Anyone who consumes creative content regularly has started to notice the pattern. A lot of what is being written, composed, and produced with AI models is technically competent and somehow empty. The words are correct. The melody is pleasant. The image is polished. And yet something is missing that is difficult to name precisely but immediately perceptible.
This is not a bug in the models. It is a feature of what the models are optimizing for.
What the Industry Is Starting to See
In conversations with creative industry professionals over the past year, an idea keeps surfacing that I find genuinely interesting. The impact of AI on creativity may not be evenly distributed across the value chain.
The base layer of creation, composing, writing, producing, editing, may become massively cheaper. Models can already generate a serviceable film score, a passable article, a competent design, at a cost approaching zero. This will displace some portion of the demand that currently supports working professionals in those areas.
At the same time, performers and live experiences may gain relative value. If recorded and generated content becomes abundant to the point of noise, scarcity shifts to the human presence, the imperfection, the unrepeatable moment of a live performance. People will still want to see musicians they love play music in a room. That experience becomes more valuable precisely because so much of what surrounds it is algorithmically produced.
The Parallel With Software
Something similar is already visible in technology. A significant portion of production code is now generated with AI assistance. In some organizations, it is the majority. But the judgment of what to build, how to architect it, what problems are worth solving, has become more valuable rather than less. The people who have what some call taste, the ability to make good decisions about things that cannot be reduced to optimization, are more sought after than ever.
The same logic applies to art. New technologies will massively democratize the technical capacity to create. Making something that sounds like music, looks like a painting, or reads like a story will require less specialized skill than it used to. But making something that resonates, that reflects genuine human experience and emotion, will remain a human responsibility.
The future of art is not gray and boring by technological inevitability. It becomes gray and boring only if we allow it to.
What This Means for the Creative Ecosystem
The shift toward abundant AI-generated content creates a pressure that the creative industry needs to respond to carefully. The response cannot be prohibition. AI is a tool, and tools do not respect jurisdictions. The response also cannot be passive acceptance, because the economic consequences for working creators are real and deserve serious attention.
What it requires is a thoughtful approach to the infrastructure of creative value. Who decides what deserves attention and compensation? How do we maintain the economic incentives for human creators to keep producing the original work that gives AI models and human culture something to build on? How do we preserve space for the imperfect, idiosyncratic, genuinely human creative act in a world saturated with technically perfect algorithmic output?
Collective Management Organizations were built precisely to answer these questions in institutional form. They exist to protect the economic conditions under which creators can keep creating. In a world where AI generates content at scale, their mandate becomes more important rather than less.
The Question Worth Sitting With
I believe, and hope, that we will continue to assign greater value to what is human-made. Not because of nostalgia, but because the value of human creative experience is not reducible to technical quality. There is something in a song written from genuine loss, or a painting made from sustained attention, or a novel built from years of lived experience, that models trained on the aggregate of existing human output cannot fully replicate.
Whether that intuition holds as AI quality continues to improve is genuinely uncertain. What is certain is that the answer will be shaped by the choices the creative industry makes now, about how to value human creativity, how to structure its compensation, and how to maintain the conditions under which it thrives.
At global.esur we believe technology should strengthen the creative ecosystem, not replace it. Get in touch if you want to talk about the future of collective management in a world shaped by AI.