Weekend Musing: Three Creative Tribes
A reflection on the three types of creators emerging in the Gen AI era—and why creativity is far from over. By Fred Grinstein
Lately I’ve been thinking about how generative AI tools are starting to create a few trends surrounding who’s creating, who's getting seen, and who’s shaping this new creative culture. And I am noticing three distinct crowds emerging. Three different types of creators starting to define this new landscape.
1. The Democratized
This group is the one everyone talks about when they mention how AI is gatecrashing old systems, opening up new access to creators far and wide. But to anyone who’s been in creative industries before, this moment feels familiar, perhaps this time it feels bigger.
This is what independent filmmaking looked like during the late '90s Indie Cinema wave. It’s what it felt like not long ago scrolling through Staff Picks on Vimeo to find new filmmaking voices often outside the Hollywood system. It’s what YouTube creators made mainstream over the past decade, showcasing how anyone can broadcast themselves and build a community.
Now, with AI tools, it’s happening again in new ways. Artists like Sow Hussein Dembel or Junie Lau (two of my recent favorite discoveries) among so many other — often hailing far outside traditional creative hubs or pathways— but now breaking through and making their names globally. Some are people who have been in creative industries and are now discovering new abilities in disciplines they previously didn’t have access to, like animation, or writing, or visual direction.
This is a great place to find the inspiration that first drew many of us into creative work. If you’re feeling cynical, go spend time here. The energy is alive and well.
2. The Noisy Middle
This crowd is sometimes harder to love—but important to recognize.
These are folks in your social feed with claims of AI-generated commercials made for a few hundred dollars, or posting "RIP Hollywood" memes designed to stir people up. Some are trolling, I suspect doing a good job getting engagement on social algorithms. Some genuinely believe the hype.
But what they’re showing us is real: things that were once very hard to do are now much easier. And as I imagine the broader impact of more affordable high quality video content, I think for example about a wave of small and medium-sized business owners who may enjoy working with these noisy creators to create branded content and high quality commercials for businesses that previously never dreamed of telling their company’s story, or their product’s narrative the way Nike does, or Coca-Cola, or Patagonia. Or other applications for storytelling that don’t care as much about Oscars or Emmys, but mainly want to be able to tell stories for cause or impact - think of the many non-profit orgs that rarely have exorbitant content budgets.
The folks that are mostly creating facsimiles of previously expensive content… I don’t think this where the vanguard of storytelling or creativity lives, maybe I’m wrong. But the loud and clear signal to me is an expansion of access. I hear people who felt left out of the creative permission to tell high quality visual stories. And more people getting to tell their stories is a good thing.
3. The Old Guard
This is the group I’m intrigued to hear more from. They’ve been slower to move. Many have been conflicted for various reasons surrounding this emerging technology. But seeing James Cameron in the mix recently weighing in on the big questions facing this technology is hard to ignore, or to not imagine what that signal means to his Establishment cohort.
But it’s not just him or the Russo brothers to consider here. Folks who have worked in “legacy” film and TV know how to tell stories that make impact, that generate audiences, that put butts in theater seats, and keep remotes on the coffee tables. Their years of experience—sometimes their failures, other times their hits, their understanding of audiences—that's a form of data. Data as lived knowledge of what resonates, what fizzles, what’s universal, and what surprises. They know how hard it is to actually build experiences that entertain and endure. They know how rare it is to truly delight an audience.
Maybe they got comfortable when the creative process was slower to adapt, harder to disrupt, more gatekept. But now, the ground is shifting. And as they adapt to new tools, that deep internalized knowledge could be a superpower. Not everyone will make the jump. But the ones who do? I’m hearing rocketbooms and it should excite people who like to be entertained.
I’m not ignoring the uncertainty this all brings to the stability of the ecosystem, one that’s already endured a lot in recent years. That’s another blog post many of us have read recently.
But if we’re just talking about creativity, the thing that moves you to sit in an art house theater, or to go to a modern art exhibit, or to go down an internet rabbit hole chasing a new creator that dazzles you, I’ve never been more excited about what’s coming. And it will be interesting to see these three different creative tribes merge and evolve and hopefully are accompanied by other groups who haven’t formed yet.