There's a particular breed of social media prophet I've been noticing lately. They lurk in the comments sections of articles about AI, waiting to pounce with their hot takes about the creative apocalypse. "Designers are toast!" they proclaim. "Copywriters? Dead in the water!" They practically vibrate with excitement as they type these predictions, as if they're announcing the scores at a particularly satisfying sporting event.
I'm a copywriter, and I'll admit it: this whole phenomenon
makes my skin crawl.
It's not the AI part that bothers me. Technology evolves.
Industries adapt. Creative tools have always changed, from the printing press
to Photoshop to whatever comes next. That's just the natural order of things,
and frankly, some of these AI tools are genuinely impressive and useful.
No, what gets under my skin is the gleeful schadenfreude of
these self-appointed futurists. The way they seem to relish the idea of
creative professionals being swept aside. The barely contained excitement in
their voices when they talk about entire industries becoming obsolete
overnight.
The Sport of Creative Destruction
These folks treat the potential displacement of creative
professionals like it's March Madness. They've got their brackets filled out:
First round, photographers get knocked out by Midjourney. Second round,
copywriters fall to ChatGPT. The championship? Some AI overlord that can direct
Super Bowl commercials while simultaneously designing the next iPhone.
But here's what these armchair analysts fundamentally
misunderstand: creativity isn't just pushing buttons. It's not a mechanical
process where you input "make good ad" and output comes a campaign
that moves hearts and minds and, yes, products off shelves.
Real creativity is messy. It's human. It's the copywriter
who spends three hours agonizing over whether "discover" or
"explore" better captures the emotional journey they're trying to
create. It's the designer who throws out seventeen concepts because none of
them feel right for that particular client's particular problem. It's
the filmmaker who knows that the magic isn't just in the technical execution,
but in understanding what makes people laugh, cry, or reach for their wallets.
The Button-Pushers Never Get It
The "creatives are doomed" crowd reveals something
telling about themselves with every gleeful prediction. They see the work we do
as purely mechanical: a series of inputs and outputs, templates and formulas. In
their minds, a copywriter is just someone who arranges words according to some
predetermined pattern. A designer is just someone who makes things look pretty
according to established rules.
This reductive view says more about their own relationship
with creativity than it does about the actual future of our industries. These
are often the same people who look at a piece of great advertising and think,
"How hard could that be?" They're the clients who want you to
"make the logo bigger" or "add more synergy." They
fundamentally don't understand that great creative work is part art, part
psychology, part sociology, and part pure intuition.
The Craft They Can't See
Here's what they miss: the best creative work happens in the
spaces between the obvious solutions. It's in the unexpected connections, the
cultural insights, the ability to see what others can't. It's knowing when to
break the rules you've spent years learning. It's understanding that a
successful campaign isn't just about perfect grammar or pixel-perfect
layouts. It's about creating something that resonates with real humans living
real lives.
Can AI help with this process? Absolutely. I've used AI
tools myself, and they can be genuinely useful for brainstorming, research, and
handling some of the more mechanical aspects of the work. But thinking that AI
will completely replace human creativity is like thinking that a really good
calculator will replace mathematicians. The tool might get more sophisticated,
but the thinking behind how to use it? That's still ours.
The Joyless Future They're Rooting For
What really bothers me about the "creatives are
finished" crowd is the future they seem to want. A world where marketing
is entirely algorithmic, where every ad is optimized for engagement but devoid
of genuine human insight or emotion. Where brands communicate with us through
perfectly efficient but soulless messaging that was generated rather than
crafted.
They're essentially rooting for a more boring world. A world
where the surprise of great creative work—that moment when you see an ad or
design that makes you think or feel something unexpected—gets optimized away in
favor of whatever the algorithm says will perform best.
The Real Future
I suspect the reality will be more nuanced than either the
doomsayers or the AI evangelists predict. Creative professionals will adapt, as
we always have. We'll use these new tools to augment our work, to handle the
tedious parts so we can focus on the thinking and feeling and problem-solving
that makes the work worthwhile.
The brands that thrive will be the ones that understand the
difference between efficiency and effectiveness, between optimization and
inspiration. They'll use AI to make their creative teams more powerful, not to
replace them entirely.
And the LinkedIn prophets of creative doom? They'll find
something new to be gleeful about, probably while the rest of us are busy doing
what we've always done: figuring out how to make people care about things they
didn't know they wanted.
Because that's the thing about creativity. It's not just
about making things. It's about making things matter. And no amount of
artificial intelligence can replace the very human ability to understand what
matters to other humans.
At least not yet.
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* OK, I'll admit it: I've been waiting for an opportunity to use the word "schadenfreude" in a blog post for a while. When I first heard it, I was like a crow finding a shiny object and couldn’t wait to use it. Not just use it, but show it off, like a kid who’s learned a new curse word and is itching to drop it at the dinner table. The way it looks in writing is a bit scary, and I love that ... I also love the way it sounds. And it's one word that can replace many. If you're new to this word and want to add it to your vocabulary, it's the German word for the emotional experience of pleasure or joy one might feel to another’s pain or misfortune. Now you're gonna look for an excuse to employ it, aren't you?
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