When I think of how creative careers are viewed within Western society, I turn to pop culture: Penny Lane as a budding music journalist in Almost Famous, Charlotte running an art gallery in Sex and the City, and Ted Mosby, the architect in How I Met Your Mother — representing creativity as not a side-hustle but a viable, even idealised, profession. While these examples are fiction, they are rooted within a reality where creativity is portrayed as deeply human, with people so engrossed in the work that they become physically part of it. But in an age where AI and the pressure to harness its technology is pervasive, how do we maintain this level of humanisation within our work?
This is symptomatic of a broader “deskilling” of careers, where specialised knowledge is quietly replaced by free labour and automated systems. Museums, galleries, festivals and small presses now lean heavily on volunteers and unpaid interns to keep basic operations running, rebranding exploitation as “experience”. Training and mentorship have also declined, as roles requiring research or storytelling are filled in part or entirely by automated processes. Added to this is a thriving digital landscape, where everyone is classified as a “creator”, making specialised knowledge and skill harder to sustain economically. For those without financial privilege, the entry point into these industries is increasingly unattainable. Younger adults from working-class backgrounds are already four times less likely to work in the creative industries compared to their middle-class peers. This points towards a culture that devalues expertise and favours efficiency at the cost of homogeneity.
It’s no secret that the sheer amount of content fed through various platforms is causing us to devolve into intense mental fatigue, or “brain rot”. Mish-mashes of clickbait headlines, rage bait, “story times” we watch at two times speed with bursts of comedic relief and curated aspirational daily vlogs make up algorithms we only vaguely control. Simultaneously, there is a pressure for us to monetise creativity in an environment that rewards speed and virality, creating another form of deskilling.
However, it would be remiss of me to deny the ways in which technological advances, most notably AI, have allowed the democratisation of creativity. It allows aspiring creatives to prototype, write and produce at a low cost which provides in many ways a sense of empowerment. It can stave off frustrating stalls in creativity, and increase productivity, allowing those working independently or in small businesses to create better use of their time, or focus on the uniquely human aspects of their work in a flailing economy.
But what happens when art becomes something generated rather than lived? The challenge for Gen Z faces is learning to co-create with AI without it stifling the human skills of empathy, originality and emotional depth that make art truly meaningful (whilst also trying not to decimate the planet — a topic that deserves a much larger deep dive than this article has room for). We take on the task of reclaiming creativity as labour and expression, where both are being automated and devalued: a vast (but not insurmountable) feat.
