A lot of the conversation around AI seems to split into two loud camps.
One side says AI is going to destroy creative work.
The other side says AI is going to make everyone a creator overnight.
I think both versions are too simple.
The more time I spend with these tools, the more convinced I am that the most valuable creative skill in the AI era will not be typing prompts. It will be taste. Judgment. Direction. The ability to steer.
That may sound obvious, but I think it is getting lost in the noise.
Anyone can rent a video camera. That does not make them James Cameron.
Anyone can buy a guitar. That does not make them Prince.
Anyone can open Photoshop. That does not make them a great photographer, designer, or artist.
The tool matters. Of course it does. Better tools change what is possible. But tools do not remove the need for taste. If anything, they make taste more important.
I remember when Photoshop started becoming part of everyday creative work. There was a lot of anxiety around it. People worried it would cheapen photography, fake reality, and replace craft.
Some of those concerns were fair. Every powerful tool can be misused.
But Photoshop also created an entire generation of new creative jobs. Retouchers, digital artists, designers, compositors, photographers who learned to extend their eye into a new medium. The people who did best were not simply the people who knew where the buttons were. They were the people who had an eye.
They could tell when an image was finished.
They could tell when something felt fake.
They could tell the difference between impressive and good.
AI feels similar to me, except much bigger.
The camera, the edit suite, the animation department, the concept artist, the composer, the effects team. More and more of that machinery is becoming accessible through software. That is extraordinary. It is also overwhelming.
If a tool can generate 100 versions of a scene, the hard question becomes: which one is worth keeping?
If a tool can make something cinematic in seconds, the hard question becomes: cinematic in service of what?
If everyone can produce more, faster, then the scarce skill becomes knowing what should exist in the first place.
That is why I do not believe AI simply “democratizes creativity” in the way people often say it. It democratizes access to production. That is different.
And access to production is a huge deal.
There are people all over the world who have never had a film crew, a render farm, a studio budget, a publisher, or the right connections. Some of them have incredible ideas. Some of them have taste that has never had a way to express itself at scale.
AI may unlock those people.
That is the part I find most exciting.
A teenager in a small town. A retired person with a lifetime of stories. A kid in a country with no traditional entertainment pipeline. A disabled creator who cannot physically do a conventional production schedule. Someone with no money, no contacts, and no permission from the existing system.
Some of those people are going to make things we never would have seen otherwise.
Not because AI magically gives them talent.
Because AI may finally give their talent a route to the screen.
At the same time, I do not think the future belongs to people who simply generate the most output. We are already seeing how quickly volume becomes noise.
The future belongs to people who can steer the machine toward something with a point of view.
That means asking better questions. Rejecting the first answer. Knowing when something is technically impressive but emotionally empty. Knowing when to simplify. Knowing when to stop.
In game development, film, photography, music, and writing, the pattern is always the same. New tools arrive, everyone panics, everyone experiments, and eventually the novelty wears off. What remains is the work.
The best work still has a human fingerprint on it.
I have lived through a lot of technology shifts in games: 8-bit to 16-bit, 2D to 3D, cartridges to discs, retail to digital, console to mobile, local hardware to cloud. Every shift changed the craft. None of them removed the need for vision.
If anything, each shift made vision easier to recognize.
When the tools get more powerful, the excuse of “I couldn’t make it” starts to disappear. That can be intimidating. But it is also liberating.
AI is going to expose a lot of weak work. It is also going to reveal a lot of hidden talent.
I do not think the winners will be the loudest doomers or the loudest boosters. I think they will be the people who stay curious, keep their standards high, and learn how to direct these systems without surrendering their taste to them.
AI plus taste is going to be incredibly valuable.
AI plus taste plus persistence may be world-changing.
And I suspect the next wave of great creators will come from places the old system never thought to look.