Taste, Not Technology, Will Define Creative Work in the AI Era
Creative professionals who can judge quality will remain essential as AI tools become more capable, according to executives building AI systems for the entertainment industry. The real tension isn't between humans and machines-it's between creatives with discernment and those without it.
Caroline Ingeborn, chief operating officer at Luma AI, said the debate over AI's impact on creative work misses the point. "Good creatives are people with taste, they have great ideas and good taste," she said at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. "We're not trying to say AI will have taste. It's creative professionals with taste who can use AI to get what they want out of these models."
Ingeborn runs research at a startup focused on building AI models specifically for creators. The company's position reflects a broader argument from founders in creative tech: AI amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it.
Jon Snoddy, CEO of Operative Games, worked in R&D at Disney for eight years before starting a company that helps Hollywood screenwriters build AI-powered characters for interactive storytelling. He frames the issue plainly: "People don't pay money to see technology. People pay money to be emotionally moved."
That emotional connection-the ability to move an audience-depends on taste. It cannot be automated. Snoddy said the creative community's distrust of AI is justified. Most AI systems were trained on copyrighted work without permission or compensation.
"There's this sad notion that people believe that with AI, we're all Michelangelo, but we're not," Snoddy said. "For me it's about these tools amplifying human creativity."
The real scaling problem isn't technological, he added. It's trust. Rebuilding that trust requires acknowledging how the industry got here and what AI can actually do: help creatives execute their vision faster, not replace the vision itself.
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