The Final StrAIw

When I got an email from my company’s CEO (after work hours, naturally) directing me to a Wall Street Journal Article with the gist that AI is displacing creative professionals and that it will likely happen quickly in the next few years, I felt.. odd. Upset. Sad. Disheartened. Mad.

The intent behind sending it was clear: as a company (and most importantly, as a marketing team), we need to start using AI as soon as possible to save time and resources on photo and video work.

Now, if you’ve read some of my prior write-ups about my qualms with artificial intelligence, you can probably understand that I am not taking too well to this direction for my career. The funny thing is that I use AI in many ways already, and I’ve come to be okay with that over time. Creative ideating, storyboarding, and wording refinement are all on the table for me. I’ve found ways to make it enhance my humanness, so I can create with more clarity and waste less time stuck in my own head. But for now, at least, it making videos and photos FOR me, is a line I’m not willing to cross.

That really sucks, because I genuinely love working in the creative field. Once you take away the human element, however, it loses its meaning for me. The human-ness is the whole reason I care for this industry in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong: AI isn’t inherently bad. There are amazing applications I use every day, such as improved localized weather forecasts over increasingly long ranges and daily assistance with project management and organization.

But directing technology to do the creative work I love? That’s not a future I want for myself. At least not for the ‘me’ I am in this present day.

Is it a pride thing? An insecurity thing? A fear thing? I think it’s probably all of those things, and more.

Sadly, this may be the reality. And that makes me really, really sad.

Sending love to the human creatives that came into this business to make something real.

-Erica J.