The Kidlat Creative Festival 2026, held Friday, September 4 at the PNB The Grand Atrium in Pasay City, brought together creatives, industry leaders, and storytellers to confront a question that has become unavoidable: what happens to creativity when machines can produce almost everything once considered creative work? Across a full day of talks on advertising, film, design, and journalism, speakers from different disciplines converged on a shared realization-the future of creativity depends less on how well people learn to use AI and more on how deliberately they choose to think beyond it.
The risks of defaulting to automation
Dan Ramon "SpiderDan" Geromo of IXM Hakuhodo opened the festival with a provocation. "You can't use great creative work without AI now," he said. But his concern was not that AI would become human. It was that humans might gradually become more machine-like, defaulting to automation whenever ideas become difficult or deadlines tighten.
"So hindi na ang tanong is, 'Kaya ba 'yan ng AI?' Oo, kaya niya," Geromo said. "Ang tanong, kapag ang AI kaya na niyang mag-edit, magsulat ng award-winning copy, mag-design ng malupit na storyboard, gumawa ng radio ads at commercials… ano bang trabaho natin?" The more uncomfortable question, he argued, is what creatives will actually be left to do. He warned that the real risk is not sentient machines but passive humans. "Sa darating na araw, baka lahat ng makikita natin sa mundo puro AI-generated na. 'Pero hindi siya naging tao, tayo 'yung naging machine.'"
Finding the one true thing
Advertising legend Emily Abrera shifted the conversation from what AI can do to what humans must continue to do. She acknowledged how rapidly the industry has changed-in only three or four years, AI has moved from novelty to a tool capable of generating headlines, key visuals, scripts, and localized campaigns at scale. Yet the speed of transformation, she suggested, should not obscure an older problem: the temptation to confuse output with quality.
"The tools have changed enormously. The temptations have not changed at all," Abrera said. "We are once again being told that speed is the same thing as quality. We are once again mistaking the ability to produce 100 options for the discipline of finding the one true thing." That "one true thing," she argued, remains rooted in qualities that cannot be generated on command-courage, curiosity, empathy, humility, and honesty. She challenged creatives to ask what remains when the prompt disappears. "Ads themselves are ephemeral," she said. "Almost everything we make will be forgotten-and honestly, it's just meant to be." What endures is the discipline of finding the truth beneath the brief and the courage to say it clearly, with humor, wit, and imagination.
AI as infrastructure, not replacement
Carlo Ople, Founder and CEO of Unbox Group of Companies, reframed AI not as a threat but as an opportunity to build sustainable creative livelihoods. He described the current moment as a "creative renaissance" and introduced what he calls the "Ikigai Engine"-the intersection of what a person enjoys, what they are good at, what they can make money from, and what contributes to the world. "If you find that intersection, you're at your natural best. You don't burn out; you don't get tired in the same way," he said.
AI, in this model, becomes infrastructure-handling research, first drafts, repurposing, captions, subtitles, translations, and administration. This frees creators to focus on the parts of their work that require a point of view. "AI can generate anything except the reason you're doing it," Ople said. "There's no money in passion alone-but there is money on purpose with a system."
Kentaro Kimura, Chief Creative Officer of Hakuhodo International, identified three keywords for creativity in the AI era: "Wish for Change - The First Domino," "New Trust," and "Human Dream Craft." He argued that AI is good at short-term change, but sustaining change over the long term is a human wish, not a machine function. Trust, he said, becomes one of the few things that cannot be manufactured by increasing output. "Trust is the greatest source of power right now in the age of AI." His final point returned to the creative act itself. "Believe in the force of human creativity. That is the greatest keyword for the AI era."
The discipline of limitations and craft
Brand filmmaker Sid Maderazo drew from 25 years in film and advertising to examine AI through the lens of craft-and the discipline imposed by limitations. Quoting Orson Welles, he said, "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." Having started his career shooting on celluloid, he recalled a time when every frame carried a cost and choices had to be deliberate. Digital technology removed many of those limits. AI is removing even more. But Maderazo does not see abundance as an automatic advantage.
"With limitations, you are forced to be clear, very concise. You are forced to choose," he said. "The tool is never the advantage. It was never the advantage. The craft was. Craft teaches you how to make something-but taste tells you if it's worth making."
Music composer Arnold Buena brought the debate into sound, raising concerns around copyright, authorship, and the training data behind generative music systems. His answer was not to reject AI but to establish where the human belongs. In his hybrid workflow, a human composer creates the melody and musical language. AI explores variations, genres, and arrangements. The human selects, refines, and finalizes the work. "Human pa rin ang magfa-finalize," he said. "The question isn't whether we should use AI. The question is: where do we put the human? Put the human at the beginning."
Efficiency versus effectiveness
Ortum Consulting founder Max Stricker distinguished between producing more and creating better work. He presented two fictional characters: Albert, the fast executor, and Theo, the slower thinker who asks questions. AI, Stricker argued, behaves much like Albert-producing quickly, confidently, and at scale. But speed does not translate into effectiveness. "Efficiency is exactly what Albert does, what AI does: doing things quickly, churning out more assets, more volume," he explained. "The problem is that efficiency doesn't mean great results. That's effectiveness."
His solution is not to remove AI but to put the human thinker in control-pausing before accepting output, interrogating how answers were produced, and deciding whether they are worth using. "Don't outsource your thinking," he said. Time saved by AI should be reinvested into better thinking and stronger strategy.
In a fireside chat moderated by adobo Magazine President Angel Guerrero, Eugene Cheong, Merlee Jayme, David Guerrero, and Pepe Torres unpacked the industry's changing relationship with AI. Cheong argued that AI eliminates the safety of mediocrity. "I think there's no more room for being average," he said. "AI can now do the top 35% of what used to require human effort. That changes everything about mediocrity." Jayme added, "You should learn to struggle-struggle is freedom." The panel agreed that the era of average is over and that trust and originality remain irreducibly human responsibilities.
For creatives navigating this shift, understanding AI for Creatives means recognizing where the technology serves craft and where it threatens to replace thinking. The festival's speakers repeatedly returned to the same distinction: tools can accelerate production, but they cannot supply purpose, judgment, or the courage to find an individual voice. As AI-generated content becomes abundant, the ability to see beyond the output-to ask why something matters and to decide what is true-becomes the defining skill. For those working with Generative Video and other automated production tools, the discipline is not in generating more but in choosing better.
Why this matters for creatives
The throughline of the festival was not that AI is good or bad, but that it demands better humans, not fewer. Eugene Cheong put it plainly: "So the question isn't 'is AI good or bad?' The question is: are you good, or are you bad? AI can't decide that for you." In an environment where anyone can generate an image, a script, or a campaign route, finding an individual voice becomes harder-and more valuable. As Philippine National Artist Kidlat Tahimik closed the festival, he reminded the room that creativity does not begin in a brief or a prompt. "That is where creativity begins. Not in a brief. Not in a prompt. In attention. In love. In the stories we owe our people."
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