The Realities of Modern Creative Work

Do we occasionally feel like we’re being replaced by this monster? Occasionally. Photo credit: Unsplash

The dirty secret of modern creative work isn’t just that we use AI. It’s the impossible math of why we have to, and the heavy environmental toll we try to ignore when we do it.

There is a massive, well-deserved reckoning happening right now over the footprint of generative AI. The water required to cool server farms, the local grid strains, the reliance on fossil fuels, and the carbon cost of running these models — all of these energy demands are real and staggering. What’s really disappointing about this is that companies like Digital Ocean and Squarespace, which were originally committed to reducing their carbon footprint, quietly dropped those commitments without explanation. Many new technologies are expensive energy hogs when they are first launched but can evolve to become more efficient with time, which is why it’s a disappointment when companies retreat from their original position.

For a studio committed to progressive, equitable futures, TLC acknowledges that this reality creates immediate friction. I use generative AI mindfully, sparingly, and with an acute awareness of its environmental cost. I don't let algorithms write my core strategies. I don't outsource my deep-dive thinking, my human-centered design, or the messy, irreplaceable work of building real community movements to a machine. And as a creative writer working on my first full-length novel, I have not written a single word of my novel through the use of AI, and I never will.

But let’s talk about the machinery of the modern media environment. When a client needs fifty distinct variants of ad copy to be loaded for an ad campaign by Tuesday morning, or a massive sweep of localization metadata reformatted across platforms, the economics of independent business hit a wall. Small boutique studios and solo operators aren't backed by endless venture capital or armies of junior copywriters working in shifts. We are competing against massive, billion-dollar agencies with razor-thin margins, relentless output demands, and a system that treats endless digital volume as the baseline.

Using a tool to clear a high-volume operational hurdle at 2 AM is often about survival in a late-stage capitalist market that demands infinite content for finite compensation. But we have to name what that survival costs. It relies on infrastructure that puts a heavy burden on local communities and ecosystems.

Transparency means owning those contradictions. It means drawing a hard line between execution mechanics (like generating high-volume ad variants where the math forces our hand) and intellectual property (like original positioning, strategic architecture, and human empathy). I minimize my own use of generative AI as much as I can, because pretending the cloud doesn't have a smoke stack doesn't make it go away. For me to be able to work without it, someone would have to be willing to pay me more. And for the record, while some of my ad variants might be written by a machine, they never go live without a human review.

And also for the record: Like all professional writers, I lovingly employed em-dashes well before the advent of LLMs. Some things are just too good — and too human — to leave to the machine.