AI is coming for creative jobs; that much is no longer debatable. What remains contested is whether this represents progress, theft, or something more complicated that neither side has quite articulated.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp said at Davos that AI will destroy humanities jobs. His solution: vocational training and neurodivergence. Not every executive agrees. Daniela Amodei of Anthropic argues that communication, empathy, and curiosity become more valuable in an AI world, and McKinsey is actively recruiting liberal arts graduates as sources of creativity to escape AI’s linear problem-solving. But the disagreement itself is telling. It seems that the people building AI cannot agree on what skills survive it.
Meanwhile, the creative industries are already living through the consequences. In The Guardian, artist Molly Crabapple describes watching AI-generated imitations of her work flood the internet after image generators scraped her entire portfolio without her knowledge. She frames this as the greatest art heist in history: billions of images taken without credit, compensation, or consent. What makes her account particularly striking is her observation that even journalists who publicly championed AI privately conceded it would eliminate writers.
The impact extends across borders and mediums. Rest of World reports that voice actors in Brazil, India, Mexico, South Korea, and China are mobilising as studios replace human performances with AI dubbing. In India, voice actor Ganessh Divekar discovered his voice had been mixed with another actor’s using AI, with no recourse. In Brazil, Fabio Azevedo warns of “cultural pasteurisation”: the loss of local idiosyncrasies that make dubbed content feel genuinely Brazilian, or Indian, or Korean.
Some artists are adopting the view if that you can’t beat them you might as well join them. But When Megan McArdle mentioned on X that she uses AI tools in her work, the response was ferocious. In a Washington Post column, she drew a line I recognise from my own practice: AI helps with research and steelmanning opposing views, but it never touches the writing itself. The Economist’s column on the “Shy Girl” controversy pushed further, cataloguing the tics of machine prose while warning that the real threat is AI writing that mainstream readers will happily accept.
I keep returning to a distinction that Richard Beard draws in Aeon. LLMs, he says, are “cliché machines” trained on our weakness for generating maximum content with minimum effort. What they cannot do is surprise. They cannot access what Beard calls “the electric shorting between inner lives” that makes writing matter. So while comedian Joel Beasley used AI to analyse his sets and landed a 20-date tour, the comedy was his. And while photographer Boris Eldagsen works exclusively with AI image generators after 30 years with cameras, the knowledge and instinct behind his choices remain stubbornly human.
I recently profiled two African filmmakers, Milisuthando Bongela and Akuol de Mabior, for a feature called Voices of African Cinema (PDF). Both are creating work that AI could never produce: films rooted in personal memory, cultural healing, and the kind of embodied experience that no training dataset can replicate. As Bongela puts it: “When a story is able to be itself and wear its own spirit, it can say, ‘we are actually very, very profoundly okay as a people.'” That is not a sentence a language model will ever generate on its own.
The answer, then, is not to reject AI entirely or to surrender to it. The answer is to stay close to the things that make your creative work yours: the stories only you can tell, the perspective only you have earned, the surprise that comes from a life lived attentively. It’s much like Joyce Carol Oates writes in Blonde (also available on Audible):
Life is just material for your art. Life is what fades; art is what remains.
For more inspiration, here are some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes from his 2025 blog posts, together with a recommended title from Blinkist.
A surgeon in the middle of an operation should probably not experiment with an untested technique. But a writer, a leader or a musician can make that question part of their craft. ~ That might be the wrong question
Learn more: The Creative Shift
Change the tools (and their distribution) and you change the future. ~ Tools and the long tail
Learn more: The Alchemy of Us
Creativity is a craft and a skill. ~ The second time through
Learn more: Playful
Curiosity is a skill, and it can be taught. ~ Why and how
Learn more: Lateral Thinking for Every Day
If you want to do artistic work, you’ll need to give up the certainty that comes with a reliable prediction. Part of the deal. ~ Hard to predict
Learn more: The Shape of Things Unseen
If your project is about making things better, organising the disorganised, connecting the disconnected and building community, you shouldn’t wait until the conditions are ideal. ~ Rainy day surfer
Learn more: Platformland
In a long tail world filled with browsing, it’s easy to confuse ‘popular’ with ‘great.’ It’s more productive to aim for great. ~ Your best work
Learn more: Lit
‘Obvious’ closes the door to inquiry. ‘Perhaps’ opens it. ~ Obvious vs perhaps
Learn more: Sapiens
Perfectionism is not related to quality. ~ Notes to myself
Learn more: No Fear, No Failure
Significant division and strong opinions (and widespread skepticism) don’t cause great ideas, but they’re often present when they arrive. ~ Important breakthroughs
Learn more: What’s Our Problem?
Successful outcomes often follow unpredicted actions. If we allow ourselves to do things that might not work, we’re far more likely to discover the things that do. ~ Repeat happy accidents
Learn more: Seeing What Others Don’t
The hard part might not be the idea – it’s in creating the conditions for others to participate. ~ The magic of the commons
Learn more: Origin Story
The hard work of innovation or the creation of revolution involves imagining what others consider unimaginable and speaking up with the unspeakable. ~ The unimaginable and the unspeakable
Learn more: Innovators
Time spent on a hobby feels like time well spent. Obstacles and setbacks aren’t a tragedy, they’re simply part of the journey, the things that make it interesting. ~ Hobby mindset
Learn more: A Year of Creativity
When we set out to create, it helps to understand who our collaborators are and to choose them wisely. ~ Movies, books and paintings
Learn more: The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft
When we use a new technology as a shortcut to replace our judgment, we’ve handed over the human part, and it won’t work. The magic disappears. But when we use new technology to provoke and amplify, when we use it for tasks instead of projects, we’re doing what we’ve always done – creating something for the people we seek to serve. ~ The writer’s room
Learn more: The Illusion of Innovation
While many institutions suffer from too much rigor, just about all of them would benefit from more curiosity. ~ Rigor and curiosity
Learn more: The Shape of Wonder
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