AI: Keys to the creative kingdom
Why creative directors should stop treating AI as a junior and start treating it as a medium.
The worst thing that happened to AI adoption in creative agencies is that someone called it a “junior.”
It’s not a junior. It doesn’t have a junior’s ambitions, anxieties, or desire to impress you. It doesn’t need managing, motivating, or mentoring. It has no career arc. Treating it like one import all the wrong mental models and none of the right ones.
What AI actually is
AI is closer to a medium than a person. Like photography was a medium. Like film was a medium. The photographers who survived the invention of digital cameras weren’t the ones who used digital to replicate film. They were the ones who figured out what digital made possible that film couldn’t do.
The same question applies here: what does this medium make possible that the previous one couldn’t?
What it makes possible
Some things I’ve found:
Volume without fatigue. I can generate forty directions for a headline before I’ve had coffee. Most are bad. But one will unlock something I wouldn’t have reached through normal ideation. The value isn’t in the output — it’s in the collision.
Perspective without ego. Ask an AI to critique your work and it will. Without the social dynamics that make humans hedge. You’ll disagree with half of what it says. The half you agree with will make the work better.
Speed at the thinking layer. The synthesis step — reading five briefs, three competitor campaigns, two trend reports, and distilling it into a positioning sentence — used to take a day. Now it takes twenty minutes. That time doesn’t disappear, it gets redirected toward harder thinking.
What it doesn’t make possible
Taste. Judgment. The thing that makes you pick the quieter option when every brief asks for the loud one. That’s still yours. That’s the whole job now.