Right now, AI is flooding the world with ‘good enough’ content: social media posts, articles, images, videos, illustrations, all appearing in the blink of an eye, much of it created by people with no creative talent or training.
So-called authors are using AI to publish books they generate in a matter of hours with a few prompts, flooding Amazon with mediocrity. The problem got so bad, Amazon has limited Kindle authors to publishing (only!) three books per day.
Spotify has removed tens of thousands of AI-generated songs. By May 2025 it was estimated that nearly half of the images on Adobe Stock were AI-generated. In October 2025 scores of AI Bollywood videos were deleted from YouTube.
AI is also infiltrating the work of major studios and production companies, either directly, with the use of AI-generated sequences in TV series such as Secret Invasion, or indirectly, via data-driven commissioning that leads to the ‘algorithm movie’, described by critic Phil Hoad as ‘the kind of generic product that clogs up streaming platforms and seems designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible’.
How on earth can we as creative professionals compete with the tidal wave of AI content?
It feels overwhelming as well as deeply dispiriting to scroll through reams and reams of so-so writing, images, music and videos.
The sad thing is, a lot of people think this stuff is OK, even good. They don’t see the garishness, the blandness, the gaucheness, the sheer lack of taste that are obvious to you and me as professionals.
The AI hype cycle is in full swing in the press and online, with (often erroneous) stories of AI outperforming human artists.
And that’s before we get to the economic implications. Some clients and employers are inevitably thinking: ‘If a machine can create something in an instant, why would I pay a human to do it more slowly?’
Hence the stories about creative jobs disappearing, and freelance work drying up because people without a creative bone in their body think they can generate all the content they need by pressing a button.
No wonder I’m seeing a lot of anger and grief among artists and creatives. It’s obvious to us that AI art is not real art. That creativity is an iterative process, not an instant one, whether or not you involve AI. But it’s clearly not obvious not to everyone.
It feels like skills we have acquired through a lifetime of painstaking effort are being rendered obsolete. And the bots – which have been trained on creatives’ work without our permission –are coming for our livelihood as well as our craft skills.
As a poet myself, I write in metrical verse, a traditional style that sounds fantastic, but which takes years of practice to do well. I’ve spent decades practising, to the point where I’m approaching some level of fluency.
So how would I feel about a robot coming along and reeling off thousands of lines of well-crafted blank verse? Or an exquisite sonnet sequence? You can probably imagine.
Fortunately for me, poets don’t have bosses or clients to answer to. I can write what I like. But if you’re working in any kind of commercial creative field, you likely have people around you who have little interest in your craft skills, only results.
So how can you ensure that you don’t find yourself pushed out of the value chain by an algorithm?
Be the Artist in the Loop
In his book Reshuffle, Sangeet Paul Choudary recounts a prediction made by the AI guru Geoffrey Hinton in 2016, that AI would soon replace radiologists. Trained on vast image datasets, AI can outperform even expert humans when it comes to detecting disease from scans. So it seemed like a matter of time before it replaced human radiologists. Yet the profession continues to thrive.
So how come the radiologists weren’t all made redundant?
Because behind every X-ray there is a human being whose life is on the line. They are not just an image on the screen. They need assurance that the diagnosis is correct. They need someone to interpret the findings and help them come to terms with bad news. They need someone to help them make informed decisions about their course of treatment.
It turns out that making a diagnosis from an image is a surprisingly small part of a radiologist’s job. AI can’t (currently) do the rest. And it’s debatable whether we will ever reach the point where patients don’t want any human interaction in the course of their treatment for a life-threatening illness.
Medicine is just one high-stakes field where deploying AI requires having a human in the loop – acting as a supervisor, a control mechanism, a safety catch, and a facilitator of what happens next.
Other fields where the human in the loop is critical include business, education and the military.
Because if you are building software, it matters that it works. If you are producing accounts, it matters that they are accurate. If you are teaching the next generation, it matters that they learn. If you create a killer robot, it matters that you can control it.
You can’t just leave these things to AI, however dazzling its performance looks at first glance. Because AI is prone to hallucination and other errors. It has no idea whether it got the answer right or wrong. And it doesn’t understand the human context in which it is operating. It does not take responsibility for results – and cannot be held accountable.
When it comes to creative work, we are not typically dealing with matters of life and death. But in a professional context, the outcome always matters.
It matters whether a piece of art or music means something to its audience, and makes them feel something. It matters whether a marketing campaign appeals to consumers, or puts them off. It matters whether a book or a movie brings something fresh, original, and meaningful to the humans it is created for.
In the creative industries, this is not just a question of artistic integrity – there is a lot of money riding on the outcome.
And when outcomes matter, someone has to own the choice. Machines can generate; only humans can be accountable for results. And the person who sets the standard and signs off on the work keeps their place at the table.
So when it comes to creative work, who is in the best position to be the human in the loop – the quality filter and the person who takes responsibility for the work?
I humbly submit that it’s someone who has spent their life immersing themselves in a creative field, to the point where they know it inside out.
Someone who has a finely honed aesthetic taste and an instinct for what will appeal to an audience.
Someone like you, the creative professional.
No matter how much we automate the generation of media we still need the Artist in the Loop – to sift out the wheat from the chaff, and to make the finished work the best it can be. Because everyone has a stake in that.
Taste and judgment: your professional edge
Creativity is more than inspiration. It’s also more than perspiration – putting in the hours, honing your craft, working patiently until the work is finished to its fingertips.
As I wrote years ago, creativity also involves your critical faculty: knowing whether something is good, being able to look at a piece of work and judge it on its merits; figuring out what works and what doesn’t; knowing how to improve it and how to present it to the world.
In short, it requires having impeccable taste.
Many of us start with a rough first draft or sketch. Writers warm up with free writing, scribbling down the first things that come into their head. Musicians noodle around with ideas, improvising alone or jamming with others. Artists ‘take a line for a walk’, in Paul Klee’s phrase, allowing the hand free rein to make marks on the paper or canvas.
But most of us don’t release these first drafts and sketches, contrary to the myth of untrammelled inspiration. We revisit and revise and rework them, until we are satisfied with the final result. So our judgment and taste are vital to the creative process.
A few years ago, I interviewed Tyler Hobbs, an artist who generates his work by writing computer code. I had reached out to interview Tyler because I was fascinated by such an alien-sounding way of working. But as he described his creative process to me, I felt a flash of recognition.
Tyler writes a piece of code that will produce an image, or a series of images:
The programs that I create tend to involve a lot of randomness. And the randomness is used very carefully and very deliberately. I might use it anywhere from the high-level structure of the image in terms of how large forms and shapes are placed and organised, all the way down to very fine details, little random rough edges and splatters and things like that. I also use randomness for colours and colour selection. So every time that I run the program, I get a different output.
This means that he cannot predict the image that the software will produce:
It flashes up on the screen. And that moment can be very exciting. There have definitely been a lot of moments where I make a change not knowing what the output is going to be. And I see the results and suddenly I know where this piece is going. Like it’s the ‘aha’ moment. It clicks when I see that image. And since a lot of my work kind of begins by stumbling around in the dark, there’s usually that kind of one critical change that really puts the … I see it and then I know what the structure of the work needs to be like.
So Tyler embraces randomness and surprise, but he also reviews the output and uses his response to decide ‘where the piece is going … what the structure of the work needs to be like’. His art emerges and evolves via an iterative process of generation and appraisal.
This is very much how I approach some scribbled notes from a rough first draft: I look through the text, I pick out the elements that seem to work, and I take them forward to the next draft.
If you are a creative professional, you probably have a similar aspect to your own creative process.
Because an artist isn’t just someone who puts paint on a canvas or pixels on a screen. They are someone, like Tyler, who can look at a succession of images and pick out the one with the potential to be developed.
The writer is someone who can look at a page of stream of consciousness and pick out the phrases with potential.
A songwriter is someone who hears a great riff or rhythm in a jamming session and says ‘play that again’, and builds on it.
As creators, we are like a heron gazing intently into a rushing stream, poised to pluck out the fish.
And this aspect of making art and creative work isn’t going away anytime soon.
In his book Co-Intelligence Ethan Mollick illustrates this with reference to AI image generators, pointing out that most users are producing predictable and unambitious work:
There is a lot of Star Wars art, a lot of fake photos of movie stars, some anime, cyberpunk, a lot of superheroes (especially Spider-Man), and, weirdly, a LOT of marble statues of celebrities. Given a machine that can make anything, we still default to what we know well.
But AI can do so many more interesting things! The AI can create a marble statue of Spider-Man, but it can also output a pretty amazing ukiyo-e woodblock Spider-Man, or Spider-Man in the style of Alphonse Mucha, or even images entirely unrelated to Spider-Man (gasp). But you need to know what to ask for. The result has been a weird revival of interest in art history among people who use AI systems, with large spreadsheets of art styles being passed among prospective AI artists. The more people know about art history and art styles in general, the more powerful these systems become.
Yes, we are drowning in AI-generated mediocrity, in blandness. But now that everyone can produce a ‘pretty good’ illustration or video or article or story, that doesn’t mean we should all join the race to the bottom.
It means the bar just got raised.
‘Pretty good’ is no longer good enough.
AI content is already starting to lose its ‘wow’ factor. Audiences are no longer amazed that previously impossible things can be done. They want to see them done well. Google is updating its algorithms to filter out AI slop. And we are all recalibrating our expectations.
Getting from pretty good to good, from good to great, and from great to outstanding still takes judgement and taste. It requires the professional eye of the Artist in the Loop.
It’s time for you to speak up
So what if AI is flooding the world with bland content? As a human creator, you can’t compete on quantity, but that was never your aim.
You can still compete on quality.
You have always aspired to excellence, which means human mediocrities have never been a threat to you. So why should AI mediocrity be any different?
So your edge isn’t speed. It’s taste: your ability to notice what’s working, what’s off, what’s clichéd, what’s quietly brilliant – and to steer the work towards what actually connects with humans.
If you are a solo artist, you call the shots. If you want to keep making art your way, and trust that there will always be enough humans who want art made by humans, then I’m with you. There’s no way I’m going to delegate writing my poems to a robot.
And maybe you will experiment with using AI in your creative process. But even if you delegate some of the execution to the tools, your taste and critical judgement are still crucial to the outcome.
If you work in a team or for clients, then your situation may be more challenging. You may be surrounded by people who can’t see the difference — and therefore can’t see why quality is worth paying for.
If that’s your situation, then it’s your job to explain to them why ‘good enough’ is not good enough. It’s your job to advocate for quality, to show them where the AI is falling short – what it costs when taste is absent.
This is a familiar challenge, is it not?
How many times have you had to explain to a client or a boss why creativity by committee doesn’t work? Why a bold idea should not be diluted? Why it’s worth going the extra mile to make the work better? Why it’s unacceptable to ship crap?
As a creative professional, this has always been part of your work. AI just presents you with another version of this challenge. Here are a few ways to make your case:
Show them the difference
Put mediocre AI work side-by-side with stellar human or AI-assisted human work, and explain why one is better than the other. Use clear criteria, such as alignment with the brand, factual accuracy, readability and emotional appeal.
Translate taste into outcomes
It’s hard for a client to pay extra for ‘soul’. It’s much easier to pay for results: higher conversion, longer time on page, more shares, fewer support tickets, fewer refunds, stronger brand preference.
If you can connect ‘better work’ to measurable outcomes — or even to obvious audience reactions — you’re no longer having an aesthetic debate. You’re making a business case.
Be open-minded
Get to know AI tools and use them where they genuinely add value. This will give you more credibility in the areas where you push back and insist on being the Artist in the Loop.
Highlight the risks of AI
Talk about the risks of using AI without expert supervision – factual errors, intellectual property infringement, cultural bias and reputational risk. Emphasise the importance of a professional whose sound judgment can avert such dangers.
Shift the conversation from efficiency to added value
Ed Gandia recently published an eye-opening report based on a survey he conducted among freelance writers.
He found that freelancers who talked to clients about using AI to save time risked downward pressure on their fees. If the work takes less time, then surely that means fewer billable hours?
But he also found a significant group of freelancers whose income had increased because of
their use of AI:
When freelancers used AI to elevate what they delivered – not just how fast they delivered it – clients noticed, appreciated it, and often said so. Nearly half of those in this group reported positive feedback. Some received glowing emails. Some got referrals. Some even used this as a jumping-off point to gradually raise their fees.
‘Elevating what they delivered’ meant taking the time they saved by using AI, and using it to do deeper research and better thinking, and deliver added extras to the client.
Don’t sell ‘faster’. Sell ‘better’.
If your client or your boss think it’s all about efficiency, and that an AI can do everything a human creative can do, your position is under threat.
But the more AI raises the floor, the more your value lies in what raises the ceiling.
Someone still has to set the standard, own the choices, and sign off on what goes out into the world. This is your chance to be the Artist in the Loop.
So speak up – not against AI, but for taste. For the work that actually means something. For the quality that’s worth paying for.
