It seems our industry is a suspicious bunch of people with new skills, especially when it is thought there may be a threat to jobs.

Freelancers; clever, capable, often brilliant, and 70% of the creative workforce, were (and sadly still are sometimes) regularly treated with an unfair level of mistrust when they started turning up more and more in agencies. In a large number of businesses, they never quite become part of the fold, of the family.

AI was the next major disruptor to the traditional workforce. We don't need to go into the whys and wherefores of that, though. There aren’t many who don't harbour some concern that it's out to get them.

There is now a new entrant to this list: people who sit right at the epicentre of those two things and are also currently generating a fair amount of mistrust. Or, at last, a fair amount of misunderstanding of what they can offer.

AI artists and creatives. But they won’t steal jobs, they’ll make more jobs (if used properly)

The real problem isn't the people doing the work, it's that there are too many businesses that are rushing at AI from the wrong direction. The reflex is to scale output, automate processes, and churn out more “content.” The bottom of the funnel has never looked so crowded. But efficiency is not the same as creativity. And for an industry that prides itself on ideas, it’s a dangerous conflation.

Where is the soul in work generated at machine speed to fill another algorithmic gap? Where is the craft, the spark, the cultural resonance? The truth is, if we allow AI to be used only as a productivity machine, we risk hollowing out the very thing clients still look to us for: originality.

This is why AI artists matter. They’re not machines. They’re humans with new skills, adding depth and dimension to the creative process. They don’t replace ideas, they augment them. And that augmentation, handled by people who understand both the tech and the art, creates something neither humans nor machines could make alone.

Clients are already asking for this blend. They want the speed and scope that AI makes possible, but they also want work that has meaning, work that moves people, work that endures. And so the agencies and networks that embrace AI artists, rather than fearing them, are the ones most likely to hold onto their creative soul.

But this means removing the fear of the new. It means treating AI artists and freelancers not as cheap labour or quick fixes, but as essential collaborators. It means asking the question: what does this tool make possible that wasn’t before?

Because the best AI work I’ve seen doesn’t look like machine-made wallpaper. It looks like a human idea, sharpened and stretched by technology. A film director who uses AI to test twenty different treatments in a day, then shoots the best one with the eye only years of experience can bring. A designer who sketches concepts in code, then iterates them into forms that surprise even themselves. A strategist who prototypes campaigns in hours, not weeks, and spends the time saved refining the insight at the heart of the work.

This is what we brought to bear on our recent campaign for Wizz Air. In partnership with Monks we created the entire thing in AI. The campaign idea, concept, script and storyboard and all of the digital out of home, were created by a multi-award-winning local Spanish creative team steeped in language and culture. Then, in a first for The Liberty Guild and for WIZZ Air, instead of the project moving into the traditional production cycle we used a selection of AI to deliver every element of the campaign. Midjourney, Runway, Google's Nano Banana, Topaz, and Flux were used to deliver all still and moving image generation, casting and persona generation, editing, grading, sound design, and even voiceover to create a whole campaign at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time.

The lesson is clear: AI won’t steal our jobs. But creatives who adopt it natively will take a larger share of the opportunities ahead. If we shut them out, we lose not only their talent but also our chance to evolve. If we welcome them, we defend the one thing that matters most — the primacy of the idea.

And that’s the point. The industry has a choice. We can rush to automate and commoditise creativity until it’s indistinguishable from content sludge. Or we can invest in people — freelancers, AI artists, augmented creatives — who can show us how to make AI work for imagination, not against it.

If we do that, jobs don’t disappear. In fact, they multiply. Creativity expands. And the soul of the industry doesn’t just survive — it thrives.