AI Hurting Creativity: Protect Your Voice, Authorship, and Craft

I’m Michael Sammut. I am the founder of Four Eyes, a web design & development agency. I live in Charlotte and work alongside many of the people who make this city great.

Over the last few weeks, I have spoken with family, friends, and colleagues about work displacement and how AI is robbing creativity.

For the last several years, my company needed to adopt and adapt to the reality of AI. From automation to writing code, we have used AI in so many capacities that I cannot even keep track.

Here is what we learned:

In the places where creativity is the product, AI is doing real harm. Not hypothetical harm. Not “someday” it might bite us. Harm right now, a big bite right now.

It’s displacing individuality. It’s a flattening voice. It’s flooding the marketplace with work that looks finished but is generic. And it’s pressuring working creatives to compete with an infinite supply of “good enough.” In business, there is the concept of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). How did minimal become acceptable? Here is the thing: we are all good with something until it affects us and this is harming us both from a consumer and producer standpoint.

From my brother and my dear friends to colleagues, the conversations I’ve had bring to light one thing clearly:

AI cannot replace the human element. It cannot replace emotion. It cannot replace the creative journey that gives work its meaning.

So yes, AI can be useful. But the stance has to be firmer than “use it carefully.”

What AI is taking?

The problem is not that AI can make things faster. The problem is that it leads people to believe it streamlines the process when, in reality, it circumvents the creative aspects.

1) It replaces a person’s voice with an average voice

AI is trained to produce the most likely next thing, which is exactly how you get content that sounds clean and feels dead.

Your voice is not just phrasing. It’s a lived experience. It’s the weird specifics. It’s my crappy grammar, despite having a tool to fix it. It’s the risks you take. It’s whimsy. It’s the decisions you make when there isn’t a perfect answer.

AI is training the marketplace to undervalue the human experience.

2) It turns authenticity into a facade

Work can look “authentic” and still be manufactured. Once authenticity becomes a style, audiences stop believing anything.

And when that happens, everyone loses. Especially communities built on trust and relationships, like Charlotte.

3) It breaks the link between our work and accountability

A real creative is accountable to people. Clients. Audiences. Communities. Collaborators.

AI isn’t accountable to anyone. It doesn’t carry consequences. It doesn’t have to stand behind a choice in a room full of peers. It doesn’t have to earn trust.

When you let AI lead creative work, you remove the accountability that gives creative work weight. Worst yet, it allows someone who has not put in the time and effor masquerade as someone who has.

4) It floods the room

AI can generate; it can endlessly generate.

That changes the economics. It reduces attention. It substitutes the time it takes to create with an excessive amount of dribbling.

And that dynamic is already visible across music, illustration, photography, writing, code, and brand work.

The dangers of relying too heavily on AI for creative and technical work were recently highlighted when a client approached us about a coding project. When asked if we utilized AI, we offered full transparency: “it depends on the use case.” For the specific task they outlined, we explained that while we could use AI for testing, architecting the code to accommodate this would actually take longer. Not pleased, they chose an overseas team that promised to use AI for the full build.

A week later, they returned, asking us to fix their code due to security vulnerabilities and functional issues. We resolved the problems using our decades of experience.

This incident is just the latest example. These experiences, coupled with discussions with local peers like Tim and Makayla from “Charlotte is Creative,” inspired this article.

Where AI should not be used

If you’re a creative, you need a clear “no list.” Not a vague guideline.

AI should not be used for:

• Final creative writing or voice meant to represent you or your brand
• Concept development when originality is the deliverable
• Art direction and the decisions that define a style
• Music composition and lyric writing when the work is meant to carry personal identity
• Visual creation that imitates or replaces human artists
• Anything emotionally sensitive where a human response matters
• Anything that muddies credit or makes authorship unclear

If you do use AI in these zones, the work may be faster. But it will also be weaker. More replaceable. Less human.

And people notice. Even if they can’t always articulate it.

I can personally share that I thought AI would be great, but I have learned from my mistakes.

Where AI can help without harming creativity

Here is where we have found AI can help. This is where AI earns its place, in my eyes. I use my company for things that do not define me or my company – rote, reproducible tasks

AI can help with:

• meeting notes and summaries
• proposals, scopes, and project planning drafts
• scheduling, follow-ups, and client admin
• organizing research and creating reading guides
• checklists, QA processes, documentation, onboarding
• turning my own messy notes into a structure I can use to rewrite

I use it for tasks that buy back time, are seldom client-facing, and require minimal personality.

And the point of buying time back is not to produce more. It’s to create better. And to stay sane.

Charlotte creatives keep creative

AI can assist with friction points, but humans must own authorship.

If AI disappeared tomorrow (it’s not going to), your work should still sound like you. Feel like you. Look like you. Because the core creative decisions were always yours.

That’s how we protect individuality.
That’s how we protect authenticity.
That’s how we protect the human element.

If you are going to use AI: Protecting your creative discipline

OK, I want to be balanced here, and I understand some may want to use AI. So let me lean into writing here because it’s the easiest place to see voice get flattened, but it applies to music, design, photography, film, and any other craft.

• Start with your guts. A single sentence. That feeling. Your unique perspective.
• Only use AI for the annoying stuff. Stuff like admin, structuring, organizing, and checklists.
• Keep AI out of the creative driver’s seat. It shouldn’t be the main author, composer, or art director.
• Give it the human touch. Rewrite, recompose, redesign, and re-edit it yourself.
• Inject real-life evidence. Add local context, actual limitations, and genuine choices.
• Be upfront about who gets credit. Make sure to protect your collaborators and the community.
• See if it works in the real world. Read it aloud. Get feedback from a trusted friend. Experience it fresh.

This is how you regain time without losing yourself.

What Four Eyes did

My company, Four Eyes, had to adapt too. The market moved quickly, and clients began asking AI questions about whether we liked it.

We adopted AI in a narrow way:

• to accelerate research and operational work
• to improve QA and documentation
• to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks

But we refuse to use it to replace the human parts of our work:

• discovery conversations
• strategy decisions
• brand voice
• publishing anything we wouldn’t stand behind

In other words, we used AI to protect our service, not to cheapen it.