At VivaTech, the show *Ma Vie Pro* posed a question that was less lighthearted than it seemed: What remains of the creator when AI can write, edit, dub, generate, translate, and speed up almost anything? The answer lies less in the tool than in the creator’s signature style.
Just a few years ago, content creators were happy to film themselves alone, facing the camera, in a bedroom turned into a studio. That image is already a thing of the past. Now, agents, editors, camera operators, miniaturists, salespeople, producers, accountants, and sometimes writers all revolve around them. Content creation is no longer just an individual endeavor—it’s a small business built on attention.
This shift changes everything. It dictates rhythms, economic models, and trade-offs. It also forces us to view creation not as a romantic gesture, but as a value chain. A video can start with a personal idea and, just a few weeks later, mobilize an entire team. It can retain an artisanal feel while becoming industrial in its organization.
It is amid this tension that AI enters the picture.
Not as an immediate replacement for the creator, but as a force for redistribution. It cuts out silences during editing, speeds up research, generates visual elements, prepares an interview, simulates narrative paths, and transforms an intuition into a prototype. It sometimes saves two hours of repetitive work. It sometimes opens a door that a lack of technical skills had kept closed.
But it raises a deeper question: if AI writes the introduction, proposes the structure, generates the image, edits the footage, translates the voiceover, and optimizes the thumbnail, where does that leave the author?
The most accurate answer isn’t found in rejection. It lies in hierarchy. AI can produce. It can assemble. It can suggest. It does not yet know how to desire in the place of a creator. It does not know why a clumsy moment moves us, why a silence works, why a community immediately senses that a face “has left the ground.” In the platform economy, closeness is not just window dressing: it is capital.
A creator who delegates everything loses more than just a task. He risks losing the essence of his presence. Conversely, one who rejects all tools risks confusing purity with stagnation. The most fruitful path lies between the two: using AI to streamline the mechanics, but never to dilute the creative vision.
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According to the Adobe Creators’ Toolkit Report 2025, 86% of the creators surveyed already use generative AI in their workflows. This figure signals less of a trend and more of a paradigm shift: AI is no longer just a novelty, but an everyday part of the production infrastructure.
This shift does not mean that creativity disappears. It means that it shifts focus. The value shifts from “doing it by hand” to choice, intention, assembly, and direction. The effort does not vanish; it simply becomes less visible. An AI-generated short film can take two weeks to get the pacing, humor, coherence, and accuracy right. The prompt is not the work of art. The work of art begins when the creator rejects nine out of ten results.
The risk, however, is real. Some professions will be more vulnerable than others. Voice-over work, translation, technical illustration, and certain post-production or visual adaptation tasks are already facing competition that never sleeps, never negotiates, and doesn’t charge like a human. Simply saying that “AI is just a tool” isn’t enough. A tool can displace a profession. A method can wipe out an entire industry.
The question, then, is not whether AI replaces creativity. It does not replace it. It replaces certain ways of producing, certain downtime, certain intermediate steps. It enhances the abilities of those who already know how to see. It undermines those whose value lay solely in execution.
In this new economy, the most successful creators will be those who can fulfill three roles at once: understanding the tools, preserving their own voice, and protecting their audience’s trust. The key skill will not just be “knowing how to use AI,” but knowing when not to use it.
Perhaps this is where the next frontier of creative work is taking shape—not between humans and machines, but between production and presence; between generated content and embodied content; between volume and signature.
AI can generate more images, sounds, and text than we could ever consume. In the future, perhaps the greatest luxury will simply be recognizing a hand.
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