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AI Impact Awards 2025: Media Execs Say AI Won’t Replace Human Creativity

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1 month ago

July 29, 2025

AI advances in industries like software development or health care are largely understood to improve efficiencies when dealing with numbers and data. But there is still concern about the use of automation and generative AI in creative industries, where a unique human touch is paramount.

The winners of Newsweek‘s AI Impact Awards in the category of Arts & Media represented three different industries that are using this emerging technology. For them, using AI doesn’t eliminate human input. It increases efficiency, democratizes their fields and allows for more creativity to hit the marketplace.

Interdependence

Interdependence is a PR and strategic communications firm, with offices in every major market across the U.S., that works with clients across industries, including entertainment, consumer and travel brands. It is the winner of Newsweek‘s AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Digital Media & Arts.

In addition to traditional media relations, the company manages social media, influencer marketing, branding and SEO. Interdependence now uses generative AI on a platform called Interviewed to identify trends based on what customers are searching for online.

“The trend alerts are based on click rates,” Interdependence President Sarah Schmidt told Newsweek in an interview. “So when our AI determines that a click rate is spiking, that’s when we know that a certain topic or trend is emerging to trend, and that’s our cue to go out with it.”

For their client Overtone, a semipermanent hair dye company, Interdependence identified major hair trends on social media.

When celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Busy Philipps and Megan Fox dyed their hair pink last year, Interviewed picked up a rapid spike in conversations around pink hair in both traditional media and social media, as audiences were eager to re-create the look.

Interdependence gathered trend data and alerted beauty editors, journalists and influencers covering the trend to pitch Overtone’s product that was relevant to the trend. Interviewed has a database of 25,000 journalists to identify who has written about emerging trends or similar topics.

The AI tools’ rapid response allowed Interdependence to “get ahead of” the trend in a way that was timely and relevant, Schmidt said.

“By aligning with celebrity-driven beauty trends, we secured top-tier placements at the peak of interest, positioning Overtone as an industry leader in on-trend hair color,” Interdependence said in its awards application.

The “King Kylie Pink” hair trend garnered nearly 79 million impressions, and the brand’s product was placed in eight major media outlets, including Byrdie, Glamour, MSN, Allure and Yahoo Lifestyle, according to Interdependence.

Schmidt said the company is constantly adjusting the tool by updating specific keywords that will pick up trends quicker, “before they blow up,” and track better data for clients.

And when teams can spend less time tracking and making dashboards, Schmidt said, they can focus on higher-level tasks, like developing creative strategies to help clients continue to innovate and expand.

Integrating technology internally will be “a game changer” for PR firms, like Interdependence, which, Schmidt said, relies on storytelling and personal relationships.

AI Impact Awards: Arts & Media

Newsweek Illustration

“We want to maintain our competitive advantage; we are continuing to push the boundaries, continuing to innovate, and we are committed to having the most advanced tech stack in public relations,” she said. “We want our team to have every tool at their disposal that is going to make them efficient, optimized and smart so we can continue to add that value to our clients.”

Automation of lower-level tasks through AI tech is encouraged throughout the company, but, Schmidt said, there is still that human touch to everything teams do.

“We really are living at the corner of tech plus human plus innovation,” she said. “We never will downplay the importance of our humans and their strategy, their creativity, their ability to make relationships and connect. That’s something that AI can never do. And so from that perspective, PR still needs to be uniquely human. We just power our team through these innovations to get to fully optimize them and make their work as strategic and propped-up with tech as possible.”

Spines

AI is not only helping improve internal and external efficiency but also increasing accessibility in arts and media creation.

Thirteen years ago, Israeli author Yehuda Niv encountered many roadblocks and inefficiencies when trying to publish his book. He later founded Niv Publishing, which grew into one of Israel’s largest publishing houses, with more than 1,200 titles published annually. But still, the publishing process remained slow, costly and inaccessible for so many people.

Using AI technology, Niv founded Spines, an AI-driven publishing platform that “removes the barriers that prevent authors from bringing their books to market,” the company said in its application.

Spines is now the winner of Newsweek‘s AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Written Media & Arts.

A book normally takes six to 18 months to get published. But with Spines, Niv said, the process takes two to three weeks. And it costs thousands of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars.

To circumvent those challenges, Spines deploys AI to automate key stages like spelling and grammar checks, page formatting, cover design and audiobook creation. Spines also offers marketing services to create and manage campaigns for authors across a wide distribution network. This drives down costs and saves time, while allowing authors to retain 100 percent of their net royalties and full control of their content post-publication.

“We take care of everything, and then the authors can focus on what they are doing best, which is writing books,” Niv told Newsweek in an interview. “We are ready to empower authors with the power of AI to help them to boost their writing, to boost their stories [and] to make them reach more.”

The company has published over 2,000 titles in 2024 and is on track to reach 8,000 by the end of 2025, the company said. Beyond revenue and volume growth, Spines also measures its success by author satisfaction and retention, noting a high percentage of returning authors who publish multiple books. Post-publication tracking also indicates that the platform is able to drive book sales and visibility to a wide range of audiences.

One of the biggest challenges of the platform was resistance and skepticism from those coming from a traditional publishing background. But Niv assured Newsweek that Spines is not trying to replace the authors—Spines is here to help authors realize their dreams in the most efficient way.

To those who assume increasing access to publishing will decrease the quality of the books, Niv says, “Who are you to choose what is high quality and what isn’t?”

“Because the publishing space was controlled for a very long time by the elite publishers who [decide] who is worthy and who isn’t worthy to become an author,” he said. “And I am here to say that if someone spent a year of his life writing a manuscript, he’s worthy of getting his book published. Let the readers decide if it’s good writing or not. Let’s give him a chance.”

Moonvalley

Like Spines, Moonvalley aims to eliminate the traditional barriers for filmmakers by cutting production costs and helping artists realize their vision faster. The company won Newsweek‘s AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Visual Media & Arts.

It was founded to “make generative video technology” for filmmakers and creative professionals. It provides AI tools to creatives “that enhance their vision rather than replace their craft,” the company said in its application.

CEO Naeem Talukdar told Newsweek that Moonvalley is focused on the creators and building control for them to best execute their work.

“We’re building models that can go in and move cameras around, change the lighting and have people decide who’s involved and where they’re moving and how they’re moving,” he said, adding that this process is broadly defined internally as generative filmmaking.

The company built Marey, an AI video model designed for professional filmmakers. It’s also the first clean AI model, where the data, video and imaging used to train the models come from licensed content generated by a network of hundreds of creators, including film school students, independent filmmakers, international studios and film catalogues.

Moonvalley recently announced that it is opening public access to Marey. In a recent press release, Moonvalley Chief Scientific Officer Mateusz Malinowski said Marey gives directors the same level of controls they expect on set and by working with filmmakers directly: “We built technology that amplifies and empowers their creative vision rather than replacing it.”

At Moonvalley’s in-house studio, Asteria, filmmakers are incorporating these AI tools, which allow the company to “build technology that’s actually built for creators, rather than just kind of being these abstract models,” Talukdar said.

Moonvalley built specialized interfaces that let filmmakers direct the AI model using sketches, storyboards, photos and camera controls. According to the company, working directly with professionals shaped the workflow and controls to ensure the technology would fit seamlessly into existing creative processes.

The company likens the effect of this technology to the shift from silent film to talkies, the introduction of Technicolor or the advent of CGI in the ways it is “opening doors to a new creative renaissance where a broader range of voices and stories can be shared.”

“When CGI first came out, there were these fears that a lot of jobs just aren’t going to be there anymore,” Talukdar said. “And it’s true: there are things that obviously you didn’t need to do anymore post-CGI that you did before. However, studios have only increased in size since CGI came out, because now you have a whole new cascade of roles that have opened up in VFX and different things that you have to do.”

He said the proliferation of AI in filmmaking will allow independent filmmakers to make more films

“What’s going to happen is that you’re talking about a 30 to 50 percent savings, and that alone is enough to cause this massive flourishing of creativity,” Talukdar said. “I really think that you’re going to see a golden age of cinema emerge from these independent studios now suddenly being able to punch above their weight and create AAA content, whereas otherwise, they would have just been making indie movies.”

There is plenty of pushback against the use of AI in the filmmaking process, but, he said, many of the fears are not the reality.

“I’m not going to spend two hours watching a ChatGPT-generated movie,” he said. “There’s no quick fixes to it, like the industry is angry, and they’re going to be hostile to the technology, as is completely natural.”

The solution, he said, is to ease in a “show, not tell” strategy to demonstrate that creatives can do the same things in a way that is more feasible than before.

“With a generative videography model, these are just power tools,” Talukdar said. “Expecting them to replace filmmakers is asinine. What they need to be is something that filmmakers can now use to realize their visions in a way that they couldn’t before. It’s not that you can make $50 million movies for $10 million, it’s that the studio with a $10 million budget can now make that money go a lot further.”

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Related Topics:AI AI Impact Awards Artificial intelligence Arts & Culture film Interdependence Marketing media Moonvalley Publishing spines

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Tools & Platforms

Creating more jobs while transforming work

Published

2 hours ago

September 7, 2025

Krishna Kumar & Rakshitha Reddy

Artificial intelligence is reshaping employment in ways that challenge basic assumptions about work and human value. While headlines focus on job displacement fears, the data tells a different story: AI will create far more jobs than it eliminates, generating 78 million net new positions globally by 2030.

The World Economic Forum shows that economy-wide trends – including AI adoption, green transition, and demographic shifts – will create 170 million jobs while displacing 92 million. This isn’t simple technological substitution; it represents entirely new forms of human-machine collaboration that require rethinking the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence.

As AI handles routine cognitive tasks, humans are being pushed toward work demanding creativity, emotional intelligence, and nuanced judgment that remains uniquely human. The question isn’t whether we can adapt – it’s whether we can evolve quickly enough to thrive.

Emergence of human-AI collaboration roles

The most revealing development in AI employment isn’t traditional tech job creation, but roles that exist precisely because humans and machines think differently. Tesla’s AI generalists, commanding salaries from $118,000 to $390,000, represent a new professional category: individuals who translate between artificial and human intelligence.

These roles reveal a deeper truth. Rather than replacing human intelligence, AI is highlighting its uniqueness by contrast. The most valuable workers aren’t those competing with machines at computational tasks, but those complementing artificial intelligence with distinctly human capabilities -contextual understanding, ethical reasoning, and navigating ambiguity that remains beyond algorithmic reach.

This represents more than new job categories – it’s the emergence of professionals who serve as translators between artificial and human intelligence. Like social media creating community managers who understood both technology and human behavior, AI creates roles requiring fluency in both machine logic and human insight.

Specialized expertise in AI age

The AI job market is rapidly organizing around a crucial insight: as artificial intelligence handles routine analysis, human expertise becomes more specialized and valuable. Apple’s Machine Learning Algorithm Validation Engineers, earning $141,800-$258,600, don’t just test code – they make judgment calls about when AI systems are safe for real-world deployment.

This specialization reflects a broader pattern across industries. AI Security Specialists, commanding low-six figures to mid-$200,000s, aren’t just cybersecurity experts – they understand how adversaries might exploit AI systems’ tendency to hallucinate or misinterpret edge cases. Their expertise lies in understanding AI vulnerabilities in ways only human insight can provide.

The educational requirements tell a similar story. While many advanced AI roles still prefer graduate credentials, degree requirements have been easing in AI-exposed jobs since 2019 as employers prioritize skills and portfolios. Companies seek individuals who think critically about AI implications, understand limitations, and make nuanced decisions about deployment and oversight.

Education and the transformation of human development

Educational mobilization around AI reflects recognition that transformation goes beyond job training to fundamental questions about human development. In August 2025, Google announced a three-year, $1 billion commitment to provide AI training and tools to US higher-education institutions and nonprofits.

Some selective, cohort-based AI training programs report completion rates approaching 85 per cent, significantly higher than traditional online courses. This success reflects a deeper truth: effective AI education isn’t about learning to use tools, but developing new ways of thinking that complement rather than compete with artificial intelligence.

The paradox of progress and human value

The most counterintuitive aspect of AI employment transformation may be its effect on human value. As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, skills that remain uniquely human become more precious. Recent analyses find salary premiums for AI skills – around 28 per cent in job postings and up to 56 per cent in cross-country comparisons within occupations.

PwC projects AI could contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, while the International Monetary Fund warns that nearly 40 per cent of global employment faces AI exposure, with advanced economies experiencing approximately 60 per cent exposure. These figures suggest transformation rather than simple displacement – work requiring humans to collaborate with AI systems while providing oversight, creativity, and ethical reasoning that algorithms cannot supply.

The gaming industry exemplifies this paradox. Despite experiencing restructuring-related layoffs, 49 per cent of game development workplaces now use AI tools. Rather than eliminating creative work, AI is pushing human creativity toward higher-level conceptual thinking – story design, emotional narrative, and cultural understanding that gives entertainment meaning rather than just technical competence.

Preparing for fundamental transformation

The research reveals both unprecedented opportunity and profound challenge. While AI creates more jobs than it eliminates, WEF estimates roughly 44 per cent of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next few years. This suggests transformation beyond retraining to fundamental questions about human adaptability and productive work.

Success stories from early adopters provide valuable insights. Companies implementing comprehensive AI training report significant productivity gains not because humans become more machine-like, but because they learn to leverage AI capabilities while providing uniquely human value.

Adaptation or transformation

The AI employment revolution represents more than technological change- it’s an opportunity to reconsider fundamental assumptions about human potential, work, and value creation. The 78 million net new jobs by 2030 will demand not just new skills but new ways of thinking about intelligence, creativity, and what makes humans irreplaceable.

The geographic and demographic dimensions add complexity that cannot be ignored. Advanced economies face higher AI exposure than emerging markets. In the U.S., 21 per cent of women versus 17 per cent of men work in jobs among the most exposed to AI. The transformation risks exacerbating existing inequalities unless approached with intentional focus on inclusive development and equitable access to AI-era opportunities.

Embracing the transformation thoughtfully

The AI employment revolution offers an unprecedented opportunity to elevate human work beyond routine tasks toward creativity, relationship building, and the kind of meaning-making that defines our species. The infrastructure investments, educational initiatives, and emerging job categories all point toward a future where humans and artificial intelligence collaborate rather than compete.

The choice before us extends beyond managing technological disruption to embracing human potential in an age of artificial minds. By recognizing that AI’s greatest gift may be forcing us to discover what makes us irreplaceably human, we can build a future where technology amplifies rather than diminishes human flourishing.

The 78 million jobs being created aren’t just employment opportunities – they’re invitations to discover new forms of human capability, creativity, and value creation. The workers who answer that invitation thoughtfully, organizations that embrace human-AI collaboration purposefully, and societies that ensure broad access to AI-era opportunities will shape a future where artificial intelligence serves to reveal rather than replace the irreplaceable nature of human intelligence.

That future requires action today – not just in retraining programs or policy frameworks, but in reimagining what it means to be human in an age of artificial minds. The opportunity is unprecedented, and the time for thoughtful transformation is now.

(Krishna Kumar is a Technology Explorer & Strategist based in Austin, Texas in the US. Rakshitha Reddy is AI Engineer based in Atlanta, US)

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