Last week, in the middle of delivering a virtual keynote on AI, a comment in the chat caught my attention. A participant expressed surprise and a bit of disheartenment, having realized that AI is not only capable of managing mundane tasks, as she had expected, but increasingly taking on creative responsibilities. She wondered, “What exactly is left for humans?”

It’s true: we’ve been reassured repeatedly that AI would handle repetitive, process-heavy tasks, leaving humans to focus on creativity. Yet AI’s ability to execute creative tasks is expanding rapidly, blurring the line of what we once considered uniquely human territory. It’s time we explore what creativity truly means, especially in an era where AI can increasingly mimic human creative processes.

First, we must understand the nature of AI models where they are given billions of parameters to train on. What develops is a machine that can answer all sorts of questions. If we ask an AI system, help me generate a marketing plan for XYZ product, the model will try its best to provide an answer. But can it replicate the work of marketing geniuses produced by advertising agencies like Ogilvy? That’s hard to say.

Or what about someone like Mr. Beast, now owning an engine nearing $5 billion in value? Though there is a pattern to his videos like running contests of seeing who can stay longer touching a Ferrari (and the ultimate winner actually winning a Ferrari), a video that has amassed millions of views; or a live enactment of Squid Game; his ideas seem hardly AI-generated. But if we ask Mr. Beast does he use AI in his work, he says yes.

You can argue that the act of creating a short video, though it belongs to the creative field, is quite a scientific process. Or take, the creation of a successful ad campaign. We might be hiring so called creatives to accomplish the task, but there is still a process and methodology.

This is precisely the intersection I aim to explore, especially to reassure those working in creative fields. No matter your industry or role, AI will inevitably become an integral part of your professional landscape. Every job, even the most creative ones, includes elements of science or systematic processes. Thus, regardless of your creative discipline, integrating AI can enhance and elevate your work rather than diminish it.

The Ick with AI Generated Content

We can already see through the AI-generated texts and emails and they’re starting to get old. Many of us are already hit everyday with paragraphs that sound like the previous because everyone is using the same AI tools to generate these texts. Images start to blur together as we can spot from afar something that is AI-generated. It’s causing garbage to infiltrate our inboxes and the wider internet to be just filled with repetitive junk.

There is this stigma or ick of consuming AI-generated creations. One time, I produced this AI-generated podcast episode using NotebookLM by sending a large pdf file of hundreds of pages into the tool. At first, when I would play this, people would ask me the name of the podcast so that they could follow it. But as soon as I revealed that the podcast episode was AI-generated, they were immediately disinterested. It almost feels like betrayal when someone you trust produces something AI-generated. We as consumers of content haven’t been able to get over that hump, and yet, we are perfectly fine reading AI-generated translations of a film that was originally set in another language.

We often devalue AI-generated content mostly because it shows less care from the creator. That’s what we don’t appreciate as consumers. Our discomfort lies not in the artificiality itself but in feeling tricked into thinking something human-made is machine-made, losing its perceived authenticity.

We’re already immersed in AI content

According to one industry survey, 31% of businesses are already using AI tools to help create videos– a sign that a significant chunk of content creators (from influencers to brands) are experimenting with AI in their production process. In fact, some futurists predict a tipping point in the next few years when AI-generated media could outnumber human-made content online (with one report suggesting up to 90% of online content might be AI-generated by 2026).

How are viewers responding to AI-driven content? Reactions are diverse and often divided along generational lines. Surveys suggest that younger audiences tend to be more accepting of AI-generated media, whereas older audiences are more skeptical. In a 2023 market study, over 75% of Gen Z and millennials said they’re interested in receiving AI-generated videos from brands, but that interest dropped to 42% for Boomers and even lower for older generations​.

There are also hundreds of Youtube channels profiting off AI-generated songs called study music, hour long Youtube videos that students will put on while studying. There are even platforms that want to be the Netflix of AI generated series.

The fact of the matter is: we are already consuming AI-generated content and we like it!

Humans are supposed to win at creativity, right?

We have created competitions where we pit the best human chess player against a supercomputer and see who wins. In those instances, AI won, because in the game of chess, it is easier for an AI to win at faster computations of possible moves on a chess board. What if there was a competition in the creative field whether that’s in movie creation or even a simple ad? Who might win?

We humans are more creative, right? And so if you were to put money on who might be the winner, you’d put your money on the human…right?

In August 2022, a game designer who lives in Pueblo West, Colorado, won first place in the emerging artist division’s category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. His winning image, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” (French for “Space Opera Theater”), was made with Midjourney.

This caused quite a stir in the photography world as judges didn’t think that AI should win such a contest. They even debated whether Allen should even win. (The next year, they allowed for AI-assisted creations to enter the contest, only if the author would reveal that it was AI-generated). Artists have since become much more powerful with AI-generated content. If at the end of the day the art we create is much more powerful with AI embedded in it, it becomes an enhancer and helps us achieve our goal. To the end consumer, it doesn’t matter whether AI was used, the product has become better. That’s what matters. The most recent Oscar Best Picture nominee, The Brutalist, used AI to create a more authentic Hungarian accent for Adrien Brody. Though there was dismay from viewers, in the end, we would agree that the movie has become better because of it.

Ben Affleck said, a couple of months ago, that the movie industry would be the last to change because of AI. “AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan. It cannot write you Shakespeare,” Affleck told attendees at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha 2024 investor summit. “The function of having two actors, or three or four actors, in a room, and the taste to discern and construct that, is something that currently entirely eludes AI’s capability…” That was in 2024, and his supposition has already been disproven.

So I’d disagree with Ben Affleck

Last week, I attended an AI movie jam where we had to group into teams and create a short film using AI within two hours. Sure, we weren’t submitting these to the Sundance Film Festival, but there were a lot of professional moviemakers in the room, many of whom were already making money from using AI-movie tools.

After a brief introduction, we assembled into teams and got to work.

We had a couple of roles to choose from.

We used a mix of Kling, Hailuo, Luma, Midjourney and a wealth of other tools to create our mini movie. The theme was a futuristic New York. Some had rats that ruled the city in the future, some used celebrities. Ours was inspired by Steven Spielberg’s AI movie.

First we started with the storyline. And ChatGPT was a great help there. Then we created our characters through a couple of iterations on Midjourney, a prompt-to-photo tool. We voted on which character look we found most interesting and based the story around their likeness. The hard part was definitely consistency. Apparently if you develop a character through multiple angles in Midjourney, it then works best when sending them to the video generators, but as you can see in the creation, the characters are still not consistent.

Here is what we handed in by the deadline:

So are AI movies coming to an AMC near you? It’s definitely possible. Sorry, Ben Affleck. Some creators have really perfected their work like this horror film.

A new definition of creativity in an AI-driven age

As workers within creative fields, it can feel like AI is encroaching on your work and threatening the existence and value of those roles, I get it. No one likes to feel that an AI can do the job of what someone might have been doing for decades. It feels invalidating, like what is the point of me trying to get better at something if AI will just do it better anyway. If we are putting hours into something that AI can just do better anyway, then we aren’t putting our hours in the right place.

What seems likely is that the future will increasingly value originality—distinctive, novel ideas—as the hallmark of creativity. That might be the new evolution of “being creative”, as in, being original, might be the new “creative”. Novel human thought is not part of the billions of parameters used to train algorithms, that is the source of new creation. The human brain is the original spout that vessels original content. The brain, is still, so far, more powerful than any AI system that is pre-trained regurgitates content it has already learned.

So to answer that woman in my chats earlier, it’s not that AI would take over the mundane or creative parts of our lives and leave us with whatever it can’t handle, it’s that AI can take over all sorts of parts of our lives, and humans are supposed to be left to imagine and create the complete, novel ideas that AI can’t think of. AI excels at remixing existing knowledge. Humans excel at imagining ideas that don’t yet exist. The value of true originality—distinctive, unprecedented ideas—will only grow in an AI-driven age.