5 Actions for Creators & Storytellers in the Age of AI
The future of film and storytelling is one of the most consequential questions of this moment, and it is receiving far less serious attention than it deserves. The entertainment industry is mid-disruption on multiple fronts simultaneously: economic models shifting, labour disputes that were really civilisational negotiations, barriers to creation collapsing at the bottom while IMAX cameras shoot three-thousand-year-old epics at the top. None of this is moving in neat, linear directions.
What makes this interesting is not the disruption itself. It is the pattern underneath it. Every time a new medium has arrived (cinema after theatre, television after cinema, streaming after both), the older form did not die. It clarified, and it became more purely itself. That pattern has held so consistently across history that it functions as a great predictive sign for what’s to come.
The questions below are for anyone thinking about where storytelling is going: as a creator, as a builder, as someone who leads an organisation that makes or uses content, or simply as someone who cares about what it means to be human in an era of significant technological change.
1. Study the Pixar frame before building or buying any creative AI tool
Pixar began as a technology company that made films to prove what its technology could do. Every film was an engineering problem in service of a story. Toy Story required the invention of rendering software that did not yet exist. Finding Nemo required simulating underwater light behaviour at a complexity the industry had never attempted. The goal was always the same: reduce the technical friction so the artist could do creative work at its highest level. That framing, where technology is in service of the artist, not as a replacement for the artist, is precisely what is missing from most current conversations about AI in creative fields.
Action: Before adopting, purchasing, or building any AI tool intended for creative work, run it through one clarifying question: does this make it easier for a skilled person to do the thing they are actually good at, or does it route around that skill entirely? Write that question on a sticky note and put it somewhere visible. The tools worth investing in are the ones that free up creative energy, not the ones that substitute for it.
2. Understand what AI can and cannot do in creative work, at a structural level
AI, at its current architecture, can recombine what already exists. It can do this with extraordinary technical proficiency. It can produce outputs that are stylistically coherent and statistically plausible given everything that has come before. What it cannot do is reach beyond the envelope of the known; access the state that the greatest artists describe when talking about where truly new work comes from. That is not a romantic claim, but it is a structural observation about how these systems are built and what they are actually doing.
Action: If you are working with AI in any creative capacity, spend thirty minutes this week mapping your creative process in rough stages. Mark each stage as either requiring genuine creative judgment or being procedural and repeatable. Then look honestly at where AI is currently sitting in that map. Is it handling the procedural stages? Or has it started moving into the stages that actually require your specific intelligence? That audit is worth doing before the boundary blurs further.
3. Look honestly at where gatekeepers still control your creative or distribution decisions
The history of entertainment is largely a history of gatekeeping; studios, networks, advertisers deciding what gets made and who gets to make it. Streaming appeared to break that model, and in some ways it did. But it is now moving back toward advertising-based economics, and platform consolidation is recreating new versions of the gatekeeping it originally disrupted. What the internet has changed is the possibility of going around the gatekeeper entirely, not fighting them, but building a direct relationship with an audience. That structural shift is still underway, and most people and organisations have not fully mapped how it applies to them.
Action: Map your current creative or content distribution pathway and mark every point where someone else controls whether your work reaches its audience. Then identify one step where you could build a more direct relationship: a newsletter, a community, a body of work on a platform you own or substantially control. It does not need to replace the existing pathway. It needs to exist alongside it.
4. Post the thing that is yours, not the thing you think will perform
Vincent Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. The impact of creative work does not always arrive on the timeline of the creator, and optimising for immediate reception is a reliable way to sand off the exact edges that make work worth keeping. The compulsion to make something and find somewhere to put it is not a modern phenomenon; it is one of the oldest human drives. And the tools we have available now are extraordinary. A teenager with a phone and a good idea can reach a global audience with production values that, a decade ago, required a professional crew. That is not a small shift. It is one of those structural changes that looks incremental until, suddenly, it is not.
Action: Identify one piece of creative work, a short film, an essay, a recording, a photograph series, a written piece, that you have been holding back because it feels too specific, too strange, or not ready enough. Set a date this week to publish it somewhere, even somewhere small. No expectations attached. The audience that needs it may be one person. That one person may be the person who needed it most.
5. Pay attention to what science fiction is saying about the future right now
Science fiction has always functioned as a rehearsal space. The stories a culture tells about what is coming are not neutral; they shape what gets imagined as possible, what gets funded, what gets built. The scientists and engineers who built the technologies that define the current era frequently cite specific films and books as the things that made them believe the work was worth doing. Science fiction does not just reflect the future. It participates in creating it. The stories being made now about consciousness, human potential, and what it means to be alive in this particular moment are genuinely shaping the future being built.
Action: Pick one recent film, series, or novel that is engaging seriously with where technology and humanity are heading; not fear-based, not utopian, but genuinely thinking through the territory. Read or watch it this month, and afterwards spend twenty minutes writing down what it assumed about the future. Not what happened in the plot. What the story took for granted. What its background assumptions were. That gap between stated narrative and embedded assumption is where the most interesting signals live.
The Journey Ahead
The entertainment industry's current disruption is not a story about technology defeating incumbents. It is a story about what happens when distribution decentralises and community becomes the real asset. The organisations and creators navigating this well are the ones who have built true audiences, people who care about them as a creative entity with a voice and a perspective, not simply as a content source.
The deeper question, though, is not about economics or platform strategy. It is about what storytelling is actually for at a civilisational level. A culture moving faster than it can integrate (technologically, socially, ecologically) uses narrative to make sense of itself. The stories being told right now are doing that work whether or not the people making them are aware of it.
The compulsion to make something, to find somewhere to put a story, to reach another person through the experience of a shared narrative, that has not changed since the dawn of time. And with technology continuously evolving, that human truth is not going to change now.
We dive deeper into the future of movies in this week’s podcast episode: