Just three years ago, if you'd described what AI can do today to a room full of creative directors and designers, most would have laughed. A few would have been quietly terrified. None of them would have believed you. Yet here we are.

The tools launched within the past few weeks are extraordinary, that much is undeniable. Claude Design, launched just a few weeks back, turns a written prompt into a working prototype: presentations, landing pages, brand assets, all through something that feels less like software and more like conversation. Figma has AI baked into its workflow. Canva has democratised design output to the point where almost anyone can produce something that looks professional. Generative video, image creation, copywriting. The entire creative stack is being rebuilt in real time. And worryingly, as far as the output is concerned, it works. That's the thing people in our industry, and I factor myself in this, are struggling to come to terms with. It now works well, really well.

There is still something however that is not quite right - why does so much of it still feel hollow?

My goal in this article is trying to honestly explore the relationship between creativity and AI. Not to dismiss the tools and not to celebrate them uncritically. To look clearly at what the creative industry is gaining, what it's losing and what happens to the people and brands who replace speed of output for strength of thinking.

What's actually happening

The creative industry is in the middle of a profound shift and nobody quite knows where it’s going to land. Fair enough, nobody has been through times of such rapid technological growth and understandably also considering the crazy world we’re currently living in. What we do know is this: agencies and creatives are struggling, especially those that built their model around creative output. Large organisations are bringing creative work in-house at a rate that is stripping agencies of their best projects, often sacrificing deep creative rigour for internal efficiency, while senior roles across agencies, consultancies and marketing teams now routinely require AI expertise. An interesting ask, given that nobody has yet agreed on what that actually means or looks like in practice.

Over the past 5 years for many marketers social platforms have been the key focal point and when a campaign post only has a lifespan measured in hours, the appetite for investing serious creative resource into it understandably shrinks. Why commission six weeks of thinking for something that disappears from a feed in 48 hours? The logic is understandable, even if the conclusion is troubling. AI fills that gap perfectly: fast, cheap, endlessly iterative, immediately deployable. For reactive social output, it's almost purpose-built.

The result is that marketers, many of whom had no interest in becoming designers and no training to do so, are being handed AI tools by management and expected to produce creative output. Not because they want to, but because someone senior decided that if the tools are accessible, the expertise is now too.

The honest case for and against

Throughout my education studying art and design I was always one of the weakest at drawing. Yet I would state (with some bias of course) that I was one of the strongest in imagination and vision. I just struggled to translate that thinking into polished visual output: my ideas and vision consistently outpaced my ability to execute them. AI changes that entirely. I can describe a concept, iterate through it in conversation and arrive somewhere that reflects the original thinking with a quality of finish that simply wasn't available to me before. The scenario opens a question around is it design if a machine creates the output? 

For people with strong imagination, AI removes the bottleneck between thought and output. One person with a brilliant creative vision can be immensely powerful. That's a meaningful shift, but it comes with a dangerous trade-off: the loss of the messy, human process that actually drives true innovation.

The other side of this is harder to sit with. Just a few weeks back I had a conversation with a Senior Artworker who worked for a large global household brand which went from over thirty designers to two, with AI tools being attributed to the redundancies. Those two remaining designers aren't just pushing pixels anymore; they act as strategic editors, curating and elevating AI output rather than generating raw assets from scratch. Those twenty-eight people didn't become less talented overnight. The work didn't become less important. The economics simply changed and that story is not unique.

The trap hiding in plain sight

Coca-Cola, a brand with over a century of emotional equity and one of the most recognisable creative identities on earth, produced an AI-generated Christmas campaign that was almost universally criticised as soulless. They briefed a team of five to generate 70,000 video clips in 30 days. The output looked exactly like what it was: volume without vision. The internet called it slop, which is fitting given that slop was named Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2025. Not a coincidence.

The lesson isn't that AI failed Coca-Cola. The lesson is that the brief failed Coca-Cola. They asked AI to be efficient. They forgot to ask it to be meaningful. When you take 130 years of brand heritage and run it through a tool without the creative thinking to direct it, you get something that looks like Coca-Cola and feels like nothing at all.

This is the trap. AI doesn't create homogenisation. Absent thinking creates homogenisation and AI simply produces it faster and at greater scale. When every brand in a category uses the same tools in the same way, guided by the same generic prompts, the output converges. Positioning collapses. Differentiation disappears. Everything starts to look, sound and feel like a variation of everything else.

The question worth sitting with

There's a theory called the dead internet theory, which suggests we're heading toward a point where AI-generated content so thoroughly dominates the web that authentic human creative work becomes almost impossible to find. Naval Ravikant has framed it differently: calling it ‘the reverse Turing test’, struggling to seem human in a landscape saturated with AI output. Both ideas point to the same concern.

The more uncomfortable version of this is generational. Creative thinking is a muscle. It develops through struggle, through failure, through the slow and often painful process of agonising over why something doesn't work and then trying again. If young creatives grow up with tools that shortcut that process entirely, will that muscle ever develop? Will there be another generation that produces a Beatles, a Massimo Vignelli, a DiVinci? Or does that level of creative thinking require a kind of friction that we're quietly in the process of removing? I am not sure anyone has the definitive answer yet, but it's the right question to be asking.

What actually survives this

Here's what I believe, having been a leader in the creative industry for over twenty years and wrestled with these AI tools myself. The brands and creatives that come through the coming period of sameness with their reputations intact won't be those who rejected AI. You won't survive the next few years by ignoring the tools. The ones who make it will be those who refused to let the tool replace the thinking.

AI is an amplifier. Feed it strong, authentic, creatively grounded thinking and it produces something worth having. Feed it a vague thinking and a deadline you’ll get slop at scale. 

The brands that will stand out when the market tires of the noise and I believe it will tire of it in years to come, are the ones spending this period protecting and sharpening their creative foundations. Not generating output. Doing the hard, slow, genuinely difficult work of thinking first.

The last thing worth saying

AI isn't the crisis. The crisis is businesses choosing convenience over conviction and calling it progress.

The tools will keep improving. The output will keep looking better, but the brands willing to do nothing more than point a prompt at a deadline will keep producing work that is technically competent and emotionally invisible.

Creativity was never just about output. It's about the thinking that gives the output meaning. That thinking isn't a feature you can upgrade or a subscription you can turn on. It's built through years of getting things wrong, caring about why and trying again. That process is uncomfortable and slow and not particularly bankable in a quarterly review. It's also the only thing that separates a brand people love from a brand people simply recognise.

The tools are here. They're not going anywhere. Neither are the brands willing to actually think.

The question isn't whether you use AI. It's whether there's anything worth amplifying when you do.