AI is increasingly entering creative professions such as marketing, product development and graphic design. An AI-generated image can look like a professional campaign within minutes. Some experts therefore argue that AI will radically change these sectors, or may even make parts of them redundant. “There has already been quite a lot of research into whether AI makes people more creative, but little is known about what happens when creative professionals use this technology in their daily work. What influence does this have on their creativity, the way they collaborate, and how ideas emerge and are then developed?” says Ella Hafermalz.
RTL Nederland
The researchers were given access for a year to the creative department at RTL Nederland, where advertising creatives and graphic designers develop campaigns and promotional material for programmes, streaming platforms and brands. They observed how AI tools such as Midjourney were used in daily work, interviewed staff members and analysed 207 AI-generated images, including prompts, reactions and creative choices.
A first important conclusion is that AI leads to what the researchers call process collapse: the creative process, as it were, collapses in on itself. Steps such as brainstorming, sketching, visualising and producing increasingly start to overlap because of AI. With a tool such as Midjourney, one creative professional can come up with ideas, test them and develop them visually straight away. This speeds up the process, but also changes the way people work. Colleagues, designers and other makers sometimes only become involved later, which can put shared discussion and course correction under pressure.
Generative AI as a spirited horse
In their publication, the researchers describe AI as a spirited technology: a technology that not only does what you ask, but also adds unexpected things. Hafermalz, who conducts extensive research into the impact of AI in the workplace, compares generative AI to a spirited horse. “It moves makers forward incredibly quickly and can surprise you, but it also veers off course and adds details you did not ask for as a maker. That can be frustrating, but it can also lead to new ideas.”
That unpredictability is exactly what makes AI creatively interesting. Midjourney can add unexpected details, lighting or compositions that set a maker off in a new direction. But this only works if creatives have enough expertise to determine which outcomes are valuable and which need to be adjusted.
I and early aesthetic closure
Another important finding is that AI-generated images can be so convincing that they push the creative process in a particular direction at an early stage. Because images from Midjourney often already look polished and almost finished, clients are more likely to see them as the expected final result. “Dazzling AI images can close down the creative process too early - we call this early aesthetic closure,” says Jana Retkowsky (Erasmus University). “They help to present an idea convincingly, but they also limit what is still possible afterwards.”
Generative AI does not simply take over creative work, the researchers argue. Behind a convincing AI-generated image, there is still human judgement: someone who sees what works, what does not add up and what is feasible in practice. Precisely that expertise risks becoming less visible, because from the outside it may look as though the technology has done the work. “For organisations, that is an important lesson,” says Hafermalz. “Do not underestimate the maker behind the AI-generated image. Those who do risk undervaluing creative talent and making the wrong decisions about people, resources and collaboration.”
The academic paper, titled Harnessing a “Spirited Technology”: How Working with Generative AI Collapses the Creative Process, has been published in Academy of Management Discoveries. It can be read here.