Creators who spent the start of 2026 distancing themselves from AI-made content are now folding the tools into most of their work, Digiday reported on 1 October after talking to agencies, brands and creators. The question has moved from whether to use AI to how much of the creative process to hand over.
The early-year mood followed the backlash to OpenAI's Sora 2: YouTube removed slop accounts, Instagram's Adam Mosseri wrote about rewarding originality, and brands asked for visibly human, imperfect work. Over the ten months since, AI features have spread through the apps creators edit with, from CapCut's suite and Adobe Firefly to YouTube's new agentic tools for A/B testing and conversational editing. Billion Dollar Boy polling cited in the piece found 87% of creators had raised their AI use over the previous year, and 86% planned to raise it again.
The line many draw is between generating content and using software to help make it. Anders Bill of Superfiliate expects a sharp distinction between generative video and tools that assist human creators. Kruszynski, who first sat on an AI-and-creators panel in 2019, said the ethics debate has shifted so far that AI is now too embedded in daily work for black-and-white positions, and an earlier Billion Dollar Boy poll found nearly a third of creators recommending AI and scheduling tools to ease workload and burnout.
Most of the uses described are behind the scenes. Gigi Robinson, host of a creator etiquette podcast, applies AI to analytics, brainstorming, file sorting and concept work and sees it as speeding up what she already does. Former journalist Danae Mercer now runs her inbox, calendar and task list with it, yet recently received a campaign brief from the brand Open that banned AI outright, edits and concepts included. Brands mainly fear content being flagged as AI and throttled by platform algorithms, said Keith Bendes of Linqia.
The worry several people raised is sameness. YouTube's new tool lets a creator upload several versions of a video and have the Gemini-powered Ask Studio predict which will hold viewers longest. Lucy Kruszynski of the agency Buttermilk said every video could start to look alike, and Mercer said she already hears AI phrasing everywhere; Mustafa Aijaz of SoaR expects fast-moving trends to prevent flattening and sees the tool helping smaller creators who cannot pay an editor.
Billion Dollar Boy's Becky Owen suggested the tools could split volume-chasing creators from more deliberate ones. Bendes and other executives floated brands steering lower-funnel, quantity-driven campaigns toward AI-assisted creators as big-budget creator pushes get harder to justify, while noting that not every creator is out to maximise every metric.
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