16-04-2025
Survival Guide for Creatives in The AI Era
We can all feel it. We constantly hear about it. AI is coming for us. The news media marvels at AI's mind-blowing advances, and the VC market is burying AI platforms in gobs of money, telling the rest of us that if you're not AI, just sit down. We need a survival guide for creatives.
In this tidal wave of technological revolution, remember that we possess a mind, while AI does not. This is the magnificent distinction of being human and an advantage not to be wasted.
AI is expanding everywhere and improving many areas; however, it can be easy to feel pushed aside, and all the brilliance and hard work can seem forgotten. While what AI solves or creates can be surprisingly good, it is often only good enough. Enough so that the thinkers, creatives, ideators, and strategists fade into the background. It's easy to feel overwhelmed, defeated, and worried about the future. A David against the AI Goliath.
To survive this disruptive period, I humbly submit the following three steps to stay sane, creating, and employed.
AI is here to stay. Stay open-minded and adopt a 'know thy enemy' mindset. A friend, colleague, and live-streamer, Kyle Shannon, said, 'Get hyper-curious about generative AI,' along with a lot of helpful info about AI. He's right. Ask your friends for tips on how they utilize AI. Seek out experts who can explain how AI works and its ongoing evolution. There are numerous resources for learning for every type of expertise. Coursera, Greenbook, and InsightPlatforms are just a few that offer courses to support this endeavor. That's the only way to peacefully coexist with AI. Knowledge is power.
Innovate and collaborate with AI. Integrate AI into your work while upholding copyright and ethical standards. Look for ways to enhance and streamline your efforts rather than replace them. Backgrounds, storyboards, or outlines generated by AI leave the thinking and ideating to you. Acknowledge AI's power but emphasize that you can transform raw materials into meaningful, insightful, or surprising results. Develop a unique style, methodology, strategy, or framework to set yourself apart.
Bacardi has done just that. AI has infiltrated the bar scene with machines that mix drinks and tell jokes. It's simply not the same bar experience. So, Bacardi will bypass the AI barkeeps with a new free program called Shake Your Future to keep bartenders manning the shakers and beer taps, aiming to train 10,000 new bartenders by 2030.
AI is amazing, but you can think, and it can't- at least not yet. Use AI to generate ideas, not answers, and experiment to understand what AI users might be getting when they could instead rely on your talent. Showing the difference between what AI can do and what you can do is proof.
Image generation has been an area of remarkable innovation, along with big conflicts involving copyright infringement lawsuits, widespread frustration, and loss of business. The recent dustup over the 'starter pack' action figure trend is a good example of demonstrating your superior abilities. Artists joined an AI meme cycle to highlight the difference between AI-generated action figures and those produced by artists. When shown side by side, the difference in quality is obvious.
It's really tempting to use what AI spits out. It's fast and cheap. But it's not always all that. AI will do what you ask it to do. You can feed it different items and ask AI to combine those things to generate something new; however, it is more challenging for AI to pluck wildly disparate things from the universe that it has not been trained on and come up with a solution that your client will appreciate, creating something exceptional.
Cultivate skills, seek support, and foster community in your own survival guide for creatives in the transformative era.
