The AI Deluge: What It Means for Independent Creators

Hey everyone! Wanted to start a discussion about something that's been on my mind lately. AI is absolutely everywhere now, and it's wild how we went from almost nothing to this complete monsoon of AI in just a couple years. The Good, Bad, and Ugly We've seen some major fails recently. Remember that Coca-Cola holiday ad? Instead of paying actual artists, videographers, and designers, they went the cheap AI route. The result was terrible - six-fingered people, mangled logos, misspelled words. People were rightfully furious. Same thing happened with Disney's Secret Invasion opening. Like, you're Disney. You can afford real artists! The Arms Race Artists are fighting back with "poison pills" to mess with AI scrapers, but AI is getting smart enough to detect and bypass them. It's becoming this endless back-and-forth that's eating up more time than actual creating. Shoutout to platforms like Cara that are standing up for human artists and actually blocking AI-generated content. Finding Balance Here's where I might get some hate, but I'll be honest about my AI use. I write my articles first, then use AI to clean up grammar and structure before going back to edit and make sure it's still "me." For transcripts and subtitles, AI saves me hours of work I literally don't have. I still create all my thumbnails and content myself. The key is using AI as a tool to enhance human work, not replace it. The DeepSeek Disruption That Chinese company just proved you can do what ChatGPT does for way less money. Watching the stock market crash and recover in days was wild. Really showed how inflated this whole AI bubble might be. Bottom Line AI isn't going anywhere. The genie's out of the bottle. Instead of treating it like a boogeyman, we need to figure out how to work with it while protecting human creativity. What are your thoughts? Are you using AI in your creative process? Completely against it? Let's discuss!