the ones the narrative predicts. Illustrators doing commercial stock imagery have been significantly disrupted — the demand for generic stock images has collapsed as AI generation makes them trivially cheap. Entry-level copywriting for SEO and content marketing has seen substantial displacement. Certain categories of voice acting for corporate training and automated content have been hit.
Meanwhile, commercial photography, bespoke illustration, screenwriting, narrative game design, and high-end creative direction have been less affected than predicted — because the value being purchased in those markets includes the judgment, taste, and relationship of the human practitioner, not just the output.
“The value in high-end creative work includes the judgment, taste, and relationship of the practitioner — not just the output. AI can produce the output. It cannot replicate the rest.”
The Middle Is Squeezed
The pattern that’s emerging is a hollowing out of the middle: the competent-but-not-exceptional commercial creative whose value proposition was reliable quality at accessible rates. That niche is genuinely under pressure, because AI output is now reliable enough for many of the use cases it served. The advice I’d give to any working creative is to be honest about which category their work falls into — and to invest deliberately in the dimensions of their practice that AI genuinely cannot replicate.
Tags: Artificial Intelligence • Opinion • Technology & Society • 192.168.1.22/