AI: Are We Gambling With Creativity?

AI is the most exciting and dangerous tool the creative industry has adopted in years. But as we rush toward speed, shortcuts, and instant visuals, we risk losing what sets great branding apart: ideas that are original, culturally aware, and disruptive.

Our Executive Creative Director, David Beare, explores how AI’s “slot machine effect” is reshaping creative habits. He discusses why it threatens the ideation process and how agencies can use AI with intent rather than impulse.

Speed Is Becoming the Standard - and the Threat

We live in an on-demand world. Food arrives in minutes. Whole box sets stream in an evening. Patience has evaporated. Our industry is slipping along with it. Sprints, agile methodologies, and a belief that speed is king dominate the rhythm of creative work.

Walk into any studio, and you’ll feel it. Screens glow. Prompts fire. Entire creative territories appear in seconds. It looks like progress. But notice how often the work starts with a prompt rather than a point of view.

According to research from It’s Nice That, 83% of creatives already use AI tools, yet few have paused to ask whether the speed these tools promise is serving the work, or simply accelerating the churn.

The Slot Machine Effect

Right now, we’re using AI like a slot machine: type the prompt, pull the lever, wait for the grid of near-misses. One looks promising, so you tweak the words. Another spin, another nudge, another credit, another dopamine hit. Before long, an afternoon is gone chasing the “jackpot” image, and the real thinking hasn’t even begun.

This isn’t just a metaphor; it’s neuroscience. Variable reward schedules, the unpredictable pattern of wins and near-misses, are among the most powerful dopamine triggers known in behavioural psychology.

Research in Addictive Behaviors shows that unpredictable rewards can make ordinary digital tools behave like addictive triggers. A 2023 JAMA Pediatrics study went further: teens who checked social media on repeat weren’t simply chasing micro-hits; their brains were recalibrating. Dopamine-responsive regions linked to social reward became more sensitive with each round of checking.

AI tools engineer this same mechanism into the workflow, delivering a rush of visual gratification every time something half-decent appears. The danger is confusing the thrill of a beautiful render with the satisfaction of cracking a powerful idea.

What Disappears When We Skip Ideation

These moments raise the question: will AI “take our jobs,” or are we weakening the part of the job only humans can do?

The concern is real. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 lists graphic design as the 11th-fastest-declining job category globally. This is a dramatic reversal from its previous growth. Meanwhile, research in Science Advances found that AI-generated content can boost individual creativity. However, it reduces collective diversity of creative output, pushing work toward a comfortable, forgettable middle.

The creative process is uncomfortable by design. Great ideas sit in the awkward space where nothing looks finished yet. Cognitive psychology and innovation theory show that the most successful ideas balance novelty and familiarity. Researchers call this phenomenon “optimal distinctiveness.”

Research from PNAS Nexus found that creative associations emerge when people regulate the tension between exploring the new and exploiting the familiar. Too familiar, and your brand becomes category wallpaper. Too novel, and consumers can’t connect. Hitting that sweet spot requires time, cultural immersion, and the messy synthesis of lived experience, not prompt engineering.

AI is brilliant at volume. But without human intent, it converges toward the internet’s average. If we skip the messy human ideation phase and jump straight to machine-made pictures, we’re betting our projects on a remix of what already exists. We stop mining our own perspectives and start decorating briefs with things that just look about right.

Fear, Context, and Why This Time Feels Different

Inside agencies, the tension is palpable. Will AI deskill the craft? Will everything start to look the same?

But it’s worth asking: why does AI feel more threatening than past technological shifts?

Part of the answer is timing. AI is arriving in a moment marked by economic uncertainty, political instability, and cultural fragmentation. The rhetoric around it skews negative because the world itself feels precarious.

Compare that with the 1990s internet boom. Optimism was higher then. The web was met with excitement and possibility, even though it ultimately reshaped how we work, communicate, and think. AI will likely do the same. But now, we’re experiencing it through a lens of anxiety rather than wonder.

That doesn’t mean the risk isn’t real. It means our response needs to be shaped by intention, not panic.

At a recent Bulletproof workshop, the answer wasn’t to retreat from AI. Instead, we actively rebelled against its defaults. We framed AI as a sandpit, a space to experiment and push the tech until it breaks. There, we learn exactly where it adds value versus where it quietly makes us lazy.

This shifts the narrative from “AI is coming for us” to “AI is something we can interrogate, challenge, and shape on our terms.”

From Slot Machine to Scalpel

Used with intent, AI isn’t a threat to ideation; it’s a way to reclaim time for it.

The slot machine mindset chases novelty for novelty’s sake.

The scalpel mindset uses AI with precision. It sharpens or pressure-tests an already strong creative thought.

In branding, this means using AI to:

1. Rapidly mock up directions once a core idea is in place.
2. Visualise “no-go” routes early to kill clichés fast.
3. Generate alternative executions to stress-test ideas across markets and cultures.

The rule is simple: the idea leads, the technology follows.

A Creative AI Manifesto

To keep the industry from gambling away its edge, we need clearer rules:

1. Human first, tool second: Every project starts with culture and the problem, not a prompt box.
2. Delay the dopamine: No visuals until the strategy holds water. Let thinking shape the idea before AI gets a say.
3. Use AI to kill clichés: If AI instantly guesses your idea, push further.
4. Design for desire, not just delivery. Judge outputs by whether they create new behaviours and cultural resonance, not just speed or polish.
5. Protect the craft: Keep space for sketching, writing, debating, without a machine in the room.
   
   

The Bet We’re Making

AI won’t decide whether the industry wins or loses this bet. We will.

If we let AI do our thinking, brands risk becoming generic and forgettable. But when we direct AI to support and accelerate strong human ideas, we shape the industry’s future rather than passively adapting to it.

At Bulletproof, we’re not treating AI like some inevitable future we have to adapt to; we’re pushing it, bending it, and using it to create the friction that sparks desire through disruption. Tech alone won’t save bland ideas. The work that actually cuts through still demands human instinct, cultural nerve, and the courage to disrupt.

That’s the bet worth making.

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