Losing Our Jobs as Creatives to AI: Is This the Future?

How do you feel about AI as a creatives and brand strategists?

Do you feel great about its fast-paced growth or do you feel hesitant and worried about how it would impact your life as a creative?

Every week or so I’d jump on a call with a group of entrepreneurs and there’s always some newfound AI-related technology that’s ready to take away yet another skillset that took us years to master. It’s making everything faster, easier, cheaper—I bet so many business owners are excited about how AI can help them scale their impact.

But what if our creative skills are no longer needed?

What if we’re that replaceable? What if they take away all our jobs?

An exploration into the unknown

There are 2 directions we can go with this conversation.

There’s one that leads to all the fears of the unknown, the unsettling feeling that we might never be needed anymore because there’s a machine that can do what we do best faster and better. Here we’ll come to the conclusion that probably as brand strategists and creative entrepreneurs, we should just leave our creative dreams and endeavors in the closet and probably choose a different career.

And then there’s one that leads to a journey of discovery. While there’s still so many parts of this that we don’t yet understand, we choose to embrace the changes and see it as an opportunity to experiment and explore creativity in a new way. The one that invites us to rethink once again what it means to be human and bring impact to others around us as a creative and entrepreneur.

“Put humanity back in business.” - Brandon Triola, Forrest Co.

I believe if God created us as creative beings, beings that specifically have the capacity to imagine, feel emotions, and create things out of our most out-of-the-bo-absurd ideas, then there’s something special about the human soul that no other created things will have.

Think about it, even AI is created by us — fellow humans with stories, passions, and dreams of making people’s lives better. They build these tools out of our creativity, intelligence, and curated resources. No matter how good the tools may be, there’s still something within us that no other machine can replicate. The sincerity and genuine-ness of being human, it’s something innate that forever only living beings can have.

Think about kindness.

Generosity.

Creativity.

Curiosity.

Grief.

We feel them at a soul level, not at a skill and operational level.

It’s these emotions and these experiences that connect us, that makes brands memorable, that makes us want to come back to certain people and places. No matter how good of a job an AI can do, we can never produce these genuine emotions and connections with a tool.

Both celebrating stories and dancing with technology

As brand strategists and creative entrepreneurs, the way we feel and see AI matters. If we merely see technology as tools that can replace us and make things easy for us so we can step away from the real work of uncovering the essence of a brand, then I think we’ve misunderstood the assignment.

Sure, AI can create all the copy. It can probably design and put up your entire website in 1 click! But what meaning will that bring to the audience? What connections are we building?

The biggest difference we can bring to the brands and businesses we serve takes place when we strip away everything that we can replicate and come back to the very core of what makes that brand and business unique. While we can use AI as a tool to accelerate and streamline our processes, technology and machines don’t have genuine emotions and hearts that can connect with a real human being.

This is our job as creatives and brand strategists. We’re here to get to know the humans behind the scenes that pour out their labor of love into the work, to connect with those transformed in the journey, to understand the ONE thing that propels the entire organization to keep growing. Our call lies in finding the real story within and celebrating that.

What AI gives us is the ability for us to serve more brands and businesses, to expand our reach and give more opportunities for people to tell their stories. But ultimately, great brands that serve people and transform lives aren’t build on machine-produced ideas. They’re built on real visions and hearts.

Could AI be a tool that helps us see what matters most?

With so many people are trying to automate everything and replace the true connections within with technology, we can become more aware and intentional about not losing our souls in the process.

It encourages us to get real about the heart behind what we do, the process that we live by, and the values we stand for. It shows us all the more while skillsets are replaceable, our souls are not—because if all we do is replaceable by AI, then have we been truly living after all?

To make a difference and leave our mark means to find out how to dance with technology in a way that brings forth our human-ness, not by eliminating it. We recognize the speed and capacity that technology brings, but we can’t forget the real stories that we want to tell.

Our job as creatives then is to dig deeper into what makes us who we are—what makes us truly human, and to rethink how we can bring that out to the world with the help of all the technologies around us. To reflect this through our brands, businesses, personal endeavors and try to make the world a better place through it.