I was there for the dying days of the layout pad as a junior art director, measuring by eye while designers huddled around the only Mac. But as soon as I heard that machine humming in their corner, I saved up, bought one and carried it into the office. Colleagues looked up, bemused, but I was testing the wind, I felt change was coming.

We’ve always mourned the past as we’ve embraced the future: We built the DSLR, then missed the darkroom, wrote the dictionary and feared words would lose their soul, built the synthesiser and missed the squeak of strings. Now we train the algorithm and hate how much we like the result.

We want our tools brilliant, just not too brilliant. AI bruises the ego, it takes away the thrill of doing it the hard way. But the sting isn’t the tool, it’s hearing people say, “I can just get AI to do it,” as if creativity were a vending machine and judgment disposable. If you’re sceptical, ask yourself whether you’re defending creativity or clinging to old methods.

Those warnings from within our industry, about speed over craft and rules over imagination, should be heeded. Some argue that generative tools encourage quantity over quality and signal you didn’t invest in craft. Others remind us that creativity thrives on breaking rules while machines play by them. Recent AI‑generated campaigns that felt cold and artificial show what happens when we forget the human story. A machine still can’t fix a bad idea.

But turning our backs on AI won’t make us better. Used well, it frees us from drudgery, surfaces patterns and helps test ideas and personalise at scale. Yet it still can’t write the line that makes someone cry or capture the nuance of a difficult brief. Every leap in technology scares us before it liberates us. We built the light bulb and longed for candles, we invented the e-book and missed the smell of paper… Each time, we adapt and often, raise the bar.

So I’m choosing to swallow my ego, take what’s useful and discard what isn’t. I use AI to sketch and to finish, to explore, to edit and to perfect. Our craft is about making people feel something. AI can’t do that, yet. And that “yet” is exciting to me. The future is going to be amazing.

A recent survey suggests that more than half of long‑form posts on professional networks like LinkedIn may be assisted or influenced by generative AI.

This one included.