It’s official. AI’s guardrails have come off. Strike that – they’ve been blown off as part of the thunderous onslaught of executive orders and investments ushering in a new administration. As news broke about the Stargate Project (a $500 billion private sector deal to expand U.S. AI infrastructure), reactions ranged from manifest destiny-level industrial optimism to sheer dread at the environmental implications of unfettered AI growth, which comes at the cost of massive, energy-guzzling data centers. Add in the launch of China’s DeepSeek, and the competitive pressure is on. All of this, of course, is happening amid a climate of regulatory rollbacks, creating a technological Wild West with little concern for the consequences such an AI shoot-out will leave in its wake.
As federal oversight is increasingly stripped in place of one-upmanship, those of us in creative professions face an existential crisis: we want to embrace the tools that could make our jobs easier (and perhaps get us better work-life balance), but we also don’t want to see AI eliminate our livelihoods – or even more important – our humanity. From my perspective, the future of the creative industry hinges on how we come together and race for authenticity. And winning that race requires an understanding of what we’re up against.
The Protections of Oversight
As AI technology continues to evolve, oversight is extremely important. We’ve already seen blatant disregard for copyrights with training models, where content (intellectual property) is swept without permission and terms/clauses are often buried in agreement legalese. We’ve also seen the beginnings of job replacement in the creative industry, not to mention the environmental impact. Taking all this into consideration, former President Biden issued Executive Order 14110 in 2023, affirming that greater regulation was warranted. AI technology continued to grow at seemingly breakneck speed, but at least we were developing guardrails that could protect the American worker.
Within his first week in office, however, President Trump rescinded EO #14110, and his appointments of David Sacks and Elon Musk have cleared a path for profound deregulation to prioritize innovation over workers’ rights.
Weighing the Costs of Unfettered Innovation
As with all things, there is a balance. Regulate too much and you stand to get left behind. Remove all regulation and you stand to get run over. Innovation aside, our goals should also be balanced. The quickest to innovate may also be the quickest to displace millions of human workers, the quickest to strain natural resources and power grids beyond what may be sustainable, and the quickest to end all hope of privacy and autonomy. The bifurcations of AI winning at all cost are immeasurable.
When it comes to creative businesses, the only ones that stand to benefit are those currently building and training AI models on content without consent or compensation of creators (think Midjourney, OpenAI, Runway ML). These businesses already have the infrastructure and resources to speed forward at a breakneck pace having already bulldozed a path. And while some pundits talk up the potential benefits for small businesses in removing AI guardrails, I struggle to see the good outweighing the bad for any business, save for the tech giants listed above. Reducing what few guardrails there are may have dire consequences for small businesses and humanity as a whole.
Who is Most at Risk Once Guardrails are Removed?
In our industry, the conceptual and storyboard artists stand to suffer the most, and they already are: we’ve seen wonderful artists/friends lose their jobs. From there, it’s not too hard to imagine AI’s path to disrupting a myriad of roles, from the camera department to the editing suite. AI will certainly provide these roles with a wealth of usable tools that I am anxious to see and use, but it may also pave the way for a race to the bottom, a double-click solution to replace a team of people that it took previously.
If one merely needs to type a few sentences into Sora and — BOOM – a Nike ad appears ready for distribution, this boils down hundreds of jobs to one “AI prompting engineer.” And while we’re not quite there yet, removing AI guardrails is leading us down that path at a rapid pace.
The Path Forward for Creatives
Not unlike the stages of grief, creative industries (especially those in roles facing their own possible extinction) will process a range of emotions before we settle on acceptance. Once there, it’s really about owning humanity. Focus advertising or customer communications on showing a real problem solved by real-life circumstances with real people. AI will never be a solve for how a product or service helps a person. It will only be a shiny distraction for initially starved eyeballs. Once we’ve had enough with non-reality, those same eyeballs will crave a real human connection.
Again, I say race to authenticity. Tell real human stories, create real connection. Have your content go touch grass. It’s only a matter of time before consumers (the WHY behind our work to begin with) start demanding authentic, human-created content again in marketing, advertising, music, etc.
Right now, there are scattered voices refusing to use AI for what they fear is coming or for what it has already done. And although I have yet to see a flag planted proclaiming any unwavering commitment to human-centered marketing practices, I believe a movement will emerge.
A Right Way for AI
In the meantime, I do believe creative business owners can stay competitive and incorporate AI in ways that don’t kill off jobs or remove credit from real artists. AI, as I mentioned, is creating some incredible tools for real artists that enable us to push boundaries and do things easier for desired results. Anything roto-related is welcome. Masking, tracking… all of these tedious tasks are well-suited for AI to take over. DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro and After Effects have helpful quality-of-life improvements like these.
As long as we look to AI as a way to elevate our work vs. cutting the need to pay another human for it, content, advertising and humanity can rise. If fully prompted content becomes the norm, and we’re flooded with nonsensical, cost-fractional, worthless content… our businesses, studios, and consumers all lose.
In the end, if our goal is to sell to humans, I believe we’ll always need human authority and connection.
TJ Bitter is a director and head of production at OddBeast, an award-winning motion design and production studio working with major consumer brands and entertainment companies.
