Yep. This is my 100th Substack. Pretty crazy to realize that I’ve written over 100K words on this platform. I really appreciate everyone who’s been on this ride whether you’ve been here since Day 1 or you’re just joining my little corner now. I do this because I enjoy it and as a writer it keeps me writing in a public forum no matter what, week in and week out. Life is about the promises we make ourselves and how we keep them: from making the bed every morning or doing a daily journal to going to the gym or taking hikes every week. Whatever it is to keep ourselves mentally and physically healthy we need to maintain it in our routine. Consistency is key as are the fundamentals to building on our every day life. The most important goal we can strive for is finding peace within and without: the door we knock on and the knock returned. The equal exchange of action and reaction. Which brings me to today’s exploration on this idea that creativity will be democratized by technology.
I am someone who has directly benefited from the creation of new technologies that lowered the price point for artistic entry. Filmmaking has always been a relatively expensive business across the board with cameras and editing software running artists in the thousands to hundreds of thousands. To learn from experience was a challenge and it’s why schools like USC and Temple have incredible film programs where students could not only study the craft but also get access to all the very expensive gear. The advent of digital filmmaking helped usher in a prosumer era that was further legitimatized by editors like Walter Murch who cut the first feature on Final Cut Pro (Cold Mountain) and directors such as Lars Von Trier who co-founded the Dogme 95 initiative which later just was called dogma filmmaking (1998-2005). I was able to (sort of) join this movement as a documentary filmmaker when I got my first camera and editing software in 1999: a single-chip Sony mini-DV camera and an FCP 1 system with a 30GB external hard drive for my G3 Mac Tower. It felt very democratizing knowing that I, too, could be a filmmaker at 19 years old.
This continued advancement in technology began to drift into the world of VFX as well with Adobe After Effects giving a whole new generation the tools needed to make their very own Star Wars or Jurassic Park. And with Macromedia’s Flash Animator we saw the birth of South Park as Jesus and Santa Claus went toe-to-toe. There was so much incredible creative energy coming out of the turn of the millennium with the birth of the internet, but it was not something that ultimately destroyed the Hollywood as we know it. From it a new crop of storytellers emerged, including Trey Parker and Matt Stone who fully leaned into the new technology, and continue to do so as they make episodes that are able to be produced both cheaply and efficiently. To think this all came from their irreverent short that stormed the internet in 1992.
Now, in 2025, we are being told that AI will completely “democratize” creativity and give everyone the opportunity to be a “creator.” It’s a tasty sales pitch that’s for sure. Right now we have a “creator economy” that is being driven by social media and with the push of generative AI we are seeing more and more slop being thrown out onto YouTube every minute. So much so that YouTube had to put a ban on any AI generated content receiving any ad revenue. I saw on LinkedIn the other day a creator who has a series called “Silly Crocodile” posting about how many AI pages had completely ripped off his character, creating a myriad of knock-offs that were absolute garbage. Here’s a guy who’s built an entire ecosystem and channel around his creation only to get his viewership skewered by cheap rip-offs. This isn’t democratizing creativity but giving rise to a whole new bunch of mimics who copycat trends then ride the wave until they kill it. This has always happened in every market, but now with imitation so easily achieved the life cycles for trends will be much shorter. Maybe it’s a good thing? But sadly a lot of real creators may get buried in the tsunami.
Democratization in this sense is a fallacy as anyone who has a cell phone can shoot a 4K video, edit it, and then upload it to YouTube. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be great or build an audience, but your ability to create something and distribute it has been “democratized” by technology. Systems like Unreal and Unity further “democratized” creativity when they gave open access to their tool suite and engine for video game creation (and filmmaking in the case of Unreal.) This opened up so many opportunities for indie studios or solos to sell their games on platforms like Steam. Between YouTube and Steam, creators have been given incredible ways to get their stories and games out into the world. As mentioned before, the current state of AI has only muddied those waters…not democratizing anything.
That said, even using genAI to create images or text for your story still means you need to know how to tell a great story. Just this past week I wrapped up a wonderful project for a client where we trained a LoRA for both a specific style as well as our main character. The visuals for the story were first drawn in layouts by Omar Francia, a comic book artist I’ve worked with on many projects, and then handed off to Tillavision for the AI creation. Each image was developed through a process that included several steps besides the generative one in order to achieve the final result. Then these final images went through a post-processing to glue the style together. It is not just a “press play” system to achieve an exact vision at a professional level. For my son who wants to see Pinhead fighting Elmo that’s one thing…but for those of us who are delivering a product for a client it’s an entirely different scenario.
One thing I will say that has been indispensable with the current state of AI is rapid prototyping. This is where I feel our current state of technology holds the most value. Communicating an idea can be challenging when having to sell it to a client or even your own team. When I work on my Marvel books I always use a mixture of Pinterest and Google images to help me curate a style guide in order to better communicate the vision. I pull all the images together and then build them into a deck to share with the team. Honestly, I do this on all my projects. But sometimes you can’t find an exact image or style that really gets across the tone or vibe. This is where you could use an image generator like Midjourney to perhaps blend together a couple images in order to share a new direction. Or if you’re looking to mock up a score for a piece of media a program like Suno can easily spin up a style that can be built into a temp track before bringing on a composer. I would do this all the time when editing films, but I was pulling tracks from a library, not using AI. Even when it comes to working with programs like Twine where you can build out your own Choose Your Own Adventures, LLMs like Claude or Grok can quickly help build out the framework for the story with all the necessary code.
Right now more than ever we need great technology communicators helping to cut through the noise to guide the next generation in the right direction. I find that there is far too polarized a conversation still happening where it’s either a bunch of AI maxis, many of whom have never worked in the entertainment industry, versus a slew of “never AI” artists, who at some point will have to adapt or be trampled. It’s similar to when digital video came about and now there isn’t a movie that isn’t being shot digitally. Back then I remember voraciously reading the ASC’s magazine, American Cinematographer, and this same conversation was happening between the “forever film” folks and the DVCAM dogme artists. No matter what way you slice it, these new technologies will become a part of our every day creative process in our professional lives.
When I bought my first digital camera and FCP system I was able to get a shot to break into the entertainment business. I realize that we’re now at a similar juncture where there is a major shift in the tools being built. But for anyone who’s looking to be a cut above the rest and not get stomped by the oncoming stampede, it’s time to really focus on discovering your voice while having a distinct point of view that is not driven by the usual viral vitriol spewed from hatred, fear, and ignorance in order to garner attention. This will be your superpower…and the true power you have in “democratizing” your creativity.