In this exclusive op-ed, Marie-Céline Merret Wirström, creative director at MC&V and co-founder of Monks ANZ breaks down the current landscape of full-stack AI creative and why she believes creativity “doesn’t thrive in an echo chamber”. It comes ahead of her session ‘Jack of All Prompts, Master of None’ at the HumAIn media conference taking place in Sydney tomorrow.
There’s a new superstar in the creative industry: the full-stack AI creative.
Someone who can come up with an idea, write the script, design the characters, generate the footage, animate the scenes, edit the film and create the soundtrack, all from their laptop.
What once required an entire production team can suddenly be done by one person, sometimes in a matter of days. And judging by the conversations happening across the industry, this is increasingly being positioned as the future of creative talent.
I fully understand the excitement. I’ve spent much of my career working with directors, artists and production specialists, and what AI is making possible today is extraordinary.
We’re seeing creatives explore new disciplines, bring ambitious ideas to life without enormous budgets and push their own capabilities further than they imagined. I love that someone with a brilliant idea no longer needs to wait for a production company or a client with deep pockets to see whether it works.
But I’m starting to wonder whether we’ve become so fascinated by what one person can do that we’ve stopped asking whether one person should do it all.
And perhaps more importantly, what happens to the quality of the work when they do?
Through the AARON Awards, we’ve reviewed more than 1,000 AI creative projects from 45 countries, and what stood out in the jury room was definitely not speed or tool fluency. That is the hype of the past. The conversation was all about craft, story and workflow: how to evaluate work through the lens of gen AI, and how the creative process is evolving to give birth to new thinking and new ideas.
Collaboration, and pushing and bending the tools, is now considered craft.
Scroll through AI creative portfolios and there’s an explosion of beautifully crafted films, impossible camera moves and surreal worlds that would have been unimaginable on a small budget just a few years ago.
Yet after a while, something else becomes apparent. A lot of the work starts to feel similar. Different people, different tools and different prompts, but often the same visual language and fascination with what the technology can produce.
Technical brilliance doesn’t automatically translate into great creative work. And being able to generate something spectacular doesn’t necessarily mean knowing how to make it meaningful.
I see this distinction constantly when working with artists. Someone might be exceptional at creating beautiful images but struggle to tell a story. Another might have an incredible understanding of movement, performance or pacing, while someone else has that rare ability to find the simplest visual expression of a complicated idea. These are very different talents and skillsets, developed through years of curiosity, experimentation, mistakes and experience.
But there’s something else I think we’re at risk of losing in the excitement around the one-person studio, and that’s the creative value of working together.
Some of the best work I’ve been involved in became great because someone challenged the original idea. A director pushed the storytelling further, an editor questioned the pacing, a designer found a completely different visual approach or a producer asked a question that made everyone reconsider what we were trying to achieve. Those moments aren’t inefficiencies in the process. They’re often where the work becomes something special. That friction is what turns good into gold.
Cheap production typically means one person behind the tools: a marketer, or a single designer or editor, coming up with the idea, the script and the storyboards, then generating the whole film.
When one person controls everything, they also become the only person challenging their own decisions. It’s easy to fall in love with an image after hours spent creating it, or to become so absorbed in making something work technically that nobody stops to question whether it’s the right creative choice. A brilliant collaborator can look at the same work with fresh eyes and, in five minutes, change its entire direction and make total sense of it, or just make it incredible.
That’s what worries me about the industry’s growing obsession with the full-stack creative.
We’re celebrating independence as though collaboration were a limitation we’ve finally overcome. Clients are buying it because it’s more cost efficient, and with budgets squeezed I understand the appeal. But the question is whether the work actually performs and stands out. Creative chemistry, constructive disagreements and the unexpected ideas that emerge between people are often precisely what separate good work from exceptional work. And in this AI era, we need exceptional work to stand out from the average coming out of the machine.
Of course, traditional production structures weren’t always perfect. We’ve all worked on projects with too many people, too many opinions and endless rounds of feedback that contributed very little or watered down the original idea. AI gives us an incredible opportunity to remove unnecessary complexity, work faster and create more ambitious things with smaller teams, but that shouldn’t automatically mean teams of one.
Nor is the old model the answer.
You can already see the large network agencies struggling to keep up. They can’t get their hands on specialist talent, and they’re trapped in their own red tape while the technology evolves at an extremely fast pace. The legacy structure built on generalist creatives is no longer sharp enough to help brands stand out.
Australia has a lot at stake here. At AARON, Australian work made up roughly seven per cent of entries but 21 per cent of the shortlist. We have a strong creative culture and we’re punching above our weight. But we risk falling into the generalist trap: the one-man band doing soup to nuts with the same tools everyone else is using, accelerating the sea of sameness.
The defaults that most need rethinking are the generalist hire and the agency-of-record model. Access to tools doesn’t equal capability. What makes work stand apart isn’t in the prompt or the machine. It sits with specialist talent who can move fast on a brief and really push the tools beyond their limits.
At MC&V, we work with artists from very different backgrounds, and I’m continually fascinated by how differently they approach the same technology. A filmmaker sees something different from a designer. An animator approaches movement differently from a photographer. AI allows them to expand their individual capabilities, but when we bring those perspectives together, the possibilities become even greater. And often the work goes somewhere none of us could have predicted at the start. That takes flexible talent, plugging in the best creative for each brief, sharper briefs, and collaborative specialist teams across the whole workflow.
This is where the next evolution of AI creativity gets exciting.
We’ve spent the past few years exploring what technology makes possible for individuals. Now the opportunity lies in leaning further into what makes us human, our instincts, intuition and ability to collaborate, and combining those strengths with extraordinary new capabilities. The first step is simple: invest in people who are strong on the tools, but hire them for their specialist skill. Stay flexible and nimble. And remember how to say no, because restraint is what pushes the thinking further.
The full-stack AI creative is an exciting new possibility, and I hope people continue pushing the boundaries of what one person can achieve. But I would hate to see the industry turn that possibility into an expectation, where talent is measured by how many disciplines someone can cover rather than what they contribute creatively.
Because creativity doesn’t thrive in an echo chamber.
It thrives when different human minds collide, instincts are challenged and ideas are pushed beyond the obvious. That’s how we escape the average.
Want to hear more? You can check out her session at HumAIn taking place tomorrow.
