By Adam Milano, ECD, Head of Entertainment at SuperBloom House.
When we mistake transition for collapse.
Creativity is ending. It’s something you’ve probably heard lately. In headlines. In conversations. In your head at 4:30 in the morning. What still amazes me is how casually potentially industry-ending sentiments like this get dropped, almost offhandedly, at a New Year’s Eve party in Los Angeles in 2026.
I’m not pretending I haven’t thought it myself. How could I not? We’re living through the most chaotic and exhilarating shift in tech, tools, and media since the birth of the internet, the collapse of cable, or even the printing press. I’m not disputing that reality. But here, at the start of the year, I wanted to challenge the assumption, not simply accept the fait accompli.
The growing chorus of creative panic.
Originality, we’re told, is becoming scarce. Words like AI slop have entered the lexicon. “Nothing breaks through anymore” gets blamed on shrinking attention spans and a loss of interest in good storytelling. “Everything will look the same.” We hear that one a lot.
How can you not feel a sense of doom if you work in the creative field, especially when your ideas, imagination, and skills are tied to your livelihood? It’s scary. A big, amorphous boogeyman keeping creatives’ dopamine levels in a chokehold. And honestly, the end of creativity should scare everyone. A world devoid of creativity is inconceivable.
Identifying the monster.
As my therapist often asks me, what are we most afraid of?
Is it the algorithm, confusing, misdirecting, quietly reshaping how people engage with creative media?
Yes.
Is it the speed at which AI is changing how we conceive of, make, and imagine storytelling?
Yes.
Is it the widening sea of sameness that AI will inevitably amplify?
One thousand percent.
Then always comes the harder question. What are we really afraid of?
It’s the unknown. It’s almost always the unknown.
Uncertainty and scarcity are the embryos of creativity.
Without being naïve about the rapidly shifting landscape, it’s useful to look back at how creative people have navigated similar moments, times when new tools, distribution models, and culture and capitalism itself threw “process as usual” into a tailspin. History is filled with creative panic.
When the printing press arrived, people worried mass publishing would cheapen knowledge, flood society with low-quality ideas, and even weaken memory itself. Instead, literacy spread, the Renaissance accelerated, and entirely new genres of thought emerged. The press also contributed to disinformation and conflict but we can hold multiple truths at once.
The same fear surfaced with photography.
“From today, painting is dead.”— Paul Delaroche, 1839
Photography didn’t kill painting. It freed it, pushing artists toward abstraction and ultimately helping usher in cinema itself.
Then came the cassette tape.
“Home Taping Is Killing Music.”— British Phonographic Industry, early 1980s
What followed wasn’t the death of music but its redistribution. Recording and duplication became consumer-level. Mixtapes turned listeners into curators. Punk, hip-hop, and electronic scenes spread outside traditional gatekeepers. The cassette didn’t weaken culture. It lowered the barrier to entry and strengthened the community.
In 1981, Springsteen recorded demos alone at home on a four-track cassette recorder. No studio. No band. When he tried to re-record the songs properly, something disappeared. The cassette versions carried an emotionality the “better” tools couldn’t capture. The cassette didn’t dilute Springsteen’s artistry. It forced a different scale, a different kind of honesty.
That’s what we tend to forget when we declare new tools to be the enemy. Sometimes creativity doesn’t die when the tools change. Sometimes it only moves us closer or back to the source.
Ultimately, necessity drives innovation.
Nowhere is that clearer than the 1960s. The optimism of postwar America fractured under Vietnam, political assassinations, and civil unrest. Laurel Canyon emerged not as an escape, but as a place to metabolize that upheaval, producing an entirely new form of music and a new class of iconoclasts.
At the same time, the Hollywood studio system collapsed under antitrust rulings and the rise of television. Control loosened because it had to. In that opening, the director became the author. Films like Taxi Driver, The Godfather, The Conversation and The Last Picture Show rejected reassurance in favor of interrogation, reshaping cinema by reflecting America back to itself. In print, Gloria Steinem launched Ms. magazine, out of necessity, because nothing like it existed. She didn’t wait for permission. She built what was missing.
We don’t even have to look that far back.
During COVID, entire industries were declared broken. Live music was “over.” Production had “stopped.” And yet creativity didn’t disappear. It migrated.
Remote productions became normalized. New creators emerged from unexpected corners of the internet. COVID-era TikTokers stepped onto primetime stages. AI produced both uncanny valley and the occasional gem. Some artists began using AI not for speed, but to deepen ideas and push creative limits.
We’re in the midst of another Great Creative Migration.
What can we learn from the creative resilience of history? That in moments of rapid change, creativity didn’t die. It was redistributed. Artists with a clear point of view, a willingness to evolve, and ability to move fluidly between formats, tools, and instincts didn’t fall behind. They adapted and gave us things like The Renaissance, movies, punk, hip-hop, electronic music, Springsteen, Laurel Canyon, Ms. magazine, Cubism, the list goes on.
Before we prematurely write the obituary for creativity, let’s focus on the opportunity to make meaning. Things that last. Things that cut through the noise. When creation is faster and distribution is open, the bar doesn’t lower. It places even more emphasis on taste, perspective, talent and intention of the people purveying it. Not everyone will come along. The work now is separating volume from value.
