No Artificial Ingredients - The Creative Industries Will Need To Strike A Balance With Al. What Might That Look Like?

Very rarely do last-minute plans disappoint in the MCI (mischief-chaos-intrigue) department; it is why I’d advise you never to turn them down. So, when I found myself invited, just a few weeks ago, to a last-minute dinner at Akub, a splendid Palestinian restaurant nestled in between London’s Kensington and Notting Hill, I knew that I simply had to go. 

Intrigue – and a hint of (mental) chaos – struck instantly. It was revealed that there would be a guest appearance: the CEO of a Canadian AI start-up, would be joining us. Ordering drinks and settling into conversation, I got over the surprise development in my surprise evening plans. And then dinner was served. With it came another heaping of intrigue and (mental) chaos. “Are you not scared?” the CEO asked. “You’re a writer, you’re creative. Is AI not going to take your job?”. 

Whilst this was not the light conversation I expected for my Thursday evening, it is the conversation reverberating around government buildings, corporate boardrooms, and creative spaces. After all, as far as the technology adoption curve goes, we are firmly in laggard territory – even those extremely cautious of new technology cannot avoid Google’s AI overviews. With Planet Of The AI Bots coming soon, the speculative fear is growing that humans, and human skills, will be demoted to primitivity.  

This fear is not unfounded. According to the National Literacy Trust, 66.5% of teachers are concerned that the value of developing writing skills will decrease. Other studies have found that, when compared to a control group completing the same test, ChatGPT users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels”. In the job market too, graduate job listings are plummeting, having fallen by almost two-thirds in the UK since 2022 – the year ChatGPT launched – as UK companies seek to redirect money from staff into AI. 

But it is in the creative industries where these statistics transform into lofty, if fraught, arguments. Whilst AI in the ‘normal’ world worries (human cognitive decline and all), AI in the art world desecrates. Exalted as a uniquely human trait, creativity distinguishes us from other problem-solving, tool-using species, whereby we unite an elusive formula of vision, symbolic thought, and expression merely because we can. Not for survival, not exactly for validation; art for art’s sake. The beauty of an Albert Bierstadt, for example, is not that he saw Yosemite better than we ever could, but that he endeavoured to express it in his own human way. So, when AI is used in the creative arena, as it has been for producing artificial models in Guess adverts featured in Vogue or perfecting Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent in the film The Brutalist (for which he won Best Actor at the 2025 Academy Awards), a distinctly human uproar erupts. Subscriptions are cancelled in protest and the chamber of nuance, X, seethes. Strikes occur, à la Hollywood in 2023, and Elton John labels the British government “losers”. The thought of not being the only problem-solving, tool-using, creative species is – currently – sacrilegious. 

We’ll get over it, no doubt. With AI able to cut fashion campaign costs, for example, by upwards of 70%, and lead times on photoshoots shortened from months into mere days, we will have to. Time is money, money is, well, money, and AI will be going nowhere. This leaves us grappling at a technological and sociological inflection point. Hurtling along a one-way ride to the AI-ification of society, it is no longer sufficient to ask, “how will AI be used in the creative industries?”, or even, “should AI be used in the creative industries?”. We know that it will, irrespective of if it should – as we have already seen. What is left to ask, however, is “what balance can we strike with AI in the creative industries?”, and for that, I suggest our best, most realistic answer can be found through a spot of window shopping. 

The organic grocery store, home to health, wealth, and wellness, is a tale of exclusivity, whereby the rich happily pay premiums for the best produce, and the unrich strive to. Lining their aisles with a curation of superfoods that profess to contain “no artificial ingredients”, the organic grocery store seduces the health-conscious, status-seeking consumer into paying higher prices for their food, stratifying food into tiers – processed, minimally processed, organic – attached with different premiums. Such premiums are ‘warranted’: organic food requires more labour-intensive farming; nor can it use the synthetic sweeteners and preservatives that enhance other foods. The result is a place like Erewhon, America’s most expensive supermarket, where chicken soup retails for $50 and celebrity clientele form symbiotic relationships with status-smoothies. 

To emphasise: the organic grocery store model targets those that value food with “no artificial ingredients” on account of it being more natural, and in some ways, more sacred. It is therefore a model that maps out a possible route for the creative industries to follow as they seek to coexist with AI. 

Firstly, the model aligns with practices already at play. In the small print of current creations, we already find “made with (or without) generative AI” labels. Tailored to the creative world, authenticity markers that correspond to the degree of AI used in the artistic process could be stamped upon products, thus alerting consumers to the artificial content of their creative consumption. Unleashing transparency upon audiences in this way would imbue them with the power of choice, allowing people to choose to seek out and consume a diet of ‘free-from-AI’ art, or not, depending on how they value art. 

Neatly, this would feed into the most distinctive layer of the model: price premiums. Around authenticity markers, an entire market of authenticity could emerge, whereby tiered pricing would reflect the artificial status of creative products as it does in grocery stores. Those featuring “no artificial ingredients” would exhibit the greatest status, and therefore the greatest expense. Like organic food, authentic art involves the painstaking labour of the artist to navigate the flaws of creative thought. This makes it costly; months can be spent on a single concept only for it to prove unworkable, requiring a return to the proverbial drawing board. Just as higher prices are justified for organic food, so too would higher prices be justified for AI-less art. 

A luxury mark-up would also contribute to these premiums. Authentic art would be a status signal, a way to show the world that you know and care about such things. A relic of the current snobbery that surrounds the art world, it would allow the creative industries to successfully embed upcharges into AI-less art beyond merely remunerating ‘traditional’ artists for their extra labour. By carving out a premium space for authenticity, the creative industries would not need to reject AI outright, but rather would balance it, allowing human-made art to hold its own alongside AI-enhanced work in ways that are economically sustainable.  

There are flaws, of course; namely that the organic model, by design, is exclusionary. In an ideal world, the organic grocery store would be accessible to all and not a playground for the rich. The healthiest food would be a staple in all our diets, all of the time. But that is simply not the world we live in. Look at your own diet. What do you find? If it is anything like mine, there will be a happy mix of processed fast food and organic produce. Beyond the monied few, the majority is sustained upon a mixed diet of the affordable and just-good-enough. 

It is therefore no stretch of the imagination to see art following the same trajectory. In an ideal world, we could all access exactly the kinds of art we would like to. But we already do not live in that world. For many people an art gallery feels inaccessible, whether for lacking the cultural, or actual, capital. To listen to music or watch Netflix ad-free, premiums are added and subscriptions needed. Whilst there is an argument here that we should be doing all we can to overcome such barriers to the creative world, and not exacerbating them with additional premiums, AI-enhanced art, which can be made cheaply and quickly, could itself fill in those creative gaps for the masses. The parallel writes itself: just as most of our diets balance the processed with the organic, so too will our cultural consumption. AI-enhanced art will be the most prevalent and accessible in society, the fast food of culture, and we will enjoy it; a catchy AI-made song, for example, is still a catchy song. Meanwhile, authentic art will become a more exclusive, special treat, the kind we save up for and cherish.  

For creatives too, this model would present the opportunity for them to redefine their relationship with their art form. In preserving authentic human creation whilst acknowledging the growing role of AI within creative processes, the fear of job losses would dissipate. Some creatives could choose to resist AI, dedicating themselves to ‘pure’ creation. Their value would be in their scarcity and the display of that which only a human can do, and there would be a market with dedicated consumers willing to pay for that craft. Others may embrace AI, streamlining the creative process to produce greater quantities and unforeseen qualities of art. Both paths would be viable, and the world saturated with creation. 

In Planet Of The AI Bots, then, the world may not be so artistically barren, nor creation itself debased, in the ways it is currently being written to be. Gleaning insights from the organic grocery model, there is a way to strike a balance between a world racing towards processed, artificial ingredients, without giving up on the importance of organic, authentic products. With authenticity markers, and the subsequent price premiums that would emerge, the battle between man and machine for creative supremacy will not need to take place. There shall be space for both at the table, with audiences able to mostly determine the split of their creative consumption and the creative industries able to adapt.

I am a writer, and I am creative, but with such a balance in mind, I cannot say that I am scared of AI.

Illustrations: Will Allen/Europinion