#InventorMode: How AI Is Reshuffling Work and Redefining Creative Expertise

Summary:
#InventorMode is a shift from limited, tool-constrained creativity to human-AI co-creation. The article explains how AI lowers barriers to storytelling and design, enabling faster experimentation while raising questions about craft, ownership, and cultural change.

Back in 2000, as a graphic designer, I grabbed the chance to reskill from print to digital, giddy like a child seeing a shooting star for the first time. I was dazzled by the possibilities of interactive, but the change was bittersweet.

Before #InventorMode

When I started building websites while at a Carbone Smolan Agency, I had to pause in the office library, holding the recently minted  Isamu Noguchi museum catalogue in my hands. It was heavy, real, loaded with gorgeous photos, fly sheets, dye cuts; it was a masterwork of book design by CSA’s Justin Peters, and tragically, something I knew my career trajectory would never touch.  I hung my head, reduced to the little girl in me, remembering a long-ago moment when I held my Barbie doll in my hands. I had spent hours traveling the universe with Barbie, but I stared into her unblinking blue eyes, realizing I would never play with her again, not knowing what would come next but feeling the void and the profound grief for what was or could have been.

Fast forward to 2024, and my YouTube feed, now bombarded by ‘prompt-engineering’ videos, it was clear that a new frontier was coming into view. Having spent years, limited by the budgets and timelines of various clients, retooling stock images to dress them in a brand personality, I was now looking into the face of an LLM and giddy like a scientist seeing gravitational waves for the first time. Soon after, that same bittersweet recognition hit me again, pausing as I confronted a dark browser window.

I saw a chance in the void of a ChatGPT window to iterate at the speed of my imagination, the usual time and money constraints now obsolete, but at what cost? Would we grieve again? Or would we embrace a new way to be creative?

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy, former director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, tweeted about  “Vibe Coding” on X, saying, “It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing.”

Curious and enthusiastic, I opened ChatGPT and tried vibe coding myself: I achieved about 80% of my objectives quickly, but debugging the last 20% took the luster out of the exercise. Even with my coding skills, I wasn’t getting where I wanted to easily, let alone breaking the barriers of brave new frontiers.

But perhaps I was missing the point.

Realizing #Inventormode

As I dove into vibe coding, I evolved my tried-and-true professional process into hypothesis testing, questioning it, reorganizing it, and injecting other areas of expertise that just seemed… logical… into a new output.

I was not only creating something so new that I still have yet to name it, but also rocketing forward on a route that sprang from myself. It was a latent permission, finally out in the open, and very personal.  I had shifted into what I am calling #inventormode. It took a digital zeitgeist to drive this emergence, and I wanted to know more.

In the tears and rain of change, I had seen technology upend everything before, and there were definitely winners and losers 25 years ago — loads of hype and promise, full of sound and fury — but now am I changed into something new? Am I in inventormode, or did I need my head checked?

If we focus on AI’s signal rather than all the noise, we can see its democratizing potential for creativity, entrepreneurship, and more. As described by author Sangeet Paul Choudary, there will be a global reshuffle — not merely optimization, but new and unseen coordinations with consequences for geopolitical power and the future of work.

Creative professionals are feeling the pressure out of the gate, and we are asking about the consequences, to name a few:

•   What about rights and ownership?
•   What about labor obsolescence?
•   Will we lose craft?
•   Is it too early to cram all these new tools together to make new things?

Perspective on #InventorMode

To gain some perspective, I turned to MetaPuppet — Director, Dad, and Head of Genre at Promise, a Google-backed film studio that is resurrecting scripts previously sidelined due to production costs. These scripts will now have a chance at life, thanks in large part to the creative collaboration between humans and AI.

Our conversation traveled through a galaxy of subjects, from democratizing access to the tension between open-source and corporate control to whether we’re mourning craft or reinventing it. The following is our conversation surfing the friction and freedom of storytelling at the dawn of generative AI.

CHRISTA

So let’s talk about AI and this moment of many shifting into what I call #inventormode. I feel that we can all invent, and the tools to create anything are readily available now, so we can vibe code, which is a form of creativity, but I see creative inventors like yourself springing up everywhere. Does AI make you feel like you can invent anything?

METAPUPPET

Yeah. Specific to what I do with storytelling, it’s a way to get what’s in my head onto a screen and share it with other people. And I’ve been dreaming of that since I was a kid, and it always felt so far away because you had to make it in Hollywood. This tech feels like an unlock for any creativity. I also think about people, from other countries or other upbringings or ranges of disabilities, where it was never a possibility. It is now a possibility if you have a story in your head that you want to see. And it’s really gratifying to be able to get it out of your head onto a screen. Other people can it can be shared with. So in that way, I feel like an inventor 100%.

CHRISTA

That’s great. I love that you see it as kind of democratizing creativity. Would you say that’s accurate in a way?

METAPUPPET

I do. AI is such a broad term, but in regard to storytelling, yeah. We’ve never had this level of visual effects, in an affordable way, before, where anybody with a cell phone can be doing these things. A lot of them. The technology is both intelligent and yet very dumb. How intelligent it is depends on the user input and what you want to get out of it. So AI allows creative freedom, and it removes the technical and cost barriers.

CHRISTA

In the early days of the internet, I was building my first websites. I had to create one for Netscape and another for Internet Explorer because they weren’t the same at all. The cacophony of technology that I had, and trying to get it all to play together well, but it didn’t really want to play together well. Eventually, it all consolidated a little better. Does AI feel that way right now? Does it feel like a wild West of so many tools that do part of the job, and getting them all to communicate is the challenge, or is it different?

METAPUPPET

The way it’s been for the last couple of years is that there’s a really good image generator over here. There’s lip sync over here, there’s inpainting, there’s upscaling, there’s audio editing. It’s all separate. Some have been trying to be all-in-one, but that’s not the answer. Then you get a hybrid of that where companies use APIs, third-party image models in their platform. So you can do more things in one place, but I’m all about giving the user the choice. I think it is the smartest way. When I talk to these different platforms or companies, I always tell them, like, you don’t have to be the best at everything. Just be the best at your one thing.

It does feel like we’re merging, and I talk about this with my other people in my community about conglomerations. You wonder if this is all just going to get bought up by Google, and everything’s just going to be owned, you know?

CHRISTA

Yes, in design, I wonder if Adobe will eventually figure all these things out for us. And then we’ll just have our Adobe products to do all of the above. So one solution, one master.

METAPUPPET

I believe an important factor is the open-source community. There are coders who develop AI in open source. I think that’s really important because you don’t want everything to be owned by one entity — they can block things, they have their restrictions, whatever, —they can also silence voices, depending on who it is, and what agenda they have. So, the open source community is very necessary. If you forget about video making, and think about this at the scale of LLMs, and who gets left out. I believe that in the future, individuals who do not have access to LLMs will face a significant disadvantage. That’s dangerous, a few controlling so much knowledge.

CHRISTA

Right, exactly. Example Apple. Apple blocked Flash. First, they bought Macromedia, and then they blocked Flash to protect the App Store. For me, it was kind of tragic because Flash was choreography for design, and there wasn’t anything at the time that was as good at choreography as Flash was. Since then, it has somewhat returned to vector animation. But it was a long period of losing out. Also, a loss of craft. For example, typographers like myself, when everything went digital and then went online, we had to mourn some craft. We weren’t going to be kerning letters or refining rag that much anymore. There wasn’t time, and the web rags it all the way it wants to anyway. So we had to give up a certain amount of craft. It was a blessing because we were spending a lot of time kerning type, but it was also a curse because I remember the first time I saw a website, I was like, that’s ugly, horrible, I hope that thing goes away. Do you feel like you have to go through a period of mourning craft, or do you think the craft will catch up?

METAPUPPET

It’s interesting. I don’t feel like I’ve mourned anything, but, you know, I went to film school 20 years ago. I learned traditionally, and I have been a full-time editor for over a decade. I’ve always been a tech enthusiast. MetaPuppet was a YouTube channel I started in 2021, and it was just covering topics like VR and the metaverse, and it was just a hobby. Then I discovered Stable Diffusion, and I was blown away. I couldn’t believe you could type what you wanted to see and it would show you, so I never looked back from there. When it started getting better with video models. I realized I’m a screenwriter, and I was like, wow, I can start actually to visualize scenes in my stories.

So I wasn’t losing anything that I loved to do. I was just adding to it. This year, everything changed for me. And now I’m a full-time director at Promise, which is an AI native film studio, so I’m not doing the traditional stuff anymore. However, I work with traditional VFX artists. Everyone that we work with at Promise is a traditionalist. They’ve all been doing this for decades in traditional production. Now we’re using this as it’s just the next wave of VFX. VFX is a tool. I don’t feel as though I’m losing anything, but that’s my angle as a writer/editor. In my experience, screenwriting and editing are two things that AI still cannot do well. However, some of the VFX guys might be mourning, as parts of their job might be replaced with AI. But really, what we’re trying to do is to push forward, to automate the parts that are not fun for them, and then allow them to still be creative and do the parts that they love.

So if you’re creating a creature for a film, it’s fun to design a monster, but it’s not fun to rotoscope it and to have to do all the keyframing and all that. So we’re trying to automate the parts that suck, essentially.

CHRISTA

How are you automating the parts that suck? In-house?

METAPUPPET

We have some in-house, like VFX specialists, who are designing our own studio operating system. It’s called MUSE, and it’s essentially a mix of our own code. So we’re writing stuff and bashing together programs that weren’t designed to work together. When it comes to generative AI, we’re trying to build this workflow, and we’re writing lines of code ourselves to achieve that.

CHRISTA

Are you running into any cultural churn, or are you, as an organization, just naturally adapting? Do you know anyone in your industry who’s just saying, ‘I quit. This is bullshit. I’m walking away.’

METAPUPPET

Oh, sure. Lots of people obviously hate AI. It’s a very divisive. Back in the 90s, when CGI came about, there was the same thing. It was, uh, this isn’t real, it is not artistry because you’re using a computer, I think AI is similar. And as for VFX, a lot of VFX people who are losing their jobs are losing their jobs to VFX artists who are using AI. So it is interesting if you make up your mind and you take on this stance of, I hate it, I’m not going to learn it, that’s your choice. But to me, that stance doesn’t make sense because technology and storytelling go hand in hand. We’ve always been evolving the tech to tell, to tell stories — otherwise we’d still be doing cave paintings.

CHRISTA

Right. 100%. We have really covered a lot of topics. Do you want to talk about rights management or creative control?

METAPUPPET

The only thing I could say about that is that at Promise, we’re trying to comply with the rules of SAG and other guilds, but there are a lot of points of view. Adobe has a model which they call an ethical model because all the data it’s been trained on is licensed. It all comes down to indemnification. We’re trying to comply, but these issues will likely be resolved through the courts. I have my opinion on which way it’s going to go, but we’re trying to be good to our people in our industry.

At the same time, I worked last year on the Coca-Cola Holiday  AI ad, and Coca-Cola was like, ‘do whatever you want’. I think it really comes down to how you want to be perceived in the industry, so we’re trying to align ourselves with the guilds in Hollywood. We’re not trying to tell them off and say that ‘we’re the future and we’re taking jobs’. That’s not our narrative.

CHRISTA

So now I would like to go back to democratization and barriers. What are the barriers or limitations for you? Because for me, the limitations inherent in my career have been time and money. I have a lot of small business clients, I’m using stock photography, I’m buying the rights, and I’m just trying to make it the best it can be, because this is what my clients can afford. Now, AI can take some of those barriers away, and I can iterate closer to the speed of my imagination — kind of a Tony Stark and a Jarvis thing. But I want the original source to be grounded in something authentic — brands have been struggling for a long time to be authentic. Do you see yourself iterating at the speed of your imagination? And do you want the nexus of your brainchild to be somehow informed by a live actor?

METAPUPPET

Yeah. I think that’s the beauty of what we’re doing, that there are multiple use cases and outcomes. We you can do 100% generative AI film. We could do a hybrid where we’re mixing it, and then we can also just use it as a VFX tool in the background with live actors instead of paintings out the window.

CHRISTA

Like the first release of Star Wars in 1977! I saw the movie when it first came out in the theater as a child, and it had moments that, even back then, looked like a puppet show. But it blew our minds! And Lucas’s breakout film remains impressive compared to the other special effects of the time, but in large part due to the storytelling.

It feels like there’s a stage where AI can add a lot of value, so that with an actor, there’s AI-driven outside and human value in the middle. But even if that’s your intention, there’s always going to be the client who’s like, “Well, why should we pay Liam Neeson when we can fabricate a character?”

METAPUPPET

Yeah, that’s true. And those are all the ethical questions when it comes to actor’s likeness and IP. But we’re using real actors all the time. We’re shooting real actors on green screen and then we’re using AI as a VFX tool. So we’re doing both. I think in terms of iterating at the speed of thought, that’s all awesome for pre-production stuff or for pitching.

CHRISTA

So the pitch deck looks so great, and the client says, ‘Sold! Do that’, is there a little bit of expectation management around that? You know, the real thing is not going to look quite like this, or the real thing is not going to happen in a week. How do you manage that? How do you manage that expectation when it looks so good in the pitch?

METAPUPPET

I think that we’re always going to exceed the look in the pitch, because we’re also going to use traditional 3D VFX takes a lot longer and is a lot more expensive. But we’re just leveraging the two to get quality a bit faster.

CHRISTA

And sometimes, I guess you manage the expectation of the price tag of the final outcome early on. And I think, you know, at other hybrid studios, they sometimes struggle. The client comes to them with something they generated themselves in AI in two minutes, and they say, ‘We love this, replicate this.’ But there are big visual problems with what the client has pitched to their client — the perspective is wrong, it doesn’t make any sense. The woman is coming out of the roof of the house. You ask ‘What are you trying to do?’ and the answer is flatly, ‘This is what the client wants. It has to be exactly the same.’

METAPUPPET

It blew my mind when friends told me about the clients coming to them with the image that they’ve generated. And they want the same thing. Just like you said. Yeah. It blew my mind, really. It’s crazy.

CHRISTA

Yeah, yeah, I guess you’re not running into that. That’s the particular nature of hybrid studio clients. You know what I’m saying? There’s nobody coming to Promise and giving you something that’s unrealistic. Not with all the things that you can do.

METAPUPPET

Yes, I think it’s because we started as an AI-native studio, and we’ve set a tone and precedent right from the start, as opposed to being a traditional studio that then gets into AI. I think that’s a little bit more difficult.

CHRISTA

That makes a lot of sense. So, Promise clients know from the outset that you cost more, or that it takes more time, or that more expertise is being brought to the table.

METAPUPPET

Yes, I think we’re definitely looking for expertise in this area, as we’re trying to attract top talent in generative AI artists and directors. I think if a client is going to an AI native studio, they are going to have a different expectation. We have been having meetings with known Hollywood people, and they’re excited about it. They’re excited about the possibilities of the tech, particularly in animation.

We have a feature-length 3D animated movie that’s going into production, and it’s still complicated, and we’re still using 3D VFX, so it’s not purely generative AI; you still have challenges like issues with consistency and lip sync.

CHRISTA

Yeah, I’m struggling with consistency too. I can generate an image, but when I want to make a set for a brand platform. The pitch has to become a visual language. All of the images have to look like they make sense together because consistency is trust.  The most accessible AI tools are not helping me build a brand language. It sounds like you’re running into the same thing.

METAPUPPET

Yeah. So we have people on the coding side and 3D VFX artists who create the set, like a 3D reference set. This is the structure, this is where everything is. Then we’re using generative AI to texture it. AI is merging those worlds.

I also think about brands, and there are some hilarious fast-food rap battles on social media that you can find, created with AI. I can only remember one brand actually asking for a rap battle about their food, and a group made a really funny one, all generated by AI. If you’re creating content for social media, you really have to embrace the absurdity of AI and incorporate it into the concept, making it fun. I think that’s the way to go, right?

CHRISTA

Agreed. 100%.

Let yourself shift into #InventorMode.  The real challenge isn’t learning the tools, it’s permitting yourself to use them in ways you once thought were beyond you.

• You don’t need to know code to experiment.
• You don’t need a film crew to tell a story.
• You don’t need anyone’s approval to begin.

In your fear, find your curiosity, in your frustration, find your motivation, and if you grieve, welcome your new wisdom.