I've been using AI writing and design tools regularly for about a year now, in a creative capacity rather than a purely technical one, and I have some honest observations that I think are more useful than either the enthusiastic early adopter takes or the defensive "it will ruin creativity" counter-takes that dominate most discussions about this.
What genuinely helps: getting past blank page paralysis. When I'm stuck on how to begin something — a piece of writing, a visual concept, a structural approach to a project — having something generated to react to is meaningfully different from staring at nothing. Reacting, editing, redirecting is easier than originating, and AI tools are genuinely useful at providing something to react to quickly.
What doesn't help: anything requiring genuine specificity, nuance, or originality that draws on actual lived experience or deep domain knowledge. The output is recognisably generic in a way that requires significant editing to become specifically useful, and the editing takes time that sometimes exceeds what starting from scratch would have cost.
The honest assessment is that AI tools are productivity aids with real limitations rather than creativity replacements — which is probably what most thoughtful people already suspected. Technology trends around AI and creative tools are moving quickly enough that this assessment will need revisiting periodically as the tools themselves change.
Where I find the intersection most interesting is in design and visual content specifically, where AI tools have genuinely compressed timelines for producing initial concepts without compressing the judgment required to select, refine, and direct what gets used. The judgment is still human work; some of the generation is now faster.
The broader entertainment and media landscape implications of these tools — what happens to creative industries as generation becomes cheap — is a genuinely complicated question that I don't think anyone is answering with appropriate uncertainty yet. Forming your own view through informed reading about technology development rather than adopting either the hype or the fear wholesale seems like the most defensible position right now.
