Why Every Creative Person Feels Slightly Obsolete Right Now (Part Two)

There’s a weird feeling in the air right now, and if you make things for a living — or worse, if you make things because you have to, because your brain starts scratching at the walls if you don’t — you’ve probably felt it.

Not full apocalypse. Not total despair. More like a low-grade spiritual food poisoning. A faint nausea humming under everything.

You open your laptop to work on something meaningful and instead you get a faceful of tools, templates, automations, generators, content systems, optimized workflows, and one cheerful tech bro after another explaining that this should actually be exciting, because now you can scale your creativity.

Scale it.

What a creepy little phrase. Like art is yogurt.

And I know, I know — not all of this is bad. I use digital tools. I love digital tools. I’m not writing this by candlelight with a crow feather and a tragic constitution. I like speed. I like leverage. I like not spending six hours doing some stupid repetitive task a machine can absolutely do faster. I am not morally attached to suffering. If something can save me time, I’ll at least look at it. I’m not trying to become the last noble peasant standing in a wheat field yelling at Photoshop.

Still. Something feels off.

Because a lot of creative people were already hanging on by their fingernails before AI started barging into every room wearing a laminated badge that says DISRUPTION. The fantasy was already cracking. The fantasy that talent is enough. That if your work is good enough, people will find it. That originality rises. That the internet rewards quality. That culture values craft. That the best artist wins. That the cleverest writer gets read. That the person who cares the most gets to survive.

That was already not true. AI just kicked the door open so hard the whole rotten frame came off.

I think that’s part of why people are reacting so intensely. It isn’t only fear of replacement, though yes, obviously, that’s in there, sweating and chewing the furniture. It’s grief. It’s the sudden, ugly realization that the world never really set up a clean dignified place for most artists in the first place. We were already improvising a career out of broken glass and Wi-Fi. Already doing unpaid marketing internships for our own identities. Already being told to make better work, and more work, and faster work, and more visible work, and more likable work, and somehow also mysterious authentic soulful work that cuts through the noise while playing nicely with the algorithm.

That’s a lot to ask from one nervous mammal with a notebook.

And then the machine arrives. Or rather, the machine arrives in public, because the machine has actually been arriving for a while. Quietly, then suddenly, the way all this stuff happens. One day it’s an odd toy. Then it’s a gimmick. Then it’s kind of useful. Then everyone is using it to write cover letters, generate logo concepts, summarize books, produce social copy, brainstorm campaigns, fake expertise, flood Amazon, flood Pinterest, flood Etsy, flood Medium, flood the entire visible internet with this weird beige foam made of language and vibes.

That’s the thing people keep missing when they talk about “AI replacing artists.” It isn’t just replacement. That sounds too clean. Too surgical. Like there will be an orderly swap, a little HR meeting, a handshake, a cardboard box.

No. What actually happens is dilution. Confusion. Compression. Your work enters a market that is suddenly full of synthetic approximations, and now your real thing has to fight harder to prove it is alive. The internet fills with echoes and filler and derivative sludge and “good enough” becomes a very powerful economic category. Not because people are evil, necessarily. Mostly because people are tired, broke, distracted, overworked, and trying to get through their own day without conducting a philosophical inquiry into authorship.

They just want the thing.
Fast.
Cheap.
Now.

Which, honestly, has always been true.

This is where a lot of creative people get stuck, because the emotional script is messy. We want to say: people should care more. And yes, they should. We want to say: real art matters. Also yes. We want to say: the human hand, the human mind, the human history inside the work — that still means something. It does. I believe that with my whole annoying heart.

But then we run into the brutal boring fact that meaning and market value are not the same thing. Never were. A hand-thrown ceramic bowl made by a woman with thirty years of experience and tendon pain and a private cosmology of glaze colors can sit online next to a dropshipped fake-rustic bowl mass-produced in some grim warehouse, and a lot of buyers will choose based on thumbnail, price, and whether shipping is free.

That doesn’t mean the first bowl has no value. It means value is not self-enforcing. Human worth doesn’t automatically invoice itself.

Which is depressing, yes, but also clarifying.

Because once you stop clinging to the sweet little bedtime story that good work naturally floats to the top, you can start asking better questions. Not “why is the world unfair,” though by all means scream that into a towel once a week. I recommend it. I mean questions like:

What is the part of my work that cannot be mass-produced?
What is the actual experience people get from me?
What do they come for besides the product?
What texture, taste, perspective, humor, history, obsession, eye, mess, rhythm, conviction do I bring that a machine — or a lazy human using a machine — won’t?

That’s not just branding, by the way, though yes, branding lives nearby wearing black glasses and pretending not to care. It’s deeper than that. It’s the difference between content and presence. Between image output and sensibility. Between “a thing was generated” and “a mind was here.”

I think a lot of creative people are grieving because they secretly built their identity on skill alone. Which makes sense. Skill is tangible. Skill is noble. Skill is trainable. Skill feels fair. If I get good enough, I’ll be safe.

Except now a bunch of formerly rare skills are being flattened into utilities. Drafting. rendering. compositing. layout assistance. idea expansion. even mimicry, which a lot of people were accidentally treating as originality anyway. So the panic kicks in: if skill is no longer scarce, what am I?

Still you. Unfortunately. Still the same haunted goblin in a cardigan, making coffee and trying to turn perception into something useful before you die.

And I don’t mean that as a joke, not really. Because this is the pivot. The useful one. The one that hurts a little, because it means we have to stop treating creativity like a product pipeline and remember it is also a way of seeing.

The value was never only in the artifact. It was in the noticing. The angle. The pressure. The choice. The restraint. The bad childhood, the strange fixations, the thousands of half-conscious references, the way your eye moves across a room, the things you find embarrassing and the things you find sacred, the jokes you make when you’re cornered, the texture of your attention. That’s the real engine. Always was. The finished thing is just the fossil it leaves behind.

And yes, that sounds poetic, maybe a little too poetic, but I’m saying it because a lot of people need to hear it right now. If a machine can produce something visually competent or verbally adequate in two seconds, that does not erase what you are. It just means the floor moved. The bargain changed. The old shortcuts to being impressive don’t work the same way anymore.

Which sucks. I hate it. Some days I want to throw my laptop into the sea and go raise medicinal goats in a foggy village.

But on better days — the smarter days, the less dramatic days, the days when I’ve eaten protein and stopped reading comment sections — I think maybe this pressure is also revealing something important. A lot of fluff is going to die. A lot of fake expertise is going to get weirdly easier to spot. A lot of lazy middle-tier “content” is going to collapse under its own dead-eyed sameness. And the people who survive won’t necessarily be the most pure or the most talented or the most anti-tech.

They’ll be the ones who stay recognizable.

The ones with an actual point of view.
The ones who can build trust.
The ones whose taste still matters.
The ones who understand tools without kneeling before them.
The ones who can make work that feels inhabited.

That’s harder than just being skilled. More annoying, too. It means becoming legible as a person, not just a producer. It means saying what you actually think. It means making stronger choices. It means learning enough about business, packaging, discoverability, and audience that your work can survive in the open. It means admitting that marketing is not always corruption; sometimes it is simply translation. Sometimes it is how the right people find the work that was made for them.

Which is not as romantic as disappearing into the woods to make genius things in obscurity, I know. But most of us were never really choosing between purity and compromise. We were choosing between being seen and not being seen.

So yes, every creative person feels slightly obsolete right now. That feeling is real. I’m not going to slap a fake inspirational quote over it and tell you to pivot joyfully into the future. Some parts of this are genuinely brutal. Some careers will shrink. Some work will get devalued. Some doors will close. Some people who were already exhausted will decide it isn’t worth clawing for space anymore, and I don’t blame them.

But obsolete is not the same as useless.
Threatened is not the same as finished.
And common is not the same as meaningless.

If anything, the flood of synthetic everything may force the real thing to become more itself. Sharper. Stranger. More specific. More human. Less generic, less polite, less padded, less eager to sound like everyone else.

Which, frankly, was overdue.