Industry
AI isn’t going to kill creativity. Mediocrity might.
The machines are very good at average. That should worry average.
By Michael Cruz · · 2 min read
The short answer
AI will not kill creativity, but it will make average work nearly free, which makes average work nearly worthless. The value moves to taste, judgment, specificity and original ideas: the things that decide what should exist in the first place. Creative people who were competing on output are in trouble. Creative people competing on ideas have never had better tools.
The average is now automatic
Ask a model for a financial services headline and you will get something perfectly acceptable in about two seconds. It will sound like every other financial services headline, because that is what it learned from.
That is the whole point, and the whole warning. AI is extraordinary at producing the statistically likely answer. Great creative work is, almost by definition, the unlikely one.
Where the value goes
When making things gets cheap, deciding what to make gets expensive. Taste, point of view, a genuinely new idea, knowing which of forty options is the right one: these become the job.
We use these tools every day. They are good for speed, exploration and the unglamorous parts of production. They are not good at knowing what matters to a specific person at a specific moment. That still takes someone who has been paying attention.
The real threat
The risk is not that machines replace creative people. The risk is that clients, agencies and audiences get used to fine. If the industry accepts the average because it’s instant, that is a choice, not a technology.
So the best defense is the same as it always was: make work that is specific, surprising and unmistakably made by someone.
If you’d like help with this kind of problem, it’s what we do at Summer Friday.
