Hello, readers. Thanks for your patience with me lately—cold season is upon us and I’ve been under the weather, behind on my writing. But luckily, that also means soup season is here, too, and along with some minestrone from Cooking with Vegetables, I’ve been cooking up a nice array of topics to share with you over the last few weeks of the year.

Week before last, I spent three days in LA attending Adobe MAX with a front-and-center view of their latest capabilities… and while in town, hosted the second On Brand × Capsule meetup! 🪡 I loved meeting ~brand people~ from Microsoft, TikTok, Intuit, and more, plus some of my Substack heroes: ICYMI by Lia Haberman and Silence, Brand! NYC in H1, anyone?? 🚕

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Can you guess which keynote announcement got the biggest applause at Adobe MAX? Some of the loudest cheers from 10,000+ attendees were not for text-to-image generation or AI video creation. They were for… bulk layer renaming! Followed closely by drag to auto-adjust kerning and text size, and bulk culling in Lightroom—AI features Adobe calls “quality of life” improvements; unglamorous workflow stuff that makes a creative professional’s day-to-day less painful.

I was there with a press pass on behalf of On Brand (still pinching myself about that 😁), and my time at and around the conference helped crystallize something I’ve been thinking about for a while: the disconnect between what’s being marketed as “the future of creativity” and what will really help creative and brand teams uplevel.

The exec push to “do it with AI”

Because here’s what happens: Some CMO watches Adobe’s keynote, sees infinite content generation from text prompts, and immediately envisions cutting their creative budget in half. “Why do a custom photoshoot when we can just have AI generate it?!” They jump on a Zoom call with their creative director and push for AI everything, legitimately believing they’re driving innovation (never mind barely educating themselves about AI’s actual abilities and limitations).

Meanwhile, their creative team is spending 60% of their time on layer management, file organization, and reformatting assets for the 47th CEO-mandated homepage redesign this quarter. They don’t need infinite content generation (where accuracy and control has so far been unreliable)—they need their lunch break back.

The seduction is real. These demos can be mind-blowing. Adobe and others are selling a vision where anyone can create anything instantly, where creativity is “democratized.” It’s a powerful narrative. But while executives are being sold on the sizzle (infinite content! no photographers needed! no T&E!), I’m not sure we’re doing justice to what’s more transformative. Your team spending 40% less time on the rote tasks AI is best at means 40% more time on strategy and craft that moves the business.

We need to understand gen AI’s time and place.

A “save or splurge” mindset for creative assets

I offer you the wisdom that fashion mags have espoused for decades. We all remember those articles about what to spend your money on when you shop—“save” on cheap t-shirts and socks and lip balm, “splurge” on really nice jeans and timeless leather boots and a great bag. You can debate what goes into either category based on what you care about most, but the idea is that you invest more or less into things based on how much you’ll use them and how important they are. Put into terms of creative assets:

“Splurge” on people-powered creativity for:

• Hero campaign imagery that will define your brand for the next year

• Product shots that become core brand assets

• Leadership, team, & customer photography (please no AI headshots)

• Any content where authenticity IS the value prop (i.e. if you’re selling a skincare product, you need to show real skin; if you’re championing small businesses, photograph real small business owners)

• Cultural moments that require genuine human perspective and nuance

• Photography that captures behind-the-scenes content, talent/influencer relationships, in-person experiences

“Save” with AI for:

• Social media/blog/display ad templates and size variations

• Background extensions, variations/iterations, different angles for different format requirements (e.g. Adobe’s Vary and Turntable features) or for A/B testing

• Placeholder content for mockups and internal pitches (though tread with caution so stakeholders don’t get attached where you don’t want them to)

• Certain B-roll or filler content that supports but doesn’t lead

There seems to be a marketing/user disconnect here. The marketing hypes all the amazing ways to create by typing a few words; people clap the most for layer cleanup. Workflow friction is more of a pain point for creators than a creativity deficit. They need AI to handle the tedious mechanics that eat up their actual creative time.

Marketing spectacular generative capabilities is what looks revolutionary in demos and drives investor excitement, but what actually revolutionizes creative work is removing the thousand paper cuts that make professionals spend more of their time on admin instead of creation. Is the transformative vision being pushed across the industry—infinite content generation—solving a problem people don’t have?

I think Adobe gets this for the most part, though only time will tell. The workflow improvements show they understand what professionals need today, while the generative features are laying groundwork for an expected (or at least hoped for) step up in model output capabilities. That the less helpful generative features get more attention isn’t Adobe’s fault—it’s that the market (executives, investors, media) gravitates toward the flashier story.

Further musings about our AI future

And then there’s an even bigger debate I keep having with myself. What moral responsibility should brands take for their products? What do brands owe us when they build reality-altering tools?

Adobe talks about “democratizing creativity” (which they want to do at “massive scale.”) That sounds like a positive vision, but what democratization seems to mean in practice is less friction—making it easy for anyone, anywhere, to create virtually any image. Anyone can now produce “professional” content without the years of training or the expensive equipment (or even the basic understanding of things like composition or color theory).

Plenty of reassuring language accompanies this: “transparently trained” and “commercially safe.” Adobe founded the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), they have ethics reviews; this is not Juul marketing to kids. But when you’re building tools that can fabricate reality at scale, is “commercially safe” enough? To be clear, this isn’t an Adobe thing—I actually think they’ve gone farther than most of the market and are continuing to innovate and deliver what their audience actually wants/needs. Meta, Canva, Midjourney, and many more bear the same responsibility to humans (or even humanity). Will they step up? Signs point to no, but I’ll remain optimistic.

While the way this tech gets used will mostly be innocent, it’s part of the same blurring of reality and credibility we’re seeing everywhere—podcasters dispensing health advice without any official credentials, Instagram news accounts and Substack writers indistinguishable from trained journalists, etc. The question isn’t whether generative tools CAN create misinformation—they can. It’s not even whether most users will use them ethically—most generally will (depending on your definition of ethical). What I wonder more is: Should any company be mass-distributing reality-manipulation tools without equivalent (or even outsized) investment in education, detection, safety guardrails and enforcement? Especially when it’s obvious that regulation or research can’t keep pace with product innovation, and there are no established norms for what interaction is societally healthy and acceptable? NYT is reporting on people’s long-term romantic relationships with AI chatbots. Character.ai (chatbots) just banned users under 18 (following really horribly sad teen suicides—making it a more reactive move than a proactive one). Will we see age limits on generative tools at some point, too? And what about the idea of “democratization” vs. gatekeeping—should there be more barriers to entry?

I wonder this because in some ways, Adobe’s been here before. We’re not so far from the Photoshop era that sparked Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign in the 2000s and a whole slew of similar marketing with “no retouching” disclaimers. We spent two decades fighting the beauty standards that Photoshop enabled. This time it’s more than beauty standards up for manipulation.

I’m trying not to go too far down the doom and gloom rabbit hole because these tools are here, and here to stay (barring some extreme government intervention, which would be surprising though not perhaps not unwelcome). What we as brand leaders CAN do is step up to create the norms for how and when they get used. As consumers, we can demand the standards we want in place. I listed “education” first up above because that’s where we marketers and brand leaders have the most opportunity (and dare I say, amid the bleakness, room to have fun?! Let’s bring on the Schoolhouse Rock era around AI education. What would Mr. Rogers say about it?).

Or through the business lens: For every dollar your org spends on generative capabilities, how much are you investing in workflow optimization (aka fixing the actual problems your customers face)?

We owe it to our audiences and each other; not just “commercially safe” content but thoughtful use of tools that have both great potential for harm as well as beauty. The brands we can trust are the ones that are transparent about their use of AI and uphold clear standards for when human creativity is non-negotiable.

Adobe says “the future belongs to those who create.” I completely agree. But smart brands need to recognize that when everyone can create anything instantly, competitive advantage doesn’t come from volume—it comes from taste, strategy, and knowing when to use which tool. 🛍️

Thanks for reading.

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