Spooner on… is AI really stealing creative careers?

Lord McKelvey has asked me to write a column offering hope to creative people in this age of AI dominance. These are the words that fell softly upon my ageing eardrums like autumn leaves upon an unvisited tomb:

“Advertising and marketing creatives appear to be under threat from every angle – the rise of AI, the soaring creator economy and clients seemingly unwilling to pay for their work. But time and time again, ‘experts’ bang on about the effectiveness of brand building compared to short-term campaigns.

“Creativity has been the heartbeat of the industry for decades, so what is the solution? How can creatives prove their worth in such troubled times?”

Of course, the simple and straightforward answer to this question is – they can’t.

Timorous, ill-advised clients have long hitched their rickety wagons to the distant star of technological innovation. No client wants to be left behind as the bandwagon-juggernaut of illusory cost-effective progress clanks and rattles towards the cliff-edge of species annihilation.

That, of course, is the future.

What about the past?

It’s generally agreed that the earliest form of human writing was developed in Mesopotamia at some time between 3400 and 3200 BCE. Unique climactic conditions have preserved thousands of clay tablets covered in cuneiform text. One of the earliest of these contains text that could be very loosely translated like this:

“Barbarians have come from across the wine-dark sea and have stolen our women, burned our crops and taken our young men away in slavery.

“Modern life is rubbish.”

That’s about the size of it, for well over 5,000 years, ever since we gained the ability to record such things we have been lamenting as well as pursuing the chimaera of progress.

I have been working in this wonderful industry so long that I am able to remember the fastidious disdain with which some art directors greeted the arrival of the Apple Macintosh. Even those who were prescient enough to recognise its innate value would mutter the venerable cliché “wonderful servant terrible master”.

Generally throughout the course of my career it has been the art director who has borne the brunt of any new technological development. Despite the mad, exploding media landscape, the channel neutral nonsense and the increasing complexity of the requirements, the technology rarely impinged on the craft of the smugly sympathetic copywriter.

That has now changed.

Writers and art directors alike are now increasingly redundant. Even Lord McKelvey’s use of the word “slop” now seems quaint and antiquated – because the quality, in fact the very ‘flavour’, of AI generated copy is now all but indistinguishable from stuff that I might write on a bad day. And, of course, I cost a very great deal more to employ than even the glitziest generative AI.

I remember writing in these very pages not so very long ago that AI would never take the place of a competent copywriter, that it was valuable for churning out content, for writing instruction manuals, for long copy that was descriptive rather than discursive and, in a way I was right.

Then, of course, the AI companies began feeding every word of copy that I and every other copywriter in the world has ever written into their systems along with every single piece of creative writing that is now out of copyright and, sadly, much literature that is still within copyright.

Perhaps the last stronghold for creative people, the place where they can make their final stand is in the world of conceptual thinking. An AI can come up with flashy, spangly, weird executions, but unless I am missing something, it has yet to crack the notion of the concept.

Sadly that predicates a future where the agency becomes  not just a “boutique” but some kind of ghastly “concept shop”. One only has to glance at the world of fine art to see what horrors spring from the triumph of the conceptual over abstraction, let alone figurative artistic expression.

BUT ALL IS NOT LOST!

The fact of the matter is that we live in a post-literate society. That content your client is generating with AI will be read only by that client, his colleagues and the bots of his competitors.

Nobody is reading advertising and marketing copy!

What luxurious freedom!

As a very old person, I can’t be arsed to think about TikTok, Snapchat, social or  in-game channels – but some creative people obviously are thinking about these things and producing intelligent, novel, surprising and engaging work that must, somehow, be making money for someone or it wouldn’t be happening.

And that of course is good news for both copywriters and art directors – because, however novel and surprising the creative work put together for these channels may be, It must still somehow conform to some basic, human aesthetic principles, both visually and verbally. So there must be a case to be made for the value of creative input in these new contexts.

I am pretty confident that, if push came to shove, I could Snap some Chat or Tick a Tock and I’m sure you could too.

Whether I could convince someone to pay me so to do is another question altogether.

Mindful of the time I provoked a stinging backlash amongst younger creative people on LinkedIn by doubting the reality of “creative burnout” on this website, I feel it’s important to state that I have a huge quantity of genuine sympathy for anyone trying to make a living as a creative person in the advertising and marketing industry in 2026.

On the one hand your livelihood is forever threatened by multi-billion dollar investment in technology designed to make you redundant; on the other hand tedious oldsters are forever sneering at your efforts and blithering on about an entirely fictitious golden age of advertising.

Rest assured that there has never been a golden age of advertising – there has only ever been good work, average work and bad work – and that the proportion of each has almost certainly remained constant ever since the first hawker set up his or her pitch in the marketplaces of Ur Of The Chaldees, Babylon or Ecbatana 5,000 years ago.

As a roman fellow noted only 2,200 years ago:

MODUS MUTARI POTEST, CARMEN IDEM MANET.

The tune may change but the song remains the same.

Jonathan Spooner is consulting creative director at Spoon Creative