In 2024, three winning entries of a poetry competition were found to have been generated by AI and were later recalled. Clearly they sounded human enough to be missed by the judges at the Migrant Workers of Singapore, the organisation behind the competition. The revelation caused a stir because it was suddenly harder to tell where human creativity ended and machine output began.

The story bothered me for very personal reasons. I’ve worked as a graphic designer and art director for decades, in a profession I had always assumed was fundamentally human. Yet I now see AI produce logos and mockups in minutes, and turn its hand to the sort of copy that would once have needed a writer. At first I was awestruck, but that quickly gave way to unease. If AI can replicate so much of what I do, where does that leave me?

I’ve come to realise that resisting AI isn’t going to get us very far. We need to understand what it is doing to our work and decide where we still want human judgement to count. Like the industrial revolutions before it, AI is already disrupting established skills and professions. What matters now is whether we have any say in how that change unfolds.

Machines have been here before

Machines were unsettling skilled workers long before AI arrived. During Britain’s nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, skilled textile workers known as Luddites smashed mechanised looms, fearing that automation would destroy their livelihoods. They weren’t entirely wrong. The machines did replace many jobs. But they also created new opportunities in other industries, from engineering to logistics.

Today, AI feels like the mechanised loom of our time, except it is reaching into areas we once assumed machines couldn’t touch. Art, writing and even aspects of decision-making are now being automated. The Luddites could take a hammer to the machines threatening their livelihoods. For today’s creatives, the threat is harder to pin down: if a machine can produce the work, what happens to the skills and identity we’ve built around making it?

From fascination to unease

Growing up in the 1970s, I was fascinated by the world of science fiction. Television shows like Star Trek painted a future where technology was a force for good, eliminating scarcity and unlocking human potential. Later, Omni magazine became my window into the possibilities of what science and technology could achieve. So I was rarely suspicious of new technology. Usually I wanted to get my hands on it and see what it could do.

But nothing prepared me for how quickly AI would develop. In a very short time, it has moved from being a useful assistant to producing images, writing, music, video and other creative work that would once have required years of training. I use these tools myself and I’m still struck by what they can do. But there’s also an unease in watching a machine produce in seconds something that took me decades to learn how to make. I still haven’t resolved that contradiction.

If a logo can be produced in seconds, where does its value lie?

Faster than expected

Just a few years ago, much of what AI can now do still seemed a long way off. Then the pace changed. AI-generated images began winning art competitions, while machine-written work became convincing enough to pass university assessments and even fool literary judges. Things that once felt safely in the future arrived remarkably quickly.

I still don’t know where the value sits. Is it simply in the finished image, or does the thinking and experience behind it still matter? The ground beneath creative work is moving much faster than I ever expected, and that inevitably changes how we value the people who do it.

When the work changes

Creative work is already changing. AI can speed up parts of the process and make things possible that would once have taken far more time or money. But it can also make skills that took years to develop look suddenly cheap and replaceable.

For freelancers, that change is already tangible. Some clients who once commissioned bespoke work are experimenting with AI because it is quicker and costs less. Agencies are adapting too, changing the way work is developed and produced. We’re past debating whether AI belongs in creative work. The question now is how much of that work it will end up doing.

Who controls the tools?

AI may feel like something we can all access, but the most powerful systems are expensive to build and remain largely in the hands of a small number of very large companies. That concentration of power matters. Independent creatives are adapting to tools developed by businesses whose priorities may have little in common with theirs.

The companies building these systems talk about empowering people, but they also need them to make money. These systems require enormous investment, and the companies developing them need to make that investment pay. What is good for users, workers or creative culture will not always be the same as what benefits the balance sheet.

That matters because the people whose work is being disrupted have very little control over the tools doing the disrupting. We need to think seriously about how people can benefit from these technologies without simply absorbing all the disruption they create.

What do we keep?

I don’t think the answer is to pretend AI can be kept out of creative work. It is already here, and for those of us working with it the more useful question is where it genuinely helps and where human judgement still matters. Some parts of our jobs will change or disappear. Others may become more valuable precisely because a person made the choices.

But adapting to this cannot be left entirely to individuals. If whole professions are being reshaped at this speed, training and employment protections need to keep pace. We may also have to confront much bigger questions about how people support themselves if automation removes significant amounts of paid work.

I can see enormous potential in AI beyond the creative industries. But I also want to know who will benefit from it, and who will be expected to absorb the cost of the disruption.

For me, resisting AI no longer makes much sense. I use it, I’m fascinated by it and I’m still uneasy about where it may lead. What I do want is some say over what I hand over to it, and what remains mine to do.

Khaled Bazzi is Creative Director at Perspective