Does AI Deserve A Place In Your Creative Team?

Jade Mitchell, Senior Copywriter

TL;DR:

Generative AI isn’t the enemy of creative work. It’s not your savior either. Here’s what it COULD be:

• A tool for clearing clutter: So your team can slow down where it counts.

• A reason to rethink roles: AI blurs the lines between disciplines, encouraging collaboration across strategy, design, and copy.

• A prompt to clean up your process: Make more room for human judgment, play, and pause.

The goal isn’t (just) to make work faster. It’s to make space for better work.

Back When the Madmen Were Just... Mad

Once upon a not-so-long time ago, advertising was the domain of generalists. Creative directors were more likely to be copywriters than art directors, and the whole point was to be bold, loud, and even a little ridiculous. It was about having one big idea, and then finding the wildest way to sell it.

But as brands evolved, so did the demands on agencies. Being attention-grabbing wasn’t enough; we had to become accountable. Strategic. Data-driven. Brand-safe. The madness was toned down. The briefcases came out. Probably because of all the lawsuits. 

Somewhere along the line, creatives stopped going to the source. No more visits to the factory floor. No long afternoons at the store with customers. Definitely no weeks-long client ride-alongs involving late nights and even later breakfasts. It all became too expensive, too inefficient, too risky, and a little too heavy on our livers. Instead, we got a sanitized version of the truth: the media-trained stakeholder soundbite, the consultant deck, the online poll results.

Creative work has had to run the gauntlet of risk aversion, where anything too bold, too emotional, too human got quietly removed in rounds of “alignment.” No wonder so much work these days looks and sounds the same. Then again, when you look at some of those old ads from the ‘60s, you get why we needed some actual grown-ups to join the conversation. 

And now there’s AI. Good old, terrifying AI that can write a blog post faster than you log into your WordPress site, generate an image quicker than you can find the right stock image, and validate your thinking without you having to trawl through eighteen corporate websites (that part is quite nice, actually). 

But here’s a thought… instead of replacing creative teams en masse by producing our mediocre work faster than we can, can AI help us find our way back to the immersive, generative, gloriously chaotic process that once defined great creative work—without terrifying the legal team, confusing customers, or bankrupting the agency?

IDK. Can it?

The Natural Rhythm of Creation

If you think about producing any kind of creative media, from a public statue to a television commercial, the process begins with a big, bold, usually slightly ridiculous idea at the top. Think: "What if we put a giant horse statue with glowing red eyes outside the Denver airport?" As budget, concept, and deadline start getting their grip, the focus narrows. 

The idea gets molded into something real. Then comes the real work. Booking talent. Finding venues. Coordinating craft tables. Weather plans, camera batteries, and material deliveries. Script revisions, updated layouts, retakes, and redos. Historically, we've spent three times as much time making “the thing” as we have spent planning “the thing”.

When it comes to creative crafting, the making has always been slow because these micro-iterations towards “perfection” are so deeply human. As individual creators and as teams of creatives, we need natural pause points.

Sometimes it's a formal review. Sometimes it's a creative producer stepping outside to touch grass, blink into the sunlight, and remember they have a human body before coming back to look at their screen. These breaks matter. They're not laziness or inefficiency. They're vital moments of reflection, recalibration, and, when necessary, of correction.

But here's where a lot of creative folks are struggling: generative AI doesn't pause. It doesn't need a snack or a sanity check. It goes from brief to barrage in seconds, spitting out options before you've even finished your tea. And while that speed can be intoxicating, it also erases those human checkpoints. The places where we stop, think, and ask: "Is this any good? Is this the right kind of weird?"

“If I do a job in 30 minutes it’s because I spent 10 years learning how to do that in 30 minutes. You owe me for the years not the minutes.” -ChatGPT, apparently

I genuinely do believe that everyone is creative. But not everyone has the patience or the inclination to become a professional “Creative-with-a-capital C.” Which is fine, there are only so many tantrums to go around.

Being a speedy typist won’t make you a better writer, and mastering the pen tool won’t turn you into an illustrator. That takes years and years of failure. It takes falling head-first into the gap between what you want to create and your own, subpar craft abilities. It takes crawling out of that hole one project, one version, one win at a time, until you know the difference between what you like and what is objectively brilliant.

Art is subjective, but professional creative outputs should meet a minimum quality standard.

Accelerated AI timelines have created the false impression that a remixed facsimile of thought is the same thing as a good idea. Artists have always referenced other work, positively and otherwise, but sheer skill has, until now, been an effective barrier to plagiarism or worse, laziness.

I Don’t Want Another Baton, Thanks

We need to fundamentally rethink the creative production process in light of AI tools. Not to slot them into the old framework, but to reshape the framework entirely.

This means rethinking the tidy but disconnected baton-passing model of production, where one ultra-specialized role hands off to the next. This is in direct contrast to how hyper-specialized creative roles seem to have become. 

It’s not enough to have ten years’ experience designing magazine covers for the jam industry; you need to prove you’ve got chops in the apricot jam industry specifically. -Jam Monthly

Generative AI invites cross-pollination. Writers are making moodboards. Strategists are sketching. Designers are scripting. Not because they want to steal jobs, but because the tools are finally letting them play outside their lanes and bring new ideas and diverse opinions to the concepting phase.

We need to lean into that messiness and make that beginning phase of the creative process bigger and broader. We need to invite more people into the room… maybe even the client? We need to make brainstorming and intakes feel less like ticking a box and more like co-creating a possibility, and put less pressure on account managers to be salespeople, strategists, creative problem-solvers, and emotional interpreters in a single 30-minute status call.

Brief Clean. Work Dirty. 

For too long, briefs have been relegated to the same mental shelf as "putting in a ticket." Write it, toss it over the fence, and wait for the work to come out the other side. But creative briefs, especially in marketing, need to take a cue from dev docs (we’re not just saying that because we’re a dev marketing agency).

They should be living, evolving, and always as accurate as possible. They should reflect not just the original intention, but the shifts, the recalibrations, the new context that shows up after a round of work, a conversation, or a market change. Automatically updating creative briefs is the kind of task you can definitely use AI to assist with. Having more time to interpret what that brief means is where the slower, messy, fun, human side can shine.

Because what we really need to do better work isn’t more speed. It’s more space. And AI can help if we let it. Use it to clear the round-one ideas off the table. To generate variations. To test templates. Use it as a tool of acceleration in the early stages, so we can actually slow down later on.

A really clean brief gives creatives time to think, to explore, to get their hands dirty again with real research and immersive experience. Because nothing great ever came from working in from a vacuum, which is what Gen AI can become if you let it.

Embracing the New Creative Flow

Which brings us to my point: eventually, good creative work is rarely born from hierarchy, and it’s almost always better when it’s layered with collaboration and diversity of thought.

If AI is shortening timelines and loosening roles, we need to embrace and make more space for the conditions that let messy, democratic brilliance thrive. That means letting go of rigid RACI charts and outdated job descriptions, creating opportunities for diverse perspectives to meet, mix, and make something genuinely unexpected.

In this new era, creative production isn't about moving faster for the sake of it. It's about moving with more fluidity, more inclusion, and more room for some old-fashioned madness (don’t worry, we’ll still pass it by legal).

Because that glowing-eyed horse outside Denver airport might have started as a joke, but now it's a landmark.

---

AI is transforming the creative process—don't get left behind. Partner with Catchy to harness its power in your developer marketing program. Contact us today.