AI and Creative Work: What Gets Lost When Machines Create

I’ve spent years building machines that do creative work. Remixd turned articles into audio. Adwave and Wavemaker generate TV commercials and video. I’m not a bystander wringing my hands about AI creativity. I built some of it and sold it, which is exactly why the question of what gets lost won’t leave me alone.

The efficiency case is closed, and I helped close it. For a huge class of creative work, the commercial for a local business, the audio version of an article, the product video, AI output is good enough, arriving in minutes instead of weeks, at a price that changes who gets to participate at all. A small business that could never afford a production crew can now have a TV spot. I think that’s plainly good. The critique that all machine-made creative is inherently degraded usually skips the cost of the alternative. I’ve had to quote that cost. It changes the argument.

But “good enough” begs the question: good enough for what? The commercial’s job is to sell something, and AI does that job. A song’s job, or a novel’s, is murkier. Some part of what we value in human-made work is the fact that a person made it, that a specific human with a specific life chose this word and not that one, and meant it. Machine output can be indistinguishable in form and still be missing the thing we were paying attention for.

Or maybe that’s romantic nonsense and we only ever cared about the artifact. I go back and forth on this, honestly, not as a rhetorical performance of balance. Blind listening tests keep catching people, myself included, who thought they could always tell. And yet the same piece of music lands differently the moment you learn a machine made it, which either means the meaning was partly in the maker all along, or means the provenance story still matters more than we admit. Both explanations fit the data.

The frame I keep returning to is human-made as luxury good. When machine creative is abundant and free, “a person made this” becomes the scarce attribute, the way hand-built furniture survived the factory. That’s not a consolation prize. Handmade furniture is a real market with real prices and real makers earning real livings. But notice what happened to the middle of the furniture trade. It’s gone. The factory took the middle, the artisans kept the top, and nothing came back. The likely shape for creative work is the same: an ocean of cheap machine-made, a premium tier of verified human, and a hard landing in between. The middle is where most working creatives currently live, and the same stratification is hitting the media business generally. Saying “the top tier survives” to someone in the middle is true and incomplete. It names who makes it through. It doesn’t help the people who don’t.

So here’s where I actually am, without the bow. I built tools that make creative work abundant, and I still can’t tell you whether what gets lost is essential or sentimental. The market will answer eventually, the way it answered for furniture. But the market has been wrong about value before, and it doesn’t refund what it discards. Whether the question of what any of us do when the machines do the making has a good answer is a different post, and a harder one.