Can You Leverage AI for Creative Execution? Our Experts Weigh In

A recent stat came out stating that only 33% of people use AI for creative execution. Most people rely on AI for upstream tasks, like research and data analysis, rather than downstream tasks like creative execution and campaign creation.

So, why is that?

Jesslyn Faustina, Lead Web & Product Designer, sat down with Macy Storm, Content Marketing Consultant, to have a conversation about why people are hesitant to use AI for downstream tasks, what the pitfalls are, and how you can do it effectively.

In this blog post:

• Why Are Marketers Hesitant to Use AI to Help with Execution-based Tasks, Like Creative Assets or Writing?
• What Are the Pitfalls with Relying on AI to Complete These Tasks?
• How Can You Effectively Balance Leveraging AI While Maintaining Creativity?
• What Are the Biggest Mistakes Marketing Teams Can Make if They Only Use AI for Upstream Tasks (research, Data Analysis)?
• Will Leveraging AI for Creative Tasks Hurt Your SEO Performance? Why or Why Not?

Why are marketers hesitant to use AI to help with execution-based tasks, like creative assets or writing?

There are few areas we hit on with this discussion:

Creative identity & authenticity

Jesslyn: When it comes to design, creative work is identity work. It’s not just about making something pretty but involves translating a company’s values, personality and voice. Hence, there is a fear of “AI slop,” that generative AI feels soulless and lacks the human touch that allows the creative work to emotionally connect with audiences.

Moreover, according to Figma’s State of the Designer Report 2026, designers are happiest when they have creative freedom. With the increase in the use of AI tools and automation, designers fight to retain creative influence.

Also related to designer happiness is craft. While subjective, most designers in the report define it as “visual polish and thoughtful problem solving”. As creative freedom and craft is important to designers and allows them to feel proud of their work, this could explain the reluctance in using AI tools and automation as it reduces their ownership of the work.

Macy: I think it’s pretty similar for writing, too. Writing is something deeply personal to each individual, even if you’re just writing a blog post for a corporation or sharing a helpful resource for a small business. A lot of writers connect their writing to their identity because everyone has a uniquely individual style when it comes to writing.

When you bring AI into the mix, it takes that away if you solely rely on it to do all the writing for you. Writing becomes bleak and lacks personality and human connection. I think that’s why a lot of writers feel the same way designers do — we all put ourselves into our work, and the fear is that, if you use AI for execution-based tasks, it takes away what makes our work unique and reflections of ourselves.

Legal and ethical gray zones

Macy: I think this is where you see two camps — people who don’t use AI to execute content tasks because they’re worried about the legal ramifications and people who ignore it completely and will use it to write all the content on their website.

The camp that won’t use AI for content execution is the camp that knows AI can hallucinate and make up information, which can lead to brand damage. Or worse, it can lead to legal consequences if that content makes false or misleading claims.

Jesslyn: There’s also the debate of copyright and ownership of AI-generated assets. How do we decide who owns AI-generated content? According to The U.S. Copyright Office, AI-generated content that lacks human authorship cannot be copyrighted on its own. Another question is, was the data used to train the AI ethically sourced? This is why teams may be hesitant to rely heavily on AI as it could be a legitimate business risk.

Skill atrophy

Jesslyn: This is a concern I often hear among creative professionals. Will we lose our creativity and edge if we let AI handle creative execution? Since AI has automated most surface-level work, will that mean the next generation of creatives will lack fundamental skills?

For example, in the past, this happened with photo editing. Once digital photo editing tools emerged, many younger designers/photographers never learned darkroom techniques. However, while that specific skill has arguably become obsolete, the craft of image manipulation, color correction, etc. didn’t disappear completely, it just evolved into a different medium.

Macy: I would almost hedge to say that skill atrophy will hit even harder with content writing. I think, in general, content is already something that businesses put on the back burner. They aren’t always willing to invest in having a skilled writer generate content for them.

And now AI comes into the picture and suddenly, they don’t “need” to hire a writer. I think it could cause a lot of people who may have previously considered a writing career to, well, reconsider. Even though the writing job market is expected to grow 4% through 2034, I think the current state of AI could discourage people from pursing a writing avenue.

On top of that, current writers are being encouraged to lean more heavily on AI to help them execute content. It makes a lot of writers feel like they’re going to lose their creative edge if AI is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

What are the pitfalls with relying on AI to complete these tasks?

We discussed a few important pitfalls of relying solely on AI to handle creative execution tasks:

Generic outputs

Jesslyn: Since AI tools are trained on existing work, when everyone uses the same AI tools or prompts, the work generated can start looking similar. This can dissolve a brand’s identity and uniqueness.

Macy: Yes! We already see this problem a lot with people who rely fully on AI to generate all their content. The content it puts out is just flat, boring, and doesn’t stand out from anything else that’s already out there.

That’s problematic because, when you’re trying to earn citations in AI search and LLMs, you need to stand out. AI content isn’t going to do that.

Missing cultural nuances

Macy: There is a lot of instances where AI doesn’t understand why you can’t say something a certain way or how a phrase could be confusing. Humans do, though.

Jesslyn: I agree. While human creatives can understand cultural context through lived experience, AI can’t easily grasp this. For example, it might not understand why certain colors or visuals might be problematic or offensive in specific cultures.

Consistency challenges

Jesslyn: AI can mimic a style, but maintaining brand consistency across different mediums and touchpoints is more complex than it seems. It requires understanding the reasoning behind brand decisions, and a human designer will know when to follow the brand guidelines, improvise, or bend the rules based on the context.

Macy: I echo the sentiment of things being “more complex than it seems.” I think writing, naturally, became the easiest thing for people to turn to AI to for help.

Looking at historical data, writing skills have always been a problem in the U.S. From 1998–2011, most 8th and 12th graders were Basic or Below Basic when it came to writing proficiency — that’s today’s workforce. There’s a prominent skill gap with writing that AI has naturally become the solution to fill.

The problem, though, is that AI isn’t very consistent with content output. You could feed it the same prompt in the span of 2 minutes and get two very different pieces of content. It’s not consistent with output, which can make it difficult when you’re trying to create content that sounds like your brand.

How can you effectively balance leveraging AI while maintaining creativity?

Jesslyn: Automate tedious tasks instead of strategic thinking. Let AI handle the repetitive stuff like removing backgrounds, renaming layers, resizing assets to free up time and energy for more strategic thinking which AI can’t replicate. This includes understanding client/project goals, problem solving, and making important creative decisions.

Macy: Yes, same for writing! Have it do tedious tasks like title tag idea generation, meta descriptions, creating schema for content, or reviewing what you’ve written for grammar mistakes. You can even use AI to help you generate a draft (you’ll need to prompt it very well for this to work) and then have a human oversee it and make the necessary changes to make it good.

The important part is that humans are still actively involved in the process.

Jesslyn: Exactly! You need to maintain human judgement on AI output. Every AI-generated asset should go through a human filter to determine if it aligns with the brand and whether it emotionally connects with the audience.

Macy: And if it doesn’t then the modifications need to be made. You need to give your team the freedom and space to make judgement calls, even if that means that what AI made has to be scrapped and you need to start over.

Jesslyn: Yes. That’s why I think you should use AI for the exploration stage instead of final execution. For design, AI is great for rapid concepting as it can generate multiple ideas or layout variations in minutes. But treat those as sketches and not finals so that you maintain human control over final execution.

Macy: Yup! Same goes for writing. Use it to draft and outline, but never rely on it to be the final product. It’s always going to need tweaking to sound more like your brand, to resonate better with your audience, and to build those human connections.

What are the biggest mistakes marketing teams can make if they only use AI for upstream tasks (research, data analysis)?

Jesslyn: Only using AI for upstream tasks but not for execution will create bottlenecks. You’ll get insights super quickly, but then won’t have enough bandwidth at the creation phase.

This creates an imbalance where your team can get overwhelmed with data and ideas but lacking the capacity to execute them. By using AI throughout the workflow, you can execute and iterate faster.

Macy: There is nothing that plagues companies more than having all the ideas but no room to execute them. If you’re only using AI for upstream tasks, you’re losing opportunities to get more stuff out there — more content, more graphics, more guides, more everything!

The thing is — you can’t look at it as an all-or-nothing mentality. Too many people think that just because you use AI for downstream tasks that it has to do 100% of the task. AI shouldn’t be doing 100%, but rather, helping. So look for the opportunities in downstream tasks (writing, creating graphics, etc.) where it can help speed up execution but not fully take it over.

Will leveraging AI for creative tasks hurt your SEO performance? Why or why not?

Jesslyn: According to Google’s guidelines, Google focuses on the quality of content rather than how the content is produced. So, leveraging AI should not hurt your SEO performance as long as you are creating helpful, reliable, and people-first content demonstrating E-E-A-T.

Macy: Yes, the key there is that it’s helpful. If your content isn’t helpful and backed by expertise, it’s going to flop regardless of AI having a hand in it. Using AI won’t hurt your SEO performance if you’re using it correctly.

Jesslyn: If anything, it might actually help better your SEO. AI can help you:

• Improve page speed: AI can assist in image compression and responsive asset generation.
• Prepare for visual search: AI can help generate tags and optimize images for visual search indexing.
• Publish consistently: With AI’s assistance, you have more capacity to create content and thus can maintain regular content cadence.
• Make content accessible: AI can generate alt text to ensure visual content is accessible.

Stay in the know on AI in marketing

Stay informed about the latest with AI search is crucial for your business if you want to stay agile. If you want more expert takes like these on trending topics, subscribe to our email newsletter!

Mit der sich verändernden SEO-Landschaft Schritt halten

Melden Sie sich für unseren Newsletter an, um praktische Tipps und Ratschläge von Experten zu erhalten, die Ihnen helfen, die Sichtbarkeit Ihrer Website zu verbessern.

E-Mail(Erforderlich)