The creative industry was supposed to be the last bastion against automation—turns out we were spectacularly wrong.

The Speed of Disruption Has Caught Everyone Off Guard

I'm old enough to remember when campaign presentations still came on printed decks. Technology has always been part of the game, but what's happening now is different. "I have never seen something so disrupt an industry so quickly as AI has been doing. We are in twenty twenty five now and chatgpt only became only started to become a little bit widespread at the end of twenty twenty two if I'm not mistaken. So we're talking about two and something years and we already see whole industries shifting."

Think about that for a second. Two years. That's all it took for entire creative workflows to change forever. The creative industry—the one sector we all thought would be immune to automation because it required human intuition, emotion, and that indefinable spark—is now at the epicentre of the AI revolution.

This isn't just about efficiency gains or cost savings. This is about fundamental shifts in how creative work gets done, who does it, and what it means to be "creative" in the first place.

The Democratisation of Creative Power

Here's what's actually happening: "AI is allowing small and medium businesses to punch way above their weight." A two-person startup can now produce creative output that would have required a team of twenty just eighteen months ago. Video production, graphic design, copywriting, even complex campaign strategies—all accessible through interfaces that don't require years of training to master.

But here's the kicker: "If sometimes there is sometimes companies, they are attached to traditional culture. Especially if the senior leadership has a particular. Especially if the senior leadership is old, they are more likely to resist to change and they're more likely to say, oh, I like the good old ways. That is very dangerous. Because what's going to happen is that they will see much smaller companies with much smaller teams outdoing and outpacing everything that they do."

The incumbents are in trouble. Not because they lack resources, but because they're often the slowest to adapt. While they're debating compliance policies and worrying about brand safety, nimble competitors are already using AI to create, iterate, and ship at speeds that would have been impossible before.

The Misconception About the Magic Wand

Let's kill this myth right now: AI is not a magic wand you wave to create perfect content. "There's a huge misconception that AI is this magic wand that you wave it and things just get done and you push a couple of buttons and success and you're off to the beach. And it's definitely not like that."

If you've actually worked with AI tools for any serious creative work, you know the truth. There's still craft involved. There's still judgement. There's still that back-and-forth process of refining, adjusting, and perfecting. The difference is that "one human can do today a lot more than they were used to. They could do maybe one or two years ago, and that's probably just going to increase."

The most effective AI-powered creative work still requires someone with deep subject matter expertise feeding the machine with proper prompts, then filtering and shaping what comes out. It's not replacing human creativity—it's amplifying it exponentially.

The Transparency Question

The recent drama around AI in creative work—from the Cannes controversy to the Mr Beast thumbnail generator debacle—all comes down to one word: transparency. "Marketing and advertising isn't necessarily about what is real. A lot of companies, they are a lot of advertisements, a lot of videos, a lot of assets, they are absorbed. Some of them are just pieces of art, if you will. And AI is just a tool."

We've always manipulated images in Photoshop, used VFX in videos, created illusions in advertising. Charlie Chaplin was using tools to create the illusion of danger in his films a century ago. "AI is just another tool that has made it a lot easier. And it's just a tool for creativity. The problem becomes when that's not very clear. So transparency, I think is the key word here."

The issue isn't using AI—it's about being honest about it. When you watch a sci-fi movie, you know it's not real. When you see a heavily photoshopped advertisement, you understand it's been manipulated. The same principle applies to AI-generated content.

Learning from the Mistakes

The Mr Beast situation is instructive. "We're all figuring out together how to use these tools. There will be a ton of mistakes being made along the way. What mister Beast or what happened to mister Beast is just one example that obviously it's blown out of the water because of the proportion of his reach."

But here's the thing: "If you think taking down mister Beast's platform because he was creating thumbnails is going to solve the problem, you're wrong. Because the technology is already there. And then just because he has a massive reach and people could talk about him and he's very protective about his brand, doesn't mean that people won't be able to do things that he was doing on his platform."

You can't put this genie back in the bottle. The technology exists, and it's getting more accessible every day. "He just inspired a bunch of sixteen years old kids to go play for a couple of days with cursor and midjourney. There you go. Now instead of one massive tool, you have hundreds of tools."

The Human Element Remains

Despite all this technological advancement, "I don't think the human element will ever be out of the equation because we are social beings, after all." The best AI-powered creative work still has that human fingerprint—the strategic thinking, the emotional intelligence, the cultural understanding that machines can't replicate.

What's changing is the nature of creative work itself. Instead of spending hours on execution, creative professionals can focus on strategy, concept development, and refinement. Instead of being limited by technical skills, they can explore ideas that were previously impossible to execute.

This shift requires a fundamental rethinking of what it means to be creative. It's less about your ability to use specific tools and more about your ability to think, strategise, and guide the creative process. The most successful creative professionals in this new world will be those who can seamlessly blend human insight with AI capability.

The Road Ahead

We're still in the early days. "We are definitely still in the early adoption phase because although chatgpt has just reached one billion users, which is an astonishing number if you think about meta platforms, for example, if I'm not mistaken, they have about four billion users globally. So there's still a lot of ground for OpenAI to grow with their products."

The tools will get better, more intuitive, more powerful. The creative possibilities will expand in ways we can't imagine. But the fundamental truth remains: creativity isn't about the tools—it's about the human ability to see possibilities, make connections, and communicate ideas that resonate with other humans.

AI won't replace human creativity. It will make it more powerful, more accessible, and more impactful than ever before. The question isn't whether to embrace it—it's how quickly you can learn to wield it effectively.

The creative industry will never be the same. And honestly, that's probably a good thing.