Creative Leaders Talk Working With AI as a Collaborator With Humans

At the first-ever TIME100 AI Leadership Forum in New York City on Wednesday night, three leaders from music, fashion, and entertainment spoke during an onstage panel about how AI has changed how they worked creatively and the role they see for AI in the arts, moderated by TIME deputy editor Kelly Conniff. Across the board, the panelists agreed that AI is best used as partner and collaborator and cannot replace the distinctly human parts of the creative process. However, they can help users gain deeper knowledge, and shorten the more tedious parts of the brainstorming and ideation process. Christopher Brearton, partner at independent studio AGBO, said that using AI tools could look like leaving a story idea meeting with not only a rough plot and characters but also a quick mockup with images and videos of what it might look like. "Having an AI tool to help open that aperture and expand and continue the creative momentum, and not have breaks in your creative process, has been really fundamentally changing what we do," he said.