“The important thing is the productivity, not the creativity. I’m already creative.” This declaration, from an impassioned customer and an advocate for artificial intelligence, is easy to agree with. The removal of tedious, repetitive tasks remains a noncontentious benefit of AI-assisted workflows. It promises creatives more freedom to focus on their ideas, with a few essential tools — a laptop, an internet connection, creative software, and a spark of inspiration — helping them bring those ideas to life more efficiently than ever before. But while this may be the more palatable side of the narrative, it overlooks the idea that AI, done right and with artists at the centre, can not only strip time-consuming processes from the workflow but also advance the creative pursuit itself.

This statement is sometimes met with an opposing and often alarmist response — that AI will entirely remove artists from the creative world. That seems unrealistic to me. Artists are driven to create, but also disrupt, to dissent, and to rebel. It’s in their nature. They will not allow a technological breakthrough to destroy them. Instead, as the dust settles on the AI boom, generative AI is set to become just another entry in a long list of technological advances that were met with naysayers proclaiming the end of their respective art forms. In fact, in all cases, those technologies simply changed the medium, often advanced it and, eventually, came to serve the creative endeavour.

Consider Gutenberg’s printing press. In 1440, it signalled an end to the painstaking craft of calligraphy, at that time restricted largely to the clergy. This was seen by some (mostly the clergy themselves) as a dangerous, heretical act that would corrupt and degrade society. Instead, what Gutenberg’s press did was accelerate and amplify the spread of reading and writing — bringing new ideas and much-needed literacy to a much wider audience.

As Gutenberg himself is said to have proclaimed, “Let us break the seal which seals up holy things and give wings to Truth in order that she may win every soul that comes into the world by her word - no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied but multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine.”

Sounds very familiar to the current conversation, and yet there’s likely nobody who begrudges the creation of the book. Perhaps Gutenberg’s assessment is cause for reflection. Is there a part of us — those who trained hard, who practised and toiled — that resents the general public the ability to create something that historically required an art degree, years of training, and 10,000 hours of practice to produce? Is AI’s ability to break the seal on creation and giving wings to new content, an uncomfortable reality for the creative community to bear?

In truth, I think we need not worry. Yes, the new tools have some power to disrupt the creative arts. But just as the books printed through Gutenberg’s press only had worth if they contained meaningful content, AI-generated output still requires a critical eye, an original thought, an understanding of artistic grammar, and that most elusive of creative qualities: taste. It’s the Rick Rubin effect. Rubin has said many times that he’s hired to produce hit records because he knows what is good, or rather what he likes, and that certainty helps him make decisions quickly and with clarity. That is taste — not just knowing what is good, but backing it without hesitation.

Taste, combined with the skills developed in art schools, graphics studios and edit suites, is the reason why great artists, supported by AI tools, will always make content that far exceeds the output of an enthusiastic amateur. We saw this ourselves at Adobe. When Adobe Photoshop first came into existence, some artists saw it as the death knell. The end of photography, drawing, painting, and art — all at once. But great artists like David Hockney immediately saw the opportunity. It was a different form, a different tool but that was precisely the point. In the hands of a master, wonderful art could still be created. It was new, exciting and novel as a result.

By the late 2000s, Hockney regularly used Photoshop with a stylus and a graphics tablet to produce vibrant digital portraits and landscapes. “…it now enables one to draw very freely and fast with colour. There are advantages and disadvantages to anything new in mediums to artists, but the speed allowed here with colour is something new…”

I lived through something similar myself at the birth of digital television and the then-dreaded digital video (DV) camera. These small, lightweight, relatively cheap cameras could shoot content of sufficient technical quality to transmit on the emerging digital channels being launched around the world. Most camera operators hated them. They were toys, the image quality was lacking, and — worst of all — a bunch of untrained, unskilled twenty-somethings were running around with them shooting out-of-focus, badly framed rubbish. The AI slop of its day!

Sometimes they had a point, but these cameras also created a whole new genre of television. They allowed intimacy with their subjects, could blend more easily into their surroundings, and let content be made that otherwise would never have seen the light of day. They became part of the MTV narrative, revolutionised documentary filmmaking, and spawned era-defining movies like The Blair Witch Project. New stories were told, new ideas were brought to life, new characters emerged, and new careers began (including my own). Plus, in the hands of talented artists who took the time to practise (or maybe just read the manual) some great, genre-spanning content was made. Moreover, despite early fears, camera operators still got work. People still wanted their skills and appreciated their expertise. There was room for both. Put a seasoned camera operator behind a Sony VX1000 and they could still produce beautiful pictures. These early cameras also blazed a trail for the high-end digital cinema cameras on which 99% of movies and TV shows are shot today.

What these technologies demonstrated is that technology, multiplied by human creativity, allows for great leaps forward. This idea, raised to the power of AI, holds the potential for unlimited creative possibility.

At Adobe, this is an area we’re deeply focused on. While we’re developing AI models ourselves — as well as with partners and customers — many conversations with our customers focus on the workflows that sit across those models. It’s what we call the “harness”. In the same way a great rider, with the right track and reins, can direct and control the most wayward horse, great artists can rein in AI models with the right harness. That might mean tools to reframe storyboards, interfaces to precisely control keyframes during generation, or ways to place cameras inside generated 3D scenes. In every case, the aim is to give the artist a way to manipulate, direct and control the model as precisely and accurately as they demand. Now the AI model is serving them, rather than galloping off in whichever direction it fancies.

The artist is in control, and with that, the creator has power. Combine that with those essential creative currencies of ideas, intent, inspiration and taste, and we find ourselves in a truly fascinating era: one where artists have a palette of tools that lets them express more ideas, faster, cheaper, and more responsively than ever.

Just as directors of photography (DOPs) remained after the dawn of DV, and photographers and painters endured after the invention of Photoshop, traditional art forms will continue to thrive in the age of AI. What these evolving generative tools offer is a modified art form, a new approach, a new way to move ideas from sketchbooks and notepads to fully fledged content. It’s Gutenberg’s wings, with more ideas taking flight. More art, from more places, in new ways, with artists controlling and directing the output. It sounds exciting to me, and maybe my shots will finally be in focus.

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