"Anyone can use it" is platform PR

The way AI is marketed is making everyone's job harder. The pitch from the platforms is democratization. And in a technical sense anyone can generate something. But that doesn’t make it usable.

What the platforms don't advertise is the output gap: the difference between a trained creative using AI and an untrained one is enormous. The tools amplify this gap, rather than closing it. Bad taste plus infinite generation equals infinite bad output.

The "is it human-made?" debate is increasingly irrelevant

Whether something is human-made is becoming impossible to answer - and less important by the day. Photography wasn’t “pure” once darkrooms existed. Photoshop didn’t kill creativity; it redefined it. The same happened with CGI. The real question is: is there a human perspective in the work? Curating outputs to match a vision is authorship. Generating at scale with no judgment, no taste, no point of view - that’s automation.

What actually needs regulation is something else: synthetic humans. Influencers who don’t exist, selling to audiences who don’t know they’re not real. That’s a clear line.

The rise of AI actually makes training juniors more important

If AI can do what juniors do, why hire juniors? It’s a clean spreadsheet argument. But also a slow-motion collapse of the industry's talent pipeline.

Juniors are where taste gets built. Every senior in that room got there by making bad work, getting feedback, and improving. Remove that layer, and you don’t get more efficiency. You get a future with no one qualified to lead. And no one to make standout work. Agencies -but also clients- have a moral obligation to hire juniors, train them and give them access to the right tools.

The distance between making and measuring has collapsed

For years, creative agencies outsourced accountability to the media. But if a campaign underperforms, creative gets blamed - even when the metrics were never designed to measure what good creative does. The algorithm surfaces the cheapest result, not the most effective one and good work gets buried because nobody built the case.

AI offers the opportunity to change that. It turns data from reporting into feedback. We can now see where attention drops, what drives action, what actually works at the speed of creation. But only if creatives stop treating data as someone else’s problem.

The real challenge will be to get great work seen

In a few years, everyone will use AI, and no one will mention it. The market will be flooded with good-enough work. The sea of sameness will be deeper than ever. The challenge won’t be making something decent. It will be making something impossible to ignore. There will be a stubborn group of people with a genuine point of view, a signature nobody can prompt-engineer, and the confidence to make clients come to them on their terms. Their work doesn't just have to be better - it has to be loud enough to exist in a landscape designed to bury it.

Breakfast with the Machine was organized by SuperHeroes Amsterdam. The conversation included 15 leaders across AI, creativity, strategy, and technology. This is the first in a series. AI moves fast, and the people navigating it need space to openly discuss the challenges they face, the opportunities they see, and the decisions they’re weighing. If you'd like to be part of a future session, we'd love to hear from you: airmail@hellosuperheroes.com.