I have been making things since before making things was a job description.
In the early nineties, "creative director" wasn't a title most people had heard of. You were a filmmaker, a designer, a writer — you picked one and stayed in it. The tools were specific to the lane: a Steenbeck for editing film, a stat camera for print work, a four-track for music. Crossing over meant learning new tools from scratch, which meant being bad at something for a while, which most people avoided.
I never avoided it. This turned out to be either my greatest asset or my defining flaw, depending on who you ask.
The thing I've learned about tools — any tools, across any medium, across three decades — is that they don't change what you make. They change what's possible to make. The distinction matters enormously.
When nonlinear editing came along and killed the Steenbeck, the editors who panicked were the ones who had confused their medium with their thinking. The editors who thrived were the ones who realized the new tools just got out of the way faster.
AI is the same story, at a scale that should terrify and delight anyone paying attention.
I've been building with AI tools seriously for about two years now. Not using them — building with them. There's a difference. Using AI means asking it to do your tasks. Building with AI means constructing systems where the intelligence amplifies your own judgment rather than substituting for it.
What I've found is this: the tools are extraordinary, and the discourse around them is almost entirely wrong.
The question isn't whether AI will replace creative workers. The question is whether creative workers will understand that the tools have changed again — and that understanding them deeply is, as it always has been, what separates the people who make things that matter from the people who make things that could have been made by anyone.
Or anything.
The through-line across thirty years of picking up new tools is always the same: the tool doesn't have a point of view. You do. That's the only thing that has ever mattered.