AI isn’t the enemy of creativity, says Ashgrove’s Terry van Rhyn, it’s just exposing how little original thinking exists in marketing.

For every major technological shift in advertising, someone inevitably declares the death of creativity.

When desktop publishing arrived, traditional designers feared the craft would disappear. When digital photography emerged, many photographers insisted the art form had been diluted forever. When editing suites replaced razor blades and tape in television production, there were predictions that filmmaking itself would become soulless.

And now, with the rise of AI, we are once again hearing the same familiar refrain: creativity is under threat.

Personally, I think we may be blaming the wrong thing.

Our industry has always evolved through tools. Looking back over the past four decades, I’ve witnessed extraordinary technological disruption first-hand, yet the core creative process has remained surprisingly unchanged.

Back in the late 1980s, when I was running an agency in South Africa, we presented advertising concepts using marker-pen scamps, Rotring pens, layout pads, Letraset and Pantone markers. Entire presentations were hand-crafted. The smell of marker pens and spray mount was effectively part of the creative process. Then Apple arrived and changed everything.

Suddenly, the agency world shifted from hand-rendered visuals to digital design systems almost overnight. Some embraced it enthusiastically. Others resisted with near-religious intensity. At the time, many feared the computer would somehow cheapen creativity or remove the artistry from advertising. Of course, it did neither.

What it did was to remove friction. It allowed ideas to be visualised faster, refined more easily and presented with greater accuracy. Instead of asking clients to imagine what an idea might eventually become, we could suddenly show them something remarkably close to the finished product itself.

The idea still mattered. The thinking still mattered. The craft still mattered. The tools simply changed.

The same thing happened in photography and film production. I remember when digital cameras first began replacing 35mm film in commercial photography and television production. For many established photographers and directors, it felt traumatic. Entire careers had been built around technical mastery of film, lighting and processing. Digital disrupted not only the workflow but also the mystique.

Yet the truly exceptional photographers remained exceptional. Their eye did not disappear because the camera changed. Their understanding of composition, emotion, timing and storytelling still separated them from everyone else.

Technology democratised access, but not talent. Because the truly creative people adapt; the mediocre simply panic. And that may be the real issue confronting the creative industries today.

AI has not made creativity irrelevant. It has exposed how much of the industry was already producing predictable, formulaic and forgettable work. When average ideas can now be generated instantly, average thinking becomes dangerously visible.

Mediocre creativity used to hide behind production value, budgets and process. AI removes much of that protection.

A technically competent visual is no longer difficult to create. What remains difficult is original thought. Taste. Judgement. Cultural intuition. Emotional intelligence. Strategic clarity. In other words, the things that have always separated genuinely great creative directors from merely competent operators.

This is why I remain optimistic about AI’s role in the industry. Used properly, it is an extraordinary creative accelerant. It allows agencies to prototype faster, explore wider territories and visualise ideas that once required substantial production budgets simply to test. It gives smaller agencies access to capabilities that were once reserved for global networks.

But like every powerful tool, it comes with risks.

My concern is not that AI will replace creative directors. It is that it may encourage a new generation to confuse speed with thinking. The danger is not technological unemployment; it is creative laziness.

Great creative work has never come from tools alone. It comes from curiosity, observation, emotional sensitivity and a deep understanding of people and culture. AI can generate outputs at astonishing speed but it cannot replace lived experience, instinct or imagination rooted in humanity.

The irony is that as technology becomes more capable, human creativity may become even more valuable. Because consumers do not remember advertising simply because it is polished. They remember it because it makes them feel something. Humour. Tension. Desire. Surprise. Recognition. These are profoundly human responses. And humans, for all our flaws, remain gloriously irrational.

The agencies and creative leaders who thrive in the coming years will not be those who reject AI, nor those who blindly worship it. They will be those who understand its proper role. Not as a substitute for creativity, but as an amplifier of it.

The creative director still sits at the centre of the process. The responsibility remains the same: to identify the insight, shape the narrative and make the work emotionally resonant. AI may change how quickly we get there, but it does not change where the idea comes from. That still comes from people.

Every generation in advertising believes its disruption is uniquely existential. In reality, our industry has always evolved alongside technology. The arrival of AI is not the end of creativity. It is simply the latest chapter in a story we have seen before.

The real threat is not artificial intelligence – it is artificial originality. Because when everyone has access to the same tools, creativity itself becomes the only true differentiator left.