Your creative voice is your only defense against AI
Mark Zuckerberg said something last year that I haven't stopped thinking about.
AI skeptics used to claim that LLM technology would never be more advanced than smart text prediction. It was argued that hallucinations would keep these systems unreliable to use. Some in the artist community insisted that generated images and videos would always be marred by extra appendages and unrealistic physics.
As we approach the middle of 2026, the speed of AI development is far more shocking than what the technology can do. Today, generative AI models are tremendously capable, far beyond the shortcomings that were common complaints before. If in just three years these systems were developed to such a degree that they grew the ability to develop apps on the fly, reason through complex codebases to discover dangerous vulnerabilities, and create content indistinguishable from real, what does it mean for the next two, ten, and fifteen years?
The conversations and the arguments have shifted. Skeptic of AI or not, we don’t argue about the deficits of the technology anymore. Far more concerning is what the technology will do to us. Will it take your job? Will it work you to death? Is it making us all dumber? I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that for creatives, the soul of our creativity, that “it” thing that defines the creative voice, is now more important than ever.
A recent article in the New York Times reported that Meta and Google’s ad businesses were soaring, largely due to the AI powered tools they’ve built for advertisers and a subtle but very important shift in how ads are served on the platforms. As noted in the article, “It used to be that an advertiser would say, for example, “I want to target women in New York between the ages of 24 and 35.” Now it’s the opposite: Meta and Google are using A.I. to recommend customers the brands should be going after.” But it’s not just about recommendations. The article also notes that “the A.I. tools are also taking over aspects of the creative and marketing process.”
Last year, Mark Zuckerberg waged war on everyone who does creative work in advertising and marketing. “We’re gonna be able to come up with, like, 4,000 different versions of your creative and just test them and figure out which one works best,” said Zuckerberg. The implication here is that, with AI, there will be no need for Copywriters, Designers, or Creative Directors. Not only does Meta know who will buy the product, they’ll also use AI to generate the exact creative and message personally tailored and statistically proven to drive the sale - off to the dustbin of history goes the agencies and the creatives who work there.
AI chills the notion that novel creativity is inherently unique by exponentially distributing the craft of creating. If anyone with a clever prompt can generate an art piece with AI, it reasons that an artist that would typically be commissioned to do the same should expect to be out of work. In this new era, our creative work is no longer valuably unique by the mere fact of its existence. So how can we create valuable (as in get paid for it) creative work?
First, the only way to combat what is coming (and what is already here) is to protect the soul of our creativity. By this I mean protecting your creativity by honing your craft to such a degree that your work is relentlessly distinguishable, undiluted by AI. As a creative, that means the basis of your best work can’t start with AI. It has to start with the novel insights, undeniably yours only, that AI would never surface from the statistical probabilities inferenced against its training data.
This isn’t an argument against using AI for creative work. I am a voracious user of AI for mine. But I don’t use AI at the genesis of anything that I create. When I write, like I am now, I keep AI away when drafting and only use it for research and editing. When I have a new idea or proposal, I chicken-scratch or outline it first before using AI to expand on it. As I wrote before, I don’t write much syntax anymore but I only involve AI in architecture design once my vision is clear.
The second thing we have to do is internalize that we are not actually in a new era but at the late stage of a long-running one. Electronic and digital technologies have been eradicating creative scarcity for generations now, driving down the value of creative work. As creators in a globally connected economy, we have been competing at a global scale for years now.
Think about where most people consume content today - it is on social media and YouTube where everybody is a “creator”. Even before the advent of generative AI, we had started living in the reality of unskilled teens slinging cameraphones, undisciplined Canva users building design layouts, and Garageband musicians making songs. With such broad access to creative tools and popular platforms without gatekeepers, creative work was no longer specialized. It became the anybody-can-do-it norm.
After internalizing where we are, the threat of AI starts to feel less dangerous for the creative community. Rather, we start to get a clue about which direction creatives should be headed. If your work is devalued in its ability to effectively market on social media, then your work should pivot to being tailored more to in-person activations and performances that AI cannot replicate. Combining irreplicable experiences with a truly unique creative voice that is distinguished from the mean of creativity that AI proliferates creates the conditions where your creative work can flourish and drive money-in-the-bank value.
I look forward to AI becoming more creatively capable because it will not only allow for new creative mediums, it will also force the proliferation of more out-of-the-box human-made creativity. For a long time, a lot of the creative work in our popular culture has been the creativity born of proven formulas and well-worn templates, much of it made to reach the “four quadrants” and the least common denominator. AI is coming for that kind of creative output first.
What will be left from there are the most unique creative voices that create experiences that can’t easily be reproduced. This, in whatever new mediums it takes shape, is what people will seek out for the universal and personal truths that art and creativity reveal. After all, it is not just AI technology that advances rapidly, human creativity also develops at a rapid pace.
What I've Been Up To
- For my real-time storytelling project, I’ve been experimenting with creating a ComfyUI workflow for generating character facial expressions. The goal is to have a workflow that, given a description of a character’s emotional state, it generates a facial expression that reflects that emotional state. Diffusion models have come along far enough as to where this is actually prettty straightforward, especially with image editing diffusion models like Flux 2 Klein which is the one I’ve landed on for my workflow.
- Related, since my intention is to be able to run the software for my real-time storytelling project locally, I finally plopped down some cash to get a graphics card so I can run workflows offline. It's amazing how much the cost of computer parts have skyrocket due to AI! I'll be doing a writeup on this soon!
- I've been learning a new languge (spanish) and how to properly play an instrument (piano). It has been challenging but a ton of fun! The best thing about learning is that you get to see yourself growing and in just the past few months with my learning, it's been great to grow while learning a few new things.