Illustration by Annelise Capossela/For The Washington Post
AUSTIN – AI was the buzzword on the ground at SXSW, mentioned at nearly every panel, party and event … to the extent that I noticed some eye rolls and grimaces by the end of the weekend when the topic came up again and again. Creators expressed skepticism that AI – particularly generative AI – is at a level that it will actually revolutionize the creator economy at large.
“The history of this industry is littered with the tools that were going to change everything. And that's not me saying AI isn't gonna change everything, it's just saying it's what you do with it,” said Kenny Gold, who heads up social and creator at Deloitte Digital. “We've had NFTs. We have had location-based gamification, we have had video first – we've seen it a hundred times.”
Creators were much more excited to chat about the IRL activations they’re planning for their communities, the new types of content they’re piloting and how they’re strategizing around platform diversification than how they’re using AI. Some said they are eager for tools that can help minimize certain business-side operations or time-sucking production tasks.
Fewer were concerned about generative AI, a surprise given all the recent chatter about AI-generated creators. Some creators told me that AI, at least at this point, is unable to replicate the authenticity and creativity that drives the trust and rapport they have with their audience. If someone is using generative AI to make a fake creator, they said, it’s easier for a copycat to do the same and harder to maintain an edge and audience.
The bigger concern among creators is AI ripping off their content. Many were less worried about it threatening their livelihoods but were broadly wary about AI’s broader societal impact, such as on the environment and privacy.
“Creators are scared. They want to understand more how it's being used against them, and they want the tools to be able to speak on it,” said Cheyenne Hunt, a political content creator I spoke with on a SXSW panel. Hunt leads Gen-Z for Change, an organization that launched the “Eyes on AI” campaign, which created a tool to spotlight the surveillance impact of AI. Hunt said creators across different verticals were “deeply uncomfortable” about AI's impact on society writ large.
From the brand perspective, marketers see AI as a tool to help creators scale, find collaborators, analyze metrics, or match them with a sponsorship campaign. Some said that AI search has also led to shifts in the types of content their teams are pushing out, such as an increase in press releases to train LLMs. No one at SXSW we met was jumping to collaborate with generative AI creators.
I moderated a Female Quotient panel on Saturday with top marketing and partnership leads, and I think their thoughts on AI use summed up the broader sentiment well. Krista Dalton of Tecovas said, “I love AI for back-end process automation and dashboards. I cannot stand it for generative AI. … We want our marketing to be as handmade as our boots.”
Yunice Emir of Moët Hennessy said the competitive advantage comes from remaining authentic, and Yahoo’s Shannon Shae Montoya told me, “it can accelerate the pace at which we push out content, but you still need the humanness to really bring it to life.” NBCUniversal’s Ann Scheiner McCarron said, “the greatest storytelling is still human, but we're using it to help actually deliver our content, to deliver better scale to more people.”
I want to hear from you: Is the AI x creator hype overblown? How are you using AI in creative ways? Or are you bypassing it altogether?
This story is part of Verified, a newsletter that is published by WP Creator, a new business outside The Washington Post’s newsroom that is focused on the creator economy and content partnerships with independent creators. Learn more about WP Creator.
