AI in Creative Industries

42 years ago, in his 1981 interview below, Steve Jobs shared an incredible analogy to understand the impact of Artificial Intelligence on human beings. In simple terms, human beings are tool makers. We create tools that amplify our abilities and free us up for more creative work. AI is such a tool. Here are 5 simple ways I've used ChatGPT in the the last month to amplify my creativity (it’s like I’ve added 5 amazing people to the team overnight!): 1) Startup Advisor I’m currently building my next tech company. I used ChatGPT to help identify the most critical success factors and the biggest vulnerabilities in the plan. I’m now focusing my creativity on the 20% of issues that will drive 80% of the success. 2) Growth Marketer I recently surveyed tens of thousands of my newsletter subscribers. ChatGPT quickly processed the unstructured text responses, revealing the topics that most interest my readers. I can now apply my creativity strategically and craft the content they desire. 3) Recruitment Consultant I'm soon to hire a pivotal team member who'll function as an executive assistant and project manager. ChatGPT assisted in swiftly crafting an enticing job ad, allowing me to channel my creativity into the selection and interview process. 4) AI Business Tutor Eager to sharpen my ability to leverage AI in business, I asked ChatGPT to test my understanding within the area. ChatGPT asked me questions, pointed out knowledge gaps, and provided improved answers to fill those gaps. Once again, I amplified my creative effort. 5) Time Management Coach Two weeks ago, I was pressed for time with only 90 minutes to finish prep for a workshop. I explained the situation to ChatGPT. It helped me break down the 90 minutes, better structure my thinking, and maximize my output. The workshop was a huge success, thanks to this AI-powered productivity boost. ________ Steve Jobs foresaw the incredible power of AI 42 years ago. Are you using AI to amplify your creativity? If you like content like this, follow me Eric Partaker, for more.

When it comes to the impact AI will have in the realm of creativity, I’m unshakably optimistic. The rate of adoption of our AI products is one validator, and so is the research that our team has been sourcing. In our latest data expedition, we partnered with Morning Consult to understand how marketing and creative leaders around the world are incorporating AI into their work and how they feel about it. As power users of Canva, marketers and creatives are among the users we’ve seen adopt our AI tools most readily. The verdict? They overwhelmingly feel good and excited about its potential, but acknowledge there are roadblocks that need to be cleared. Here are some of my key takeaways 🧵 🔑 It’s unlocking creativity AND productivity. 69% believe generative AI is enhancing their team’s creativity, and 70% believe it’s enhancing team productivity. Whether it’s generating new ideas, brainstorming headlines, or translating text, AI is proving its utility when time is short, creativity is at a premium, and productivity can’t be compromised. 📈 It’s helping teams scale content outputs. Content demands have skyrocketed (in terms of quantity and quality), but generative AI is helping teams keep up. 83% have used AI text generators to create written content and 82% have used AI tools to generate and edit unique images. Our own marketing team at Canva has been tapping into AI to develop first drafts of marketing copy and as a brainstorm partner for creative campaign slogans. On the product and engineering teams, AI enables us to analyze code more quickly.  🔒 The top concerns are around privacy and bias. Approximately three-quarters are worried about the impact of generative AI tools on privacy - customer data, company data and personal data risks are weighing on the minds of practitioners around the world. 71% also expressed concern about bias in content generated by AI. These issues are top of mind for us at Canva, too, and we’ll remain focused on developing AI-powered solutions that are safe and secure to use, and inclusive and representative of everyone. Does this check out with how you or your team are feeling about AI? Let me know in the comments and definitely check out the full report: https://lnkd.in/dWBxb8XT

If you're using AI for marketing, this is absolutely worth your time. It turns out that most of us may have been doing it wrong. 🫢 Researchers just published a massive study testing AI-generated ads against those created by humans. What they discovered challenges a lot of this early, conventional wisdom and defined some new best practices. 🤔 Here's what they found... ➡️ Asking AI to edit and polish our existing ads is where it performs worst. When researchers tested AI-modified ads, performance actually dropped compared to the originals. ➡️ But, when they let AI create ads from scratch, it was a different story altogether. A 19% improvement in click-through rates (CTR) versus the human versions. AI redesigns of product packaging had even higher performance boosts. 😮 ➡️ Telling customers it's AI-generated drove CTR to the floor, plummeting by 31.5% Transparency requirements are coming, but this validates the pain in performance. This is probably something that the industry needs to figure out fast. So, why do they think all of this happens? ➡️ When AI modifies existing ads, it loses that authentic feel that makes ads work. But creating from scratch, AI generates more emotionally engaging, visually fluent creatives that connect better with people. How could you put this into practice? ➡️ Use AI as your ideation engine at the beginning of the creative process. Generate 20 concepts in minutes, then let humans select and refine the winners. ➡️ For small teams, this is important. You don't need a massive creative department when one person who understands these principles can generate what used to take an entire team. tl;dr - Stop asking AI to fix your ads. Start asking it to reimagine them completely. 😊 This awesome paper is attached below for your convenience. #ai #technology #innovation #creatives #marketing

The most interesting AI story in Hollywood this year is not about replacement I have watched the AI-in-Hollywood debate calcify into two camps over the past two years. One side calls AI the thing that will replace artists. The other sells it as the magic that will rewrite the industry overnight. Both sides are missing what is actually happening on set. Utopai Studios is helping redefine the AI conversation in Hollywood, and its backing of director Hyo-joo Yang's live-action feature Half Moon is the clearest case study I have seen this year. Half Moon is a deeply human, live-action drama rooted in raw performance and traditional cinematic craft. Written story. Real actors. Real cinematography. Principal photography in Germany. The film follows a Korean-German teenage girl and her emotionally wounded aunt during a fractured summer on a remote North Sea island. Loneliness, family trauma, belonging, repair. Watch Half Moon: https://lnkd.in/eqWkrKqE These are not prompts. These are performances. So where does Utopai's proprietary AI, PAI, come in? Strictly as an advanced production tool. Not as the author. Not as the director. Not as the actor. PAI handles complex visual and operational workflows: building visual environments, maintaining continuity across shots, accelerating previsualization, enabling cinematic moments that used to demand blockbuster budgets. Read more here:  https://lnkd.in/emj3868E This is the real future of AI in media. Not replacing writers and directors, but giving independent filmmakers high-end production capabilities that used to be gatekept by $100M+ studio budgets. In Irreplaceable, I argued that the challenge of the AI era is not the AI or the human. The challenge is the "+" between them. Half Moon is what that "+" looks like in practice. The Humics stay entirely human: creativity, judgment, emotional truth. The machine amplifies what the budget cannot. Technology should always be subservient to the story. It is genuinely exciting to see a studio put that philosophy into practice. The real revolution is not that AI makes the movie. The real revolution is that a smaller creative team can now dream at studio scale. AI should not become the author. It should become the amplifier. Where in your industry is AI already doing this quietly, amplifying craft rather than replacing it? #UtopaiPartner #VFX #FilmProduction #StudioTech #Innovation #FutureOfWork #HumanPlusAI #Irreplaceable #FilmProduction

I did my PhD on AI and copyright - and I said this would happen. On 13 February, the Munich District Court dismissed a copyright claim over three logos generated by artificial intelligence, holding that the plaintiff’s prompts, however detailed and iterative, did not make him the author of the resulting images. The reasoning was grounded in the harmonised EU concept of a “work” as developed by the Court of Justice: copyright protects original intellectual creations that reflect the personality of their human author through free and creative choices. Giving instructions to an AI, the court found, is closer to commissioning a designer than to creating a work. The decision was unsurprising. Across the EU, copyright law is deeply anthropocentric. French law protects “works of the mind.” Italian law requires the “creative character” of the author. The CJEU’s originality standard demands a human intellectual creation, reflecting the author’s personality by “free and creative choices”. The US has reached a similar position: the Copyright Office and Federal Courts hold that prompting alone cannot ground a claim to authorship - AI generated works are not copyrightable. Ireland, however, occupies an unusual position. Section 21(f) of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 provides that, in the case of a computer-generated work, the author is “the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.” Ironically for a piece of copyright legislation, we copied this provision from the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, drafted well before generative AI existed. While AI was mentioned by the House of Lords when passing it, the tech anticipated bore no resemblance to the AI now producing text, images, and code at scale. The provision has never been tested in court. Yet it remains on the Irish statute book, creating a framework under which AI-generated outputs could attract copyright protection even where no human creative choice shaped the expressive content. That sits uncomfortably alongside the EU’s CJEU harmonised originality standard, which, as the Munich court confirmed, requires human creative influence to be objectively identifiable in the final output. The UK is no longer bound by EU copyright harmonisation - Ireland is - and we no longer have the legislative weight of the UK behind us. Whether section 21(f) can be reconciled with the CJEU’s originality jurisprudence is a question policymakers should address before a court is forced to. In 2024, the AI Advisory Council published its paper on the impact of AI on the creative sector, which I chaired. That paper recommended the Government reconsider this provision in light of Ireland’s EU obligations. The Munich ruling underlines that recommendation. As Ireland prepares to assume the EU Presidency later this year, it has both the opportunity and the credibility to lead on AI copyright reform. Our own regime would be a good place to start.

If broadly true, this is massive. "Our findings reveal that AI enhances general human capital (cognitive abilities and education) by facilitating adaptability and idea integration but diminishes the value of domain-specific expertise." A fascinating study, "Augmenting Minds or Automating Skills: The Differential Role of Human Capital in Generative AI's Impact on Creative Tasks" (link in comments) researches humans + AI work dynamics in highly creative domains. The results align with what I have been thinking: because we can readily access and learn domain expertise, generalist skills are rising in relative value. This leads to many more questions, such as how we develop generalist skills, when this can only be built from sets of domain expertise. I will be sharing more on this in later posts. Some specific insights from the paper: 📊 Generative AI Enhances Creativity but Favors General Human Capital: Across two experiments—flash fiction writing and songwriting—AI improved creativity, particularly in novelty and overall impression. However, this effect was significantly stronger for individuals with high general human capital (education and IQ). Specific human capital, like domain-specific expertise, negatively moderated the AI-creativity relationship, as experts benefited less. In songwriting, AI use did not consistently improve creativity, suggesting task-specific limits of AI's impact. 💡 AI’s Role in Breaking Knowledge Barriers: The experiments highlight how generative AI transforms the value of expertise by reducing reliance on domain-specific knowledge. In songwriting, for instance, AI’s ability to synthesize diverse information outperformed the narrower focus of experts, allowing novices to achieve comparable results. 🎯 Implications for Task Design and Skill Development: The findings reveal that AI excels in tasks involving broad exploration and integration of ideas, while its impact diminishes in emotionally nuanced or deeply specialized contexts, such as songwriting. Organizations can leverage AI most effectively by redesigning roles to emphasize strategic oversight and integration rather than routine expertise. 🔄 Cognitive Ownership and Engagement Dynamics: AI use decreased participants’ psychological ownership of their creative work, potentially undermining intrinsic motivation. However, it boosted creative self-efficacy, particularly for novices, empowering them to engage in tasks they might have avoided due to perceived skill gaps.

We’ve just stepped into a new era of creativity. The Mokobara ad film you see here wasn’t shot in a studio. No cameras, no actors, no locations. Every single frame — the characters, the settings, the visuals — was generated through prompts using generative AI. Think about that for a moment. What once required casting calls, production crews, weeks of planning, and expensive shoots… can now be done in hours with a keyboard. This isn’t the future. This is happening now. So what does this mean for us as creators, brands, and storytellers? It means the playing field is changing. The technical barriers are falling away. What used to take deep pockets and big teams is being democratized by AI. But here’s the key: tools may change, but the power of storytelling won’t. In a world where anyone can generate visuals, the real differentiator will be the story you tell. The ability to connect with an audience, move them, and inspire action will matter more than ever. Generative AI will keep getting better, faster, and more accessible. But it will never replace the uniquely human spark that gives stories meaning. The future belongs to those who can combine imagination with storytelling — and let technology do the rest. 👉 What do you think — will storytelling become even more valuable in the age of AI? Mokobara Ad created by Aaron & Pranay Maurya | | Somya Parikh | Raghav Shrivastava | Aaron Gabriel C. | #Mokobara #GenAI #AIAds #AIFilmMaking #Marketing #Storytelling

𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐈 𝐄𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐬𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲? 🎨 I've been closely watching the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and its expanding role in our daily lives. From simplifying mundane tasks to performing complex calculations at speeds and accuracies far beyond human capability, AI's potential seems limitless. But as it ventures into realms traditionally reserved for human intuition and creativity, particularly art, it begs the question: Can AI truly emulate, or even surpass, the artist's touch? AI's foray into the arts has been both fascinating and controversial. We've seen algorithms compose music that stirs emotion, generate paintings that captivate viewers, and write poetry that touches the soul. These developments challenge our preconceived notions of creativity as a uniquely human attribute. AI-generated art raises profound questions about the nature of creativity and the value we place on human versus machine-generated works. On one side of the canvas, AI's ability to learn from vast datasets and generate art based on learned patterns offers exciting possibilities. AI can introduce us to new styles and perspectives, pushing the boundaries of traditional art forms. It democratizes creativity, offering tools for those without formal training to express themselves in novel ways. However, art is not just about the end product but also the process—infused with personal experiences, emotions, and the artist's unique touch. Critics argue that while AI can mimic these elements, it lacks the consciousness to infuse its creations with genuine emotion or to understand the context behind its works. Moreover, the intersection of AI and art sparks a debate on originality and copyright, challenging our legal frameworks and ethical standards. As AI-generated art becomes more prevalent, determining the line between inspiration and infringement, or defining authorship, becomes increasingly complex. The fusion of AI and art is not a question of replacement but of collaboration. By combining AI's computational power with human creativity, we can unlock new forms of expression and explore uncharted artistic territories. This partnership could redefine art, expanding our understanding of creativity beyond human limitations. As we navigate this new landscape, it's crucial to foster discussions that consider both the technological possibilities and the ethical implications of AI in art. Embracing AI's potential while honoring the human spirit that breathes life into art will ensure that this digital renaissance enriches our cultural tapestry. What are your thoughts on AI's role in the future of art? Can machines ever truly possess the soul of an artist, or will they remain powerful tools in the hands of human creators? #ai #genai #innovation #artificialintelligence #generativeai

The conversation around AI in Hollywood is shifting fast – and how it gets built matters more than ever. I work closely with leaders across studios, streaming platforms and global franchises. Media and entertainment companies need to create more content, faster, while staying true to their brand and IP. And they need partners who honor the craft, nuance and authenticity that define great creative work. The stakes are high. Demand for content is rising while timelines are shrinking. And no studio, streamer or franchise can afford to sacrifice the originality that sets their work apart, whether they’re expanding beloved characters and franchises or creating stories that are entirely new. Studios want to partner with companies that share their commitment to the integrity of their IP – companies that truly understand creativity, how it scales and what it takes to protect it. For decades, Adobe technology has been at the center of how films get made. Our tools have earned multiple Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievement, and filmmakers have relied on them to cut, shape and finish their own award-winning films. We understand firsthand what’s at stake in the day-to-day realities of production. The director who needs a reshoot while lead actors are halfway around the world. The animator who must maintain character consistency across hundreds of shots in a single series. The studio launching a franchise film across dozens of markets and languages, with every asset needing to stay true to their brand. That's exactly why we built Adobe Firefly Foundry. Foundry enables media and entertainment companies to build and train custom AI models on their own IP. Their characters. Their worlds. Their visual language. Teams can maintain character consistency in pre-visualization, generate hundreds of thousands of on-brand assets quickly and compress the timeline from concepting through post-production. Every output across image, video and audio stays aligned to their story's creative identity. It also gives studios something just as important: the ability to collaborate with creators thoughtfully while expanding access to their IP. This means that as they scale, studios still protect their actors, their characters and the integrity of their work. Creativity is too important to be a side bet. At Adobe, we're deepening four decades of partnership with the creative industry and working hand-in-hand with creators, studios and media organizations to shape what comes next. Really excited about what the next forty years of storytelling will bring. https://lnkd.in/gy6cr942

As a CMO, one of my top priorities right now is working out what role AI will play in our marketing work at Google. In my experience, Creatives are always the first to play with new tools, and AI is the most exciting sandbox yet. I believe this moment could be a fundamental shift in how we create, allowing us to have impossible ideas and to do things we never could before. While it is still early days, we are already seeing AI revolutionise our workflows, whether it's saving us countless hours storyboarding with ImageFX, or generating 300 variations in one day of our Best Phones Forever spots, using AI to generate copy and visuals. AI can help us do creative testing way faster, or respond to a brief with lots of ideas (or help us organise all the ideas we had but never shipped). Building a culture of experimentation on my team has always been a top priority. Now everyone, regardless of their role on the team, can make things and bring their ideas to life. And the most important part is that humans are in control. We are still the ones calling the shots and making sure that the final work we put out into the world meets our high bar. AI just helps us get there faster, bolder, and with more fun toys along the way. Exciting times! I really enjoyed chatting with Fast Company and Jeff Beer about how my team is harnessing #AI across every stage of the creative process, from ideation to creation. Check out our full conversation & let me know how you’re using AI in your creative process: https://lnkd.in/gxvv2UBD