AI can make the first draft nearly free. A hundred logo directions before lunch. Forty taglines while the coffee brews. If your value as a creative person was ever "I can generate options," that value is evaporating fast, and I think that's fine.
Because generating options was never the hard part. Anyone who has run a real brand project knows the hard part comes after the wall of sticky notes: deciding which three of the three hundred ideas deserve to live, and having the spine to kill the rest. That skill has a short, old-fashioned name. Taste.
Taste is a filter, not a feeling
People talk about taste like it's a mood, something you either woke up with or didn't. In practice it's closer to a filter you build by hand over years: every project you shipped, every one you regret, every time a client said "this feels off" and you eventually figured out why. Taste is pattern recognition with receipts.
Which means it compounds. The more real work you do, the sharper the filter gets. A tool can hand you a thousand outputs, but it cannot tell you which one will still look right on a truck wrap in four years, or which tagline will make the founder wince at a trade show. That judgment lives in people who have been in the room.
What I actually do all day
When I look honestly at my week, very little of it is "making things appear." Most of it is choosing. Choosing which strategy question matters, which reference is a trap, which of two nearly identical layouts respects the content and which one just decorates it. Clients don't hire me for volume. They hire me because I can tell the difference, and I can explain the difference in plain language.
That explaining part matters more than ever. When options are infinite, the person who can say "here's why this one, and here's why not the others" becomes the most useful person in the project. Curation without reasoning is just preference. Curation with reasoning is direction.
So no, I don't think creative careers are ending. I think the entry ramp is moving. The work that survives is the work machines are worst at: caring about the right things, noticing what everyone else scrolled past, and knowing what deserves to exist at all. Build the filter. It travels well.