AI and the Death of Creative Industry

The technology industry generally stays quiet about how its business operates day-to-day: it's rarely pretty. Creative Industry is no different, and that leads to a misperception of reality among academics, hobbyists and artists on the outside.

One topic in particular is on everyone's mind these days...

What's the impact of deploying AI into creative industries?

“No, AI will not replace creative people or ‘kill creative jobs’. Such development would indicate the quality of human creativity, don’t you think?” [[source]](

https://towardsdatascience.com/creativity-and-dreams-with-ai-the-year-2020-6125b7900e9d)

— Vladimir Alexeev, Artist & Futurist.

I've worked in creative industry for almost two decades (directly or indirectly, from games to advertising) so let's get things straight!

• Advertising still dominates in the creative industries, based on employee count and global market size — estimated about 3:1?
• The turnover for advertising agencies is infamous; it's been measured around 23% and increasing based on recent reports.
• The designers we hired at creative.ai (during our VC-funded phase) couldn't find any former colleagues still working in agencies!
• Our research on-site indicated that juniors would literally burn out in about 9 months, and 2 years was the upper limit.
• Automation and "programmatic" is still high priority on the list of advertising CEOs! I'll share examples in follow-up posts...
• One of the co-founders of creative.ai, Samim, wrote about this exact topic about a year after leaving.

Creative Industry is turning into a machine built on the commoditization of work from a disposable labor force. Advertising conglomerates are setup as a production line for "creative" projects on-demand. They have mostly lost their ability to innovate.

If you're optimistic, you're probably thinking that employees affected by AI can just find new tasks or projects to work...

“Historically, improvements in design AI almost always result in a need for better tools & lead to more ambitious goals for the next project. Workload expands to fill available human-time budget.” [source]
— Max Kreminski, PhD Researcher at USCS.

However, the broader creative industries face the following problems:

1. It's significantly harder to upskill or retrain artists and designers than it was for computer games companies, which had multi-disciplinary teams and programmers to help that transition. In other companies, it may be too expensive to justify retraining. 📚
2. There's a fixed market for many visual designs produced by advertising and marketing companies: there's a limited number of billboards & pageviews, finite weeks in the year for promotions, and you just don't need that many logos! 💰
3. The leadership in advertising agencies is already overworked, and increasing the pace of projects or adding new clients would cause a lot of friction — unless it's handled by predictable and automated machines. ⚙

AI will decimate the creative/advertising industry, not because it has reached human-level, but because humans themselves have turned into machines there. A large part of the work being done is mechanical, and even a sub-optimal AI will cause significant disruption.

You could argue that's a good thing!? 💥

With a few notable exceptions, you could declare creative industry as ALREADY DEAD inside ☠️ — advertising in particular. Maybe AI is just helping us realize this? The remaining question, then, is how to manage the transformation to whatever comes next...

(Cover image by Jo Kassis from Pexels.)