Super Unfiltered

Impact of AI for In-House Brand Creatives: James Murphy

When compliance becomes a creativity bottleneck, what gets built? James Murphy just revealed what happens when you bring AI into the most risk-averse industry on earth: banking. Here's what the SVP Creative Brand Lead at U.S. Bank shared in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The trust paradox: Finance lives and dies on authenticity, but AI-generated content exists in a legal gray zone. When Midjourney spits out artwork, who owns it? Who clears it? And how do you make sure a prompt doesn't accidentally infringe on Disney, or worse, erode customer trust? → The junior creative survival question: Art directors used to spend year one comping storyboards. Now AI can rough-cut video on demand. So what do their first five years look like when the grunt work disappears? → 80% of U.S. banks hiked AI spend in 2025: Some by 25% or more. But they're not just betting on content generation, they're navigating the tightrope between personalization at scale and regulatory compliance that can kill a campaign in seconds. The uncomfortable truth? When everyone can produce at the same speed, regulated industries like banking face a choice: embrace the sameness or build guardrails that actually protect what makes them different. So here's Supergood's question: When AI removes the friction from execution, does compliance become your new competitive advantage, or your creative death sentence?

Copyright in the AI Era: Joe Naylor

When copyright becomes unenforceable, who pays for creativity? Joe Naylor just dropped some uncomfortable truths about the billion-dollar battle between AI companies and the creators they're scraping from. Here's what the CEO of ImageRights revealed in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The $6.3M wake-up call: One photographer included a single sentence in his contract—"non-transferable and non-assignable"—and turned it into the largest jury statutory damage award in US history. That's $150,000 per photo. → Big Tech's selective spending: AI companies will drop billions on NVIDIA chips and data centers, but ask them to pay for the actual content training their models? Suddenly it's a "national security threat" and we'll "lose to China." → Stock photography is dead: If you're shooting generic office scenes for licensing, AI already replaced you. But if you're shooting Taylor Swift? You're irreplaceable. The gap between commodity and craft just became a chasm. The uncomfortable truth? Courts are calling AI training "exceedingly transformative"—but conveniently ignoring that the outputs directly compete with the creators whose work trained the models. Half a billion images hit the internet every day. Getty ingests tens of thousands before lunch. And the question isn't whether AI scraped your work—it's whether you registered it with the copyright office before they did. So here's Supergood's question: If AI can generate anything you can create, what makes your work worth protecting, and worth paying for?

AI vs. Humans in Production: Matthew Craig

A former Wall Street Journal photojournalist just explained why your production budget is about to become irrelevant. Matthew Craig built a global visual storytelling network for brands like Airbnb and Google. Now he's running AI workflows in parallel with live shoots—and the "impossible" shots are getting cheaper than stock footage. His prediction? The entire industry is asking the wrong question. Here's what he shared in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The parallel pipeline: While his team films real people, AI models train on the exact same brand guidelines. By post-production, they're synthesizing product shots that would've cost $50K and taken weeks. Clients can't tell the difference. → The microwave vs. the kitchen: Most creatives use AI like a microwave—type prompt, get random output. Matt's team uses Stable Diffusion like a full professional kitchen, controlling lighting, motion, climate, and environment with the precision of a DP. The gap between these approaches is the gap between amateurs and agencies in 12 months. → The homogenization trap: Every Midjourney output looks the same because it's trained on the statistical average of the internet. The agencies that survive will be the ones capturing their own training data during live shoots—building proprietary visual languages that can't be replicated. The uncomfortable truth? Stock footage research used to take hours. Now generative synthesis is faster AND cheaper. The only question is whether you're still paying for the old way. His boldest prediction for 2026: Audio. Voice becomes the primary human-computer interface, and musicians start building hyper-curated AI models. The music industry's copyright battle will make visual AI look like a warmup. So here's Supergood's question: Are you training AI on your brand's visual language, or are you still licensing someone else's generic footage?

Young Lion's Perspective on the Future of AI x Advertising: Ronaldo Cordova

A D&AD Yellow Pencil winner just admitted something most creatives won't say out loud. Ronaldo Cordova, who went from Ecuador to winning one of advertising's most prestigious awards, uses AI on every brief. Even when clients explicitly say "don't use AI." His logic? They're buying the work, not the process. Here's what he revealed in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The invisible revolution: While agencies debate AI ethics, Ronaldo uses ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Runway on client work—and clients never notice. They just see award-winning results delivered faster. → The beer refill campaign: His breakthrough idea came from a morning journal entry, refined with ChatGPT, and produced using AI tools. Traditional approach? Weeks of production. His approach? Days. Same Yellow Pencil outcome. → The 1-2 year warning: Tools that turn a single image into commercial-grade video already exist. In two years, anyone can recreate Will Smith eating spaghetti at broadcast quality. The creative who can't adapt will be the one holding the old Bose headphones. The uncomfortable truth? The industry's AI debate is already over. The winners just stopped asking for permission. His prediction for 2026: Agencies shift from billing hours to billing outcomes. If AI lets you finish in 3 hours what used to take 30, should you get paid less—or more? So here's Supergood's question: Are you still pretending AI isn't in your workflow, or are you building your advantage while others debate?

Rebuilding the Creative Process with Generative AI: Milton and Jones

When execution becomes free, what are you really selling? Milton Correa and Jones Krahl just revealed something uncomfortable: the ad industry's sacred "1% idea, 99% execution" rule died. AI killed it. Here's what they shared in our latest Super Unfiltered conversation: → The vinyl-doll paradox: A trend went viral not because of production quality (AI made that accessible to everyone), but because the concept was novel. When everyone has the same tools, the idea is all that's left. → Personalization at scale is table stakes: Their clients aren't asking if they can create thousands of personalized ads. They're asking what comes after they can do that effortlessly. → Taste is the new competitive advantage: Rick Rubin gets paid millions for his taste, not his technical skills. In an AI-rich world where a graduate student can build a website in 30 seconds, your ability to discern what's worth making matters more than your ability to make it. The uncomfortable truth? If AI can execute your idea as well as you can, you weren't really a creator, you were a production assistant. The non-negotiable skill now isn't what you know today. It's how fast you're willing to learn while everything changes. So here's Supergood question: If everyone can execute at the same level, what makes your creative work irreplaceable?