How AI may be gradually winning over creatives

What a load of crap. I produce the report on a yellow memo pad.

How AI may be gradually winning over creatives

Creative professionals were among the first to speak out against AI. Now, that resistance may be fading.

The Deep View

July 20, 2026

George Lucas, creator of Star Wars and Lucasfilm, recently compared AI to the horse and buggy in an interview. He acknowledged the risks. Just as cars, born from that shift, eventually brought breakdowns, fuel dependency, and even weaponization in the form of tanks, he argued that this is simply the nature of progress.

"Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies,” said Lucas. "There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress. It’s the future."

He isn't the only creative to hold that opinion. A new Adobe report that surveyed 16,000 creators across the US, UK, France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, India and Australia found that 87% of respondents using creative AI reported it had accelerated the growth of their business or audience, while 75% described it as integrated or essential to how they work.

The use cases include moving faster in the ideation phase:

Around 93% of creators say creative AI helps them produce content faster, though 57% say their creative AI outputs typically require moderate or extensive editing before they're ready to share.

Even with the additional work needed, 35% say it gives them more freedom to experiment before pitching ideas, and 33% say it gives them the confidence to pursue more ambitious ideas and projects.

At Adobe Summit in April, Forest Key, VP of agentic AI for the creativity and productivity business at Adobe, who previously worked at Lucasfilm in the 1990s on Star Wars, told The Deep View that some of his most time-consuming tasks could now be done easily by AI.

"When I worked at Lucasfilm, we were tracing humans with these little splines and animated curves frame by frame," said Key. "40, 50, 70, 80 hours to do like a three-second shot. With Premiere and its AI power tools, you can do what would take hours and hours and hours literally in a minute."

He adds that applications of AI of that nature don't kill the creative process, but rather accelerate creativity. Meanwhile, on its latest earnings call, Netflix said that nearly 300 titles used AI for "highly complex sequences" that would otherwise not have been possible due to time or cost constraints, according to co-chief executive Ted Sarandos.