AI Won’t Replace Creative Professionals

On March 22, Shane Hegde published a handwritten letter in the New York Times and listed his personal cell number at the bottom. He invited anyone who disagreed with him to call.

His position: AI will never replace creative professionals.

This is a man who has raised $70 million to build AI tools for creative teams. By his own account, nearly all of Air’s product resources have shifted toward AI-centric features. His best engineers spend most of their days evaluating AI-written code. So the letter was either a bold statement of genuine belief or an exceptionally well-timed piece of marketing. Or probably both.

The letter itself is worth reading. Not for the provocation, but maybe for the line that sticks: “AI would never smoke a cigarette with you.”

And we genuinely appreciated this, “But the organizations that survive will require human beings who are willing to take risks. These people understand that letting what they love kill them is a uniquely human trait.”

He means it as a defense of creative inefficiency, of the beautifully irrational human behavior that makes good work good. Doubt, indecision, or Hegde’s example of a “cancerous reflection” at 9AM on a street corner that actually lead to great work. Machines don’t do that. They find patterns and recommend the most common answer. As we know, AI in particular is by definition an averaging of our collective thoughts.

The machines are always correct, he writes, but not always right.

It’s a good line. The question is whether it holds up when you push on it.

What Creatives Are Actually Worried About

People who visit Mediabistro aren’t likely sitting around debating the philosophy of AI and creativity. They’re watching copywriter job postings dry up. They’re seeing design briefs go to Midjourney. They’re freelancers who made $80K two years ago making $55K now, and for many, careers are seeming to be caught in a zero sum game.

Here’s the thing, though: the demand for creative and content skills hasn’t actually collapsed. It’s just moved. Tech companies are now hiring people who think and write like journalists, for example, in increasing numbers.

Hegde saw this coming eight years ago. “We told investors that every company was becoming a media company,” he wrote in the letter. “And, if true, every company would need an engine to scale their creative work.” The job market has since caught up to that thesis in ways even he probably didn’t map out fully.

Hegde came up through finance at HPS Investment Partners, spent time as Chief Digital Strategist at Revolt Media and TV, and co-founded Air in 2017 on that thesis. He is not a creative by training. Eight years in, he knows the work from the outside in, which is either a limitation or an advantage depending on what you think the job of a tool-builder actually is.

The Interview

Mediabistro’s audience isn’t debating AI displacement in the abstract. They’re watching it happen in their hiring pipelines. Copywriter roles are down, design briefs are going to Midjourney, newsrooms are using AI for first drafts. What do you say to a freelance writer or designer who’s already lost income to AI in the last 12 months?

“Our perspective is that it’s undeniable that the world has changed. We can’t avoid the AI conversation because it’s a hard discussion, but what we can do is engage with creatives, to provide them with tools should they want to pick them up and experiment.”

“To the creative person who has lost income, I would say that the part that will never go away is the thing that got them their job in the first place. The judgment and nuance will always be needed and that’s something AI can never automate or replace.”

Air is positioning itself as a tool that helps creative teams “scale output.” But from the individual creative’s perspective, “scaling output” often means fewer people doing more work. How do you square the efficiency pitch with the reality that efficiency gains in creative departments have historically meant layoffs?

“What we’re seeing is creative teams spending an outsized amount of their time on logistics, whether that’s collecting files, approvals, resizing or creating new formats and organizing. That’s not the creative work any of them wants to be doing. The opportunity with Air’s AI layer is to remove the ‘busy work’ so to speak that none of these creatives want to spend time doing in the first place. Then they can get back to doing the actual creative side of their job.”

What he doesn’t say, and what nobody in this space says cleanly, not from malice, but because nobody really knows, is what happens after the busywork disappears. That decision lives with whoever controls the budget.

You came up through finance before going to Revolt Media and then founding Air. Our readers are mostly editors, writers, designers, and producers. How do you try to understand what creative work actually feels like day to day?

“My co-founder and I have been running this business for 8 years, and we have spent thousands of hours with photographers, videographers, illustrators, graphic designers, and creative directors. We’re not them, but we are relentlessly building a product that seeks to support and optimize how they work every day. The reason why we love the work is because we think what they do is magical. But so much of their day is spent on logistics and from our perspective, that’s a technical problem that technology could solve for them.”

“The beauty is, when you solve it for them, creatives can go off and do these often incredible, sometimes illogical, but always wholly unique things with the time they have back.”

Air’s “context layer” promises to keep everything on-brand automatically. But a big part of what a creative director gets paid for is making those judgment calls, knowing when to break the guidelines, when the vibe is off even if the hex codes are right. Are you worried this kind of automation chips away at the expertise your customers are hired for?

“There is still space for a creative director or brand manager to provide the basis of context to begin with and the nuanced direction of let’s make this ‘messier’ or change the artwork type, verbiage, etc, but without having to spend time digging through files and heading into the abyss of tracking version history.”

“The truth about creativity is that there is no correct answer, there is no certainty, there is no objective truth. It is subjective, it is people’s opinions, it is judgment. The creative director is always going to want to come in and get their hands dirty on something and tweak it and change it and that might not mean chatting with a machine.”

That last bit is worth sitting with. Most founders don’t build an off-ramp away from their own product into the answer.

You’ve raised $70 million. A lot of creative professionals have watched well-funded startups promise to empower them, then pivot to selling to the companies that used to hire them. Are you building for the creative person, or for the marketing VP who wants to need fewer of them?

“A lot of technologists believe that creative work should be fully automated, that a prompt can replace the work of a filmmaker or photographer. We don’t believe that at Air. We believe humans are, and will forever be, in the loop for this magical zero-to-one moment in the creative process. Similarly, AI can, would and should be in the loop when you’re trying to then scale those assets.”

The press release says “AI won’t replace creatives, but it can give them more time to focus on the work that actually matters.” Our readers have heard that from dozens of AI companies. What does Air actually do differently?

“I would argue our launch to be the most human AI product for creatives that acknowledges their place in the future. The illogical parts that don’t make sense, the judgment, the direction, that kind of work is the work that creatives love doing. It’s coming up with the next campaign idea, it’s going on a set, and realizing that you’re shooting the wrong side of someone’s face or the location around the corner is actually better. The happenstance within creative work is really what makes it special.”

“You can’t approach creators and tell them how to work. That’s not how it operates. You can give them picks and shovels and teach them how those picks work. The beauty is, they often are going to find ways to use those tools in ways you never even could imagine.”

You beat Apple and Squarespace at the Webbys. What does that actually mean for an enterprise software company?

“Does winning a Webby matter in enterprise software? I think the more interesting question is what does making consistent creative work that reaches our ICP not because we paid to have them watch it but because they organically connected, engaged with and shared it to their friends and colleagues mean for a brand?”

“Over the last three years campaigns and organic social media have been primary channels, far more than the traditional SaaS playbook of display, SEO, webinars and lifecycle. And the result was unequivocal: It helped us move upmarket. It helped us grow triple digits. And it helped build a business with world class unit economics that was ready to scale even further.”

There’s something fitting about a company that sells tools to creative teams winning creative awards by making work that didn’t feel like software marketing.

So Does He Mean It?

Hegde’s argument stays consistent. AI handles the operational layer. Humans own the judgment layer. The two don’t substitute for each other; it’s the necessary and most efficient division of labor.

It’s a cleaner position than most people in this space are willing to commit to publicly, which is probably why the NYT letter got some traction.

The question his letter raises, and that this interview circles without fully settling, is who captures the upside when you automate the logistics of creative work. Hegde thinks it’s the creative professional or at least the companies that allow creative professionals to do their thing.

The market will have its own answer eventually.

In the meantime, his cell number is still at the bottom of the letter. Which, for the record, we think is a terrible idea.

Mediabistro has been covering, and maybe even entertaining, the media industry for 25 years. We interview media personalities, founders, executives, editors, and working creatives about where the industry is going and what it actually takes to build a career in it. This interview is part of that ongoing conversation.

We run one of the longest-standing job boards for media and creative professionals, with listings across editorial, content strategy, social media, design, video, and communications. If you’re hiring, you can post a job here. If you’re looking, browse current openings here.

We also publish Playbook, a platform of 400-plus tools built for creative and media professionals, that can help design your workflows. If you’re figuring out which AI tools are worth your time and which ones aren’t, it’s a reasonable place to start.