Creativity After Efficiency – On AI, Creative Labour, and the Next Cultural Contract
On AI, creative labour, and the next cultural contract
A new tone has entered the culture. It's polite, grammatically correct, endlessly helpful. It summarises, explains, and suggests. It can write good-enough copy, generate images, and deliver iterations at a speed that used to require entire editorial teams. It sounds like creativity – but rarely feels like necessity.
It's tempting to frame this as decline: Machines rise, art dies, and human creativity becomes a quaint memory. But that story is too simple – and too boring. Creativity won’t disappear. The real question is more precise, and more serious: What happens to creativity as work, as craft, and as social infrastructure when generative AI becomes ubiquitous?
This essay argues three main points:
1. That creativity risks becoming disconnected from sustainable work;
2. That AI disrupts the invisible learning zones where talent is forged;
3. That the future of creativity is not a technical question – but an institutional and political one.
Creativity isn’t a trait. It’s an ecosystem.
We often treat creativity as an individual attribute: talent, imagination, originality. But in reality, it’s an ecosystem. It depends on education, labour, feedback, audiences, time – and money. Most people we now see as exceptional artists, writers, designers or thinkers didn’t start out as geniuses. They started as average beginners who got time – and often got paid – to practice.
This is where AI hits a nerve. Generative systems are especially good at tasks that have traditionally been entry points to creative careers: research, sketching, colouring, drafting, editing, variation, first drafts. These are the low-prestige but essential steps where skills are developed and bills are paid.
When those steps are automated, creativity doesn’t vanish – but the opportunity to learn it in practice begins to erode.
The elite fallacy: The best will survive
A common claim is that AI only threatens the bottom 80–90%, while the truly talented will be fine. But this misses the point: most people aren't born in the top 10%. Creativity is a journey, not a fixed state.
Many great professionals were unremarkable in their twenties. They became outstanding through repetition, friction, failure, and slow improvement. Remove the early steps, and you don't just eliminate jobs – you reduce future excellence.
So the question isn’t whether a creative elite will exist. It will. The question is: who gets access to becoming part of it?
The efficiency paradox: When everything sounds the same
This shift is amplified by a familiar pattern: when new tech is seen as inevitable, it’s implemented without much thought – not because it's better, but because everyone else is doing it. That’s standard institutional behaviour.
In many media houses and businesses, AI has already become the default – not through strategic choice, but as a signal of modernity. The result is a torrent of content that is fast, correct, and harmless. But also interchangeable.
And so, the paradox: the more efficient the production becomes, the harder it is to distinguish between what matters and what merely exists. Creativity doesn’t lose value – but the criteria for value start to blur.
Polarisation: More content, less meaning
We’re moving toward a cultural split. On one side: vast volumes of synthetic content that meet needs for speed, variation, and novelty. On the other: a slower, rarer, more expensive kind of creativity that is deeply human – often biographical, risky, accountable.
This isn’t necessarily a catastrophe. But it is a distortion. Because when creative careers require financial buffers, networks, or institutional protection, diversity and renewal suffer. It’s not technology that causes inequality – but it can cement it.
The new social contract for creativity
The future of creativity isn’t about taste or tools. It’s about the terms under which creative work happens. In a world where production is cheap but judgement is scarce, the core question becomes: what conditions are we willing to create for creative labour?
The responsibility is shared – and four levels matter.
1. Education: Protect formation, not just output
· Ask for documentation of process, not just finished products
· Create AI-free learning zones for foundational skills and voice
· Make critical reflection on AI part of professional training
· Keep entry-level tasks as training ground, not just a cost centre
Principle: You must not optimise learning out of existence.
2. Companies: Separate production from meaning
· Define where human judgement is strategically essential
· Organise for both efficient delivery and creative development
· Measure quality and effect – not just speed
· Invest in skills, not just software
Principle: AI amplifies what you already prioritise.
3. Policy: Treat creativity as infrastructure
· Acknowledge creative fields as long-term ecosystems
· Support transition phases in creative careers
· Ensure transparency in generative content
· Update rights and contracts with fairness in mind
Principle: Markets alone don’t sustain cultural vitality.
4. Individuals: Cultivate judgement as a core skill
· Use AI as a partner, not a replacement
· Develop taste, voice, and accountability – the un-automatable
· Accept slowness where quality demands it
· Choose deliberately what not to automate
Principle: In a world of infinite output, the ability to choose what matters is everything.
The stakes: Why creativity still matters
The future of creativity is not under threat from tools that imitate style. It’s threatened by systems that make creative work feel unnecessary, invisible, or out of reach.
If we want a culture that is more than noise – more than variation without intention – we need to take creativity seriously. As labour. As learning. As responsibility. Not out of nostalgia, but because a society without real, living creativity may become efficient, fluent and hollow.