When the noise fades, what remains is intent.
When the excitement fades and the next big thing arrives, the creative industry faces the same old question: what endures?
If WIRED was right to call AI “the bubble to burst them all,” then this moment — the edge between inflation and disillusion — is where we start to see what truly matters.
Not the tools. Not the hype. But the choices we make with them.
From automation to authorship
In the age of AI, creation has become instant.
But the speed that once looked like liberation now feels like dilution.
As machines learn to generate, the value of deciding what to make grows.
Authorship — the ability to choose, to edit, to mean something — becomes the new scarcity.
Technology will continue to produce.
But authorship will define.
The slow return of craft
Speed has been mistaken for progress.
Yet every art form eventually rediscovers the value of slowness — of the deliberate gesture, the intentional cut.
The creative world will have to re-learn refinement: editing as a statement, silence as a form.
Craft is patience turned into precision.
Value in meaning, not mechanism
When every process is automated, the only real differentiation left is meaning.
The market for ideas will shift from what you can generate to what you can stand for.
Brands, artists, and strategists who ground their work in values and vision will outlast any platform.
What endure
Empathy. Narrative. Curiosity.
Everything else is temporary code.
After the AI bubble, what will remain are not the systems we built, but the stories we tell —
and the humans who keep telling them.
By Sabino D’Argenio — Creative Director · Digital Strategist