4 AI Trends That Have Helped the Creator Economy (and How to Take Advantage) Creators are using AI to make their jobs easier and more productive. You can too.
By Lucas Miller
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AI has come to dominate online conversations — especially when it comes to its impact on content creators. This includes both negative and positive viewpoints.
In reality, the introduction of AI tools serves as a way to significantly boost the creator economy, streamlining work and helping creators increase their earning potential like never before.
By understanding the trends that are currently giving the creator economy a jump-start, you can identify opportunities to take advantage of these tools in your own work.
1. Conceptualization
AI may not always have the capability to generate content that is ready for audiences — as many humorous examples from across the web reveal. But while its output is often imperfect, one area where it has given creators a significant boost is in the ideation and conceptualization phase.
AI offers a powerful advantage because it can quickly generate image mockups, taglines, product names and more — all derived from human inputs. This helps creators fine-tune their ideas, serving as a launchpad for their own work.
This can be especially helpful for creators collaborating with clients. Some production companies even use AI to generate concept pieces to establish a clear vision for a project with a client. While the final pieces are still completed by human artists, using AI to help establish the tone and direction for a project can save a lot of time by allowing clients to fine-tune the vision of what they want.
Related: How AI Can Help Small Businesses Do More in Less Time
2. Building a rough draft
In many use cases, AI can go beyond mere idea generation and provide a usable rough draft that a human creator can then polish and perfect.
For example, the average writer spends about 75% of their writing time working on a first draft — content that is usually far from perfect and requires a fair amount of editing before it can be published.
With generative AI, writers can get much-needed help in creating that rough draft by providing an outline and basic talking points. By using AI to produce the so-called "rough draft," writers can quickly move on to the next phase of the work — fine-tuning and editing the writing for flow, voice and other important qualities. By using AI to provide a baseline, many creators are able to dramatically speed up their creative process.
By one estimate, writers who use AI to help in their process spend roughly 33% less time writing their posts in comparison to other writers. By streamlining and speeding up the creative process, writers can become more efficient and better monetize their work than in the past.
3. Editing and optimization
Another trending use for generative AI is in what could be described as the "editing and optimization" phase of content creation. For example, AI can be used to streamline the process of removing unwanted objects from the background of a video. Or it can be used to help pair the right background with a piece of visual content in the first place.
A Lightricks survey of 1,000 content creators showed that 53% of respondents use AI for photo backgrounds, followed by 47% who used AI for video backgrounds. In such use cases, AI isn't being used to create the focal point of the content. Rather, it is being used to fine-tune and optimize the content that a creator has made, and it is doing so in a streamlined manner that is much less time-consuming than it would otherwise be.
The increased efficiency that can come from using AI in the editing process is perhaps part of why 38% of creators in the survey reported that they expect to command higher pay rates as a result of using AI.
Related: How AI is Changing the Future of Personal Branding
4. AI as an assistant
Each of these current use trends can help creators save time and money as they work on projects for building their own personal brand — or on collaborations with clients. However, it's worth noting that AI is poised to also help creators with tasks beyond streamlining their creative processes.
Bill Gates sees AI as eventually being able to serve as "personal agents" that help improve productivity.
"It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read and read the things you don't want to bother with," Gates says. "This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don't want to do. You'll be able to use natural language to have this agent help you with scheduling, communications and e-commerce, and it will work across all your devices."
While this full-scale personal assistant is still a ways off, it's one more way that AI can offer yet another way for creators to focus on what matters most.
Taking advantage of current (and future) AI is a must
As these examples reveal, generative AI is poised to streamline a wide range of activities for creators, but it can never fully replace a human touch. Even in use cases where AI is tasked to create an "end product" ad, it is still reliant on input from living, breathing people.
What each of these examples highlights, however, is how generative AI is poised to provide a powerful boost to the creator economy. As AI helps creators shore up their individual weaknesses or simply work more effectively, they will be able to produce higher-quality work than ever before.
