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You&#8217;ve probably seen it by now. The AI-generated Instagram accounts with perfect photos, the podcast clips that sound too polished to be real, the comments that feel just slightly off.
I met a creator recently who had fantastic engagement on social. Their Reels were taking off, dozens of comments rolling in from what looked like a lively community. But something felt slightly off and the comments came in faster and all at once.
So I clicked through to the profile of a commenter, &#8220;Gloria From Europe,&#8221; who seemed normal at first. You know, she had the correct number of fingers. But after glancing for a moment I realized she was fake. The AI-generated images, the fake bio link, the manufactured stories.
I kept digging and found dozens of accounts that all followed the same pattern:
<ul>
<li>AI-generated photos in multiple poses</li>
<li>Usernames related to style, travel, or creative topics</li>
<li>Always between 1,500 and 2,000 followers</li>
<li>50 to 100 posts</li>
<li>Three sets of saved stories</li>
</ul>
It was all fake. Very dystopian.
As creators, we&#8217;re watching this unfold in real time. The technology that was supposed to help us is starting to feel like it might replace us entirely. And honestly? That fear makes sense.
<h2>The AI hype cycle we&#8217;ve all lived through</h2>
But AI isn&#8217;t exactly new. For the last seven to 10 years, we were constantly over-promised and we overestimated what was possible with AI.
So many companies wrote &#8220;AI&#8221; into their pitch decks just to get funding.
Remember the hallucinations in data, the photos of hands with seven fingers, the companies that claimed to be AI-powered but weren&#8217;t?
Take Amazon Go stores. Pretty cool premise. You walk in, grab what you want, put it in your basket, and walk out without talking to anyone. It automatically figures out what you put in your cart and charges your account using AI magic.
But then the story broke that <a href="https://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/amazon-s-just-walk-out-checkout-tech-was-powered-by-1-000-indian-workers-124040400463_1.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Amazon&#8217;s walkout technology relies on hundreds of workers in India watching you shop</a>. It was actually just a big team watching the cameras.
Artificial intelligence? No&#8230; that&#8217;s just regular old-fashioned intelligence.
But after years of AI being overhyped, it&#8217;s here and delivering real results. And here&#8217;s what I believe: AI is significantly more powerful than what we imagine now. It&#8217;s actually under-hyped right now.
Everything is changing so fast, and these new technologies will compound faster than we can imagine. In the next few years we’ll have AI becoming very practical and valuable from self-driving cars and humanoid robots to creating advances in health and recovery with peptides and brain-computer interfaces where people can control prosthetic limbs with their thoughts.
I think we&#8217;re significantly underestimating how much the world will change in the next two to three years.
<h2>What AI mean for the future of creators</h2>
I had a moment thinking about this while watching my kids. I&#8217;ve got three boys; my oldest is 13. A few months ago, I showed him Cursor, the coding tool. I said, &#8220;Here&#8217;s what you can do with it.&#8221; I showed him the basics of how to prompt.
I came back an hour later, and he had built a game where he could go around and mine resources, level up, build buildings—something he had prompted his way through with code. That&#8217;s pretty wild that he can do that, with AI as his tutor.
In five years, he&#8217;ll turn 18. What career advice would you give him? The world will change so much between now and when he goes to college. I don&#8217;t even know if he should go to college.
A few years ago I knew exactly what I&#8217;d say. Today, I&#8217;m not so sure.
We&#8217;re all creators, so let&#8217;s look at the future of the creator economy with fresh eyes.
Let&#8217;s make a prediction, starting with something familiar: a podcast.
Soon, AI will write the script. It&#8217;ll be optimized to hook attention, hold it, and deliver perfectly timed punchlines. AI voices will narrate it. AI avatars will perform it. They&#8217;ll A/B test whether the audience prefers a 25-year-old woman or a 50-year-old man.
AI will cut clips, write titles, and push it to every platform. And then AI bots will consume it, share it, comment on it.
We&#8217;ll have content created by AI, performed by AI, and consumed by AI. No humans required.
Sounds great, right? I don&#8217;t think so either.
Buckminster Fuller said, &#8220;The race between dystopia and utopia will be neck and neck until the very end.&#8221;
The truth is, I&#8217;ve bet my entire career on the future of the creator economy. I live and breathe the creator world from three different perspectives: First as a creator myself, writing, podcasting, and speaking. Next as a coach, diving deep inside creator businesses to help them scale. And finally, running Kit to serve over 500,000 creators who use our platform.
And despite all of this, I still believe in it now more than ever. Why?
Because people don&#8217;t connect with pixels. They connect with people.
And in the world we&#8217;re walking into, full of noise, bots, and infinite content, what&#8217;s real will matter more than ever.
<h2>Three predictions for the future of the creator economy</h2>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-61635 size-full lazy" data-src="https://media.kit.com/post/3-predications-creator-economy.jpg?fm=pjpg" alt="3 predications for the future of the creator economy" width="1600" height="900" srcset="https://media.kit.com/post/3-predications-creator-economy.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=338&amp;w=600 600w, https://media.kit.com/post/3-predications-creator-economy.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=576&amp;w=1024 1024w, https://media.kit.com/post/3-predications-creator-economy.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=432&amp;w=768 768w, https://media.kit.com/post/3-predications-creator-economy.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=864&amp;w=1536 1536w, https://media.kit.com/post/3-predications-creator-economy.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=1152&amp;w=2048 2048w, https://media.kit.com/post/3-predications-creator-economy.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=332&amp;w=590 590w, https://media.kit.com/post/3-predications-creator-economy.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=219&amp;w=390 390w, https://media.kit.com/post/3-predications-creator-economy.jpg?fm=pjpg 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px" />
Futurists always say &#8220;everything will change,&#8221; but they don&#8217;t get specific. I went to a keynote recently that had all this talk about how everything was going to change, but they never made a single prediction, I think for fear of being wrong.
So at the risk of being completely wrong, here are three concrete predictions about the future of the creator economy.
<h3>Prediction 1: AI will give creators superpowers, not replace them.</h3>
So much of the work we do as creators is busy work. At every step along the way, we&#8217;ve embraced technology to make that faster: better editing tools, easier recording setups, improved collaboration platforms.
That&#8217;s already starting to show up in the little things, like how much easier it is to turn one piece of original content into many.
It used to be that if you recorded a podcast and wanted to turn it into written content, that was a very manual process. You&#8217;d have to re-listen to the episode, pull out key themes, and write everything from scratch. It was time-consuming and inconsistent.
But now? You can feed the transcript into AI and instantly get a list of topics, takeaways, and quotes you could build on. From there, it&#8217;s easy to turn it into other formats like a newsletter issue. You can ask AI to generate an outline, a title, or even a full draft—all rooted in your original voice and ideas.
This gives creators the ability to move faster and do more with less. You&#8217;re not replacing your creativity: you&#8217;re amplifying it.
Because while AI might be able to generate, only you can build trust. Only you can have a lived experience worth sharing. Only you can create a connection that actually means something.
<h3>Prediction 2: Email will change substantially, but not be replaced.</h3>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-61636 size-full lazy" data-src="https://media.kit.com/post/how-email-will-change.jpg?fm=pjpg" alt="3 ways email might change with AI" width="1600" height="900" srcset="https://media.kit.com/post/how-email-will-change.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=338&amp;w=600 600w, https://media.kit.com/post/how-email-will-change.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=576&amp;w=1024 1024w, https://media.kit.com/post/how-email-will-change.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=432&amp;w=768 768w, https://media.kit.com/post/how-email-will-change.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=864&amp;w=1536 1536w, https://media.kit.com/post/how-email-will-change.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=1152&amp;w=2048 2048w, https://media.kit.com/post/how-email-will-change.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=332&amp;w=590 590w, https://media.kit.com/post/how-email-will-change.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=219&amp;w=390 390w, https://media.kit.com/post/how-email-will-change.jpg?fm=pjpg 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px" />
To make this specific, let&#8217;s break email down into three parts: creation, delivery, and consumption.
<h4>Creation</h4>
Logging into Kit, hand-typing your newsletter, and hitting send probably isn&#8217;t going to happen the same way a few years from now. I already find myself replacing half of what I type with voice transcription now that tools like SuperWhisper are getting really good.
<h4>Delivery</h4>
This is the actual pipes that bring the content you wrote to the inbox of the person who should read it. Email has lasted for more than 30 years and nothing has taken it down. But AI is going to take down a lot of things that have been unable to be crushed up until this point.
So if anything was going to take out email, I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if it was AI. But I don&#8217;t think it will, and here&#8217;s why.
The candidates for replacing it might be tools like WhatsApp, Instagram Messenger, Telegram, or something new entirely. But all of those are owned by individual platforms and companies.
One of the hardest problems in AI right now is that it&#8217;s very hard to connect disparate systems, to move content and share data between closed systems. As you have all these different companies building AI models, I don&#8217;t think OpenAI and Anthropic are going to say, &#8220;You know what, Mark Zuckerberg? We&#8217;ve decided we&#8217;re going to send all of our communication through your platform so you can train on all of our data.&#8221;
They&#8217;re all in this war trying to see who can build the best models and serve their customers best. They know that data and communication are most important, and they&#8217;re not going to make big bets on someone else&#8217;s system. Email will remain that open system that everyone communicates on.
<h4>Consumption</h4>
Then I think consumption is going to change dramatically. What if, instead of reading each newsletter in your inbox, there&#8217;s a podcast episode that&#8217;s generated from your subscriptions, made just for you? Maybe you get the full version of your favorite newsletters and then just a quick summary of ones you want to stay in touch with. It could be totally bespoke, created for you to listen to on your commute.
You could say, &#8220;Hey, make me one that&#8217;s exactly 22 minutes long because that&#8217;s how long it takes me to get to work.&#8221; That doesn&#8217;t exist today, but I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if it existed very soon.
That&#8217;s why I believe email changes substantially but won&#8217;t be replaced. So be ready to create in new ways and focus on content that your subscribers will want to consume. Expect the inbox to change. But also expect to still rely on email as an underlying system.
<h3>Prediction 3: Every business will become a creator business</h3>
You&#8217;re already seeing it with local businesses. When I go on Instagram, I see ads for painters, landscapers—they&#8217;re using creator-style marketing.
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-61637 size-full lazy" data-src="https://media.kit.com/post/marketing-is-creator-marketing.jpg?fm=pjpg" alt="Examples of how businesses are marketing like creators" width="1600" height="900" srcset="https://media.kit.com/post/marketing-is-creator-marketing.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=338&amp;w=600 600w, https://media.kit.com/post/marketing-is-creator-marketing.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=576&amp;w=1024 1024w, https://media.kit.com/post/marketing-is-creator-marketing.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=432&amp;w=768 768w, https://media.kit.com/post/marketing-is-creator-marketing.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=864&amp;w=1536 1536w, https://media.kit.com/post/marketing-is-creator-marketing.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=1152&amp;w=2048 2048w, https://media.kit.com/post/marketing-is-creator-marketing.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=332&amp;w=590 590w, https://media.kit.com/post/marketing-is-creator-marketing.jpg?fit=scale&amp;fm=pjpg&amp;h=219&amp;w=390 390w, https://media.kit.com/post/marketing-is-creator-marketing.jpg?fm=pjpg 1600w" sizes="(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px" />
The reason is because creator marketing is the best way to capture and hold attention. It&#8217;s direct, sincere, and builds trust with the brand you want to work with.
Creator marketing just becomes&#8230; marketing. The way we do things is the way everyone is doing it.
You&#8217;re seeing this with celebrities too. Just in the last six months, we launched newsletters on Kit for Tom Brady, Hasan Minhaj, Dua Lipa, Ellen, Lil&#8217; Jon, Morgan Freeman, Matthew McConaughey, and more.
We&#8217;ve heard a few people say, &#8220;Oh, I guess Kit is for celebrities now. Not creators like me.&#8221;
But that&#8217;s not true at all. Kit isn&#8217;t pivoting to serve celebrities. The celebrities are pivoting to become like you. They want creative control. They want direct connection with their fans. They&#8217;ve always been creators with their art, you just showed them a better way to package it, distribute it, and connect.
Everyone is converging on creator marketing. Every business is becoming a creator business.
<h2>Authentic human connections are a creator&#8217;s competitive advantage</h2>
This is the future we&#8217;re headed toward, one where AI amplifies creators instead of replacing them, where email evolves but endures, and where every business becomes a creator business. The question becomes: how do you build for that world?
At Kit, we believe it comes down to two fundamental things: connecting people and connecting technology.
In a world full of AI-generated noise, authentic human connections will be your competitive advantage. In a landscape where tools are constantly evolving, you need technology that adapts with you, not against you.
At Kit, we&#8217;re not building to replace creators with machines. We&#8217;re building to give creators what they need to thrive in this new landscape. Because we believe that the creators who lean into what makes them irreplaceably human, while using AI to handle the busy work, will be the ones who win.
We&#8217;re focused on technology that amplifies your creativity and features that help you connect more meaningfully so you can build real relationship with your audience.
<a href="https://app.kit.com/users/signup?plan=1k&amp;__cf_chl_tk=lZaHrOJRhicYP9ACjzh3UD2O1daaeitqQO4zFdqScDg-1750095486-1.0.1.1-Zu46Tx3JdnmkaLGl2ULU3rAroEXgNPK_7XsRIInp2CM" target="_blank" rel="noopener">If you&#8217;re curious what this looks like, try Kit for a free 14-day trial</a>.

The creator’s edge in the age of AI

Nathan Barry

Kit: The only alternative to ActiveCampaign for creators