Inside the creator economy’s AI reckoning
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Few phenomena within the creator economy have moved as fast as AI’s embrace. What was once treated with anxious suspicion is now more widely viewed as a necessary strategy. Last year, according to Kameron Buckner, founder of Social Docket, which helps creators navigate the legal implications of their work, the conversation around AI was defined by dread. This year, she says, the tone has shifted from fear to leverage — less “this thing is going to take over” and more how do we actually use it. I spent the last several weeks talking to Buckner and others closest to this shift: top creators, consultants, founders, and social media strategists. Unsurprisingly, those who returned from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year said AI was a centerpiece of the discourse. But across the board, I sensed no real fear. Everyone I spoke to is using AI. Some more than others, some with discernment, others with keen enthusiasm. What’s certain is that AI has brought new questions to an industry built on areas like increasing productivity, monetizing creativity, and protecting IP. The bottom line: using it wisely is the difference between staying ahead of the curve and getting drowned out by it. “AI is like a calculator,” says Taylor. “Just because I have a TI-89 doesn’t mean I’m going to get the right answer. I still need to put the right inputs into the calculator.” Alicia Richardson, head of community and brand partnerships at FiveTwoNine and the founder of Black Create Connect, shares this sentiment. “It can enhance your creativity,” she says. “It doesn’t create your creativity. When it comes to raw, creator-led work specifically, she doesn’t think AI is ever going to take over, because audiences connect to people, not outputs. Buckner tells her clients to think of AI less like a finished product and more like a running start. “Why start from a blank sheet of paper when you can start from an outline?” she says. In her own daily practice, prompting AI well has made her a better manager of actual human beings, because it forces her to get precise about what she wants before she asks for it. She applies that same instinct to her own visibility as a founder, using HubSpot’s AEO tool to check whether Social Docket shows up when someone searches for creator contract tools. Gigi Robinson, a content creator and founder of the social media consulting business Hosts of Influence, works with her team to feed 15-plus minutes of raw footage into AI video tools to get a rough cut before a human editor touches it. The software finds the “book-worthy” moments, but a person still decides what makes the final edit. The payoff shows up in her numbers, too: Robinson estimates AI saves her more than 10 hours a week and has driven a 20%-plus increase in her income. No matter how efficient these tools become, Buckner emphasizes, they’re not replacing what actually makes someone worth hiring. “I don’t think any of these tools are going to substantially replace depth of knowledge and expertise,” she says. If AI hasn’t caught up to human expertise, the law hasn’t caught up to AI. “Law is so far behind, it’s never going to be able to catch up to the speed of technology,” says Buckner. “We’re still citing cases from like 1963.” With many rules still unwritten, brands have started pushing the boundaries of what they can ask for. Buckner has started seeing a new kind of clause — brands willing to let creators use AI, on the condition that the creators hand over access to their prompts and processes. Her response is clear: “Immediately, no. That’s unnecessary access.” In her view, the prompting process, not just the finished post or video, is where a creator’s actual thinking lives. Handing it over gives a brand insight into a creator’s mind that has nothing to do with the deliverable they paid for. Regardless of whether the law formally recognizes it yet, she suggests creators establish their own boundaries. Gamble has seen the inverse version of this play out in creator contracts: brands banning AI use outright. One clause he recently encountered required that a creator not use any AI software, tools, or technologies without the brand’s prior written consent. He predicted that creators, not just brands, would eventually start writing their own AI-use clauses into agreements, protecting how their content and voice can be repurposed by brands using AI, not just the other way around. Annie-Mai Hodge, founder of Girl Power Marketing (and also a HubSpot partner), sees a different platform-specific contradiction playing out. Social platforms are pushing AI tools directly into creators’ dashboards, she says, while simultaneously penalizing the content those same tools produce. “We are stuck in this incredibly frustrating paradox where platforms demand AI adoption but punish the output,” says Hodge. The result, she argues, is creators who are either too nervous to experiment with the tools they’re being handed, or too afraid to admit they already have. Robinson has witnessed what happens when creators rely on AI without fully understanding the fine print. She points to a creator who partnered with one brand, then posted content for a direct competitor just two weeks later. That fell well within the exclusivity window most brand deals require — something Robinson knows firsthand from her own partnerships with the same agency.
Source: HubSpot
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