Current debates around AI contain much passionate discourse, but generally lack nuance. Artificial intelligence will either unlock a whole new era of human flourishing or take all our jobs and maybe our lives as well. When Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk admitted to using AI to brainstorm when writing, the backlash was swift; the literary journal Granta has also come under fire for printing a short story which was later determined to be AI-generated (although AI detectors often make mistakes and return false positives) . Increasing numbers of creatives are taking a public stand against use of the technology in any form, despite the fact that it is baked into so many systems it has become functionally impossible to avoid .

In the midst of this charged environment, the AI and Creativity Summit, produced by Artist and the Machine , sought to offer another perspective. The event, which was held at the Lighthouse in Brooklyn on May 14, brought together creators who are using AI to enhance their work and allow them to create more at scale. The general thesis of the day seemed to be that while AI can be used as a tool to make creative work, it won’t replace the humans who come up with the ideas and prompt it in the first place.

There’s also space for a broader conversation about the intersection between art and profit and where AI fits into that. For instance, creative technologist Don Allen Stevenson III led a seminar where he built a little retro video game in real time; my initial thought was that while it was cute and fun, I wondered what it was for, exactly. The delta between a cute little prototype and an actual functioning and marketable game is massive. But maybe that’s an error in judgment on my part – what if the point of the game is to make something cute for a friend and leave it at that? What if the point of vibe-coding an app on Loveable isn’t to create a product and sell something, but to just have a little hack that makes it easier to manage a grocery list or keep track of movie release dates?

During a fireside chat, Nicholas Thompson (CEO, The Atlantic) and poet Sasha Stiles discussed how she incorporates AI into her work and her feelings about that work being used to train models. Stiles says that art is collaborative and no one can replicate her work because no machine can replicate her lived experience; Thompson pushed back that he viewed the work generated by those inputs as competitive. That said, as anyone who has read a book and then started narrating life in the author’s voice, it’s a hard distinction to make. Flat-out plagiarism without credit is one thing, but it is functionally impossible to break down the source material for any LLM query. And it gets even more complicated and meta from there, as LLMs are ingesting material they generate and applying it to new queries, leading any responses further away from the original source.

Of course, for all the high-minded theorizing, there were plenty of more practical discussions of using AI to speed workflows on the back end. The filmmaker King Willonius discussed how he uses tools like Nano Banana to generate visuals and Runway to create style transfers when making his films. It’s still his story and creative work, he says, but it allows him to save money and streamline production, which makes filmmaking more accessible for him. Among the audience of creative technologists, there were lots of conversations about tool stacks and best practices for prompting.

So where do things stand for AI creators mid-way through 2026? AI has chipped away roles at the margins, but it tends to hit behind the scenes work more than people who focus on creativity. For all the hype that is sure to keep growing as Anthropic and OpenAI gear up to go public, it’s hard to point to an industry that has been truly decimated or altered by AI. With some notable exceptions aside, the bulk of creative content people are consuming is still primarily made by humans.

The most likely outcome of all of this is that AI becomes a tool like Photoshop – generally useful, occasionally over-the-top, but not a replacement for photographers or even editors, whose roles evolved alongside technology. The general impression I left the Lighthouse with at the end of the day was that there were lots of useful tools in the market, but nothing beats someone coming up with an ambitious idea or quirky prompt to kick the whole thing off.