The panic in the creative industry about AI is misdirected. AI is not going to kill creative work. What is going to kill creative work — and is already visibly killing it — is the flood of undifferentiated, taste-free output that AI has made trivially cheap to produce.
We call it slop. You know it when you see it. The purple gradients on every SaaS landing page. The identical hero images across every DTC brand. The AI-narrated podcast that sounds like every other AI-narrated podcast. The generic "brand voice" that could belong to any of a thousand companies. Slop is not any single piece of bad work. Slop is what happens when a whole category converges on a single aesthetic because that aesthetic is what the tools default to.
Why slop wins by default
Because AI tools are trained on the mean of the internet, and the mean of the internet is generic. Every model is pulling from the same corpus, weighted toward the most common patterns. Feed the same prompt to the same tool ten thousand times and you get ten thousand variants of the same average output. The tools are not biased toward taste. They are biased toward the middle.
The middle is where brands go to die.
What separates work that lasts
Taste. Point of view. Editing. The ability to say "none of these are right, and here is what right actually looks like." That capacity is not automated by any tool that currently exists. It is possibly the most valuable capacity in the entire creative economy right now, precisely because it is now the only thing that separates you from the flood.
How SMG uses AI
We use AI aggressively. Every strategist here has a set of internal models tuned to specific tasks — audience analysis, brief-to-frame conversion, cultural signal detection, media planning, script iteration. Our AI stack takes tasks that used to consume a week of a strategist's time and compresses them to hours.
But we do not ship the model's first output. Or its fifth. Every artifact that leaves this studio is filtered through a human who has spent years developing taste in that specific medium. The model is the intern with infinite energy. The taste comes from the operators.
What to do about it
If you run a brand, protect your taste layer at all costs. Do not fire your best creative director because AI can produce ten posts a day. Fire the process that lets any of those ten posts ship without her review. The economics of great work have not changed. The economics of generic work have just collapsed. Position accordingly.