AI for Creative Professionals: Practical Tools for Designers, Writers & Marketers

You've probably done this: asked ChatGPT to "teach me photography" and gotten one giant answer you copied into a Notion doc and never opened again. I did the opposite. I built myself a real six-week audio engineering course, specifically to close a gap I already knew I had, not to relearn the basics. I made AI interview me before it wrote a single lesson, forced it toward one specific finish line...

Your portfolio shows what you made. But does it show how you think? In this episode, I make the case for an “audio CV” — a small, 8-episode podcast designed to help designers, writers, editors, photographers, and other creative professionals stand out to employers and potential clients. We get into what those episodes should actually be about, examples for different creative professions, why you d...

Would you email an unreleased client interview to some random company you've never worked with? Probably not. But most of us do the AI version of that without a second thought. This episode is about what actually happens to client information the moment it goes into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and the four questions worth asking before anything gets uploaded again.  By the end you'll have an exact...

How much AI should actually be part of a creative professional's work? In Part 2 of my This or That episode, I'm answering the AI questions I didn't get to last time, from ChatGPT vs. Claude and AI-generated imagery vs. stock photography to automation, traditional creative skills, AI overwhelm, and whether I'd actually want AI to become more capable than it already is. Listen to Pt. 1 episode HERE...

Which creative skills actually still sell now that everyone has access to AI? That's what I went looking for real data on this time. I dug up job posting numbers and freelance rate reports, and I also went back through my own 2018 portfolio, which is mostly dropshipping ad cuts made in Premiere and Filmora and Canva templates with a different product photo dropped in. It's cringe. it's not bad wor...

AI search is changing how clients find creative professionals, freelancers, designers, writers, podcast producers, photographers, and other independent creatives online. In this episode, I’m looking at how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and other AI search tools are changing online discovery, what Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) actually means, and what you can do to improve your c...

Why does having AI handle more of your work leave you feeling more anxious, not less? That's the real question behind this episode on AI burnout and AI anxiety for creative professionals: designers, writers, marketers, anyone whose day is work plus side projects plus a constant queue of content. I break down exactly what the stacking looked like for me: client work, my own side projects, YouTube,...

There are experiences AI still can't replace - live music, theater, live sports, and handmade craft all resist AI replication for real psychological reasons, not just sentiment. This episode breaks down exactly why, using concepts like collective effervescence and the effort heuristic to explain what AI can generate versus what it can never actually recreate. I went to a Godsmack concert last Sund...

If you're a creative professional - a designer, writer, marketer, videographer, illustrator - using AI tools to work faster and still not seeing your rates move, this episode is probably about you. I'm following up on something I said back in June and didn't fully explain: that I'm thinking about upskilling into something closer to where client revenue actually lives. A month later, I still don't...

Is stock photography dead? That's the question that sent me down a rabbit hole this week... after a random Saturday spent bouncing between buying Godsmack tickets, messing with my own website, and generating about forty AI images for my blog. One of them looked exactly like something I would've paid twelve bucks for on a stock site a couple years ago. So I went and checked what's actually happenin...

If you've ever searched "best freelance business tools" or "simple tech stack for freelancers" at eleven at night instead of doing the actual client work sitting in another tab.... well, same, and this episode's for you. I break down the four things a service-based creative business actually needs - a website, an onboarding process, one workspace, and a real offer. And where that stack usually bal...

This episode is a little different. I'm answering a completely unprepared round of This or That questions that ChatGPT asked, from food, travel, fitness, and music to freelancing, creative work, money, personal projects, and the kind of creative career I actually want. Some answers were easy. Others made me question choices I've apparently been making for years. We get into everything from creativ...

If you're a creative freelancer using AI and still not making more money, you're not imagining it... the math in fact doesn't work out the way everyone promises. This episode is the honest, unfiltered version of that problem, starting from a night I couldn't sleep doing that exact math in my head. I'd been lying awake doing math in my head, realizing I was repeating the exact same overcommitting p...

I've heard some version of the same advice about five times in the last couple weeks from content coaches, creator newsletters, and other podcasters: in the age of AI, people crave authenticity, so keep your episodes messy, leave in the tangents, don't over-edit. I agree with about 70% of that. It's the other 30% I think we're taking way too far. In this episode I get into why editing and authenti...

Six AI subscriptions. Three I use regularly. That's what I found going through my own bank statement, and it's the whole reason this episode exists because collecting AI tools isn't the same thing as having an AI strategy, and I think a lot of us have basically mixed those two up. This one's about where AI actually fits into creative work: research, ideation, production, distribution, and why spre...

"AI slop" isn't just a meme - it's a real design failure pattern, and it's got a 1985 ancestor most designers have never heard of. This episode breaks down the "ransom note effect," why AI image tools are heading toward smooth sameness instead of visible chaos, and what that means for anyone using AI tools for designers right now. Okay so you know that specific visual, the AI-generated poster with...

You know that fatigue you get before you've even opened an app? Like you're already tired in advance of whatever you're about to scroll through. I've had that for a while and I wanted to know if it was just me being cranky or whether something was actually happening at scale. Turns out it's both. And the numbers are a bit wild. In this episode I go into the research on content overload, and the fi...

Okay so I'm gonna be real with you... when most people think about podcast production, they picture a whole operation. Studio time, an editor, someone writing show notes, someone else doing socials. Days between recording and publishing. And I get it, because that's how a lot of shows run. Mine doesn't work that way. It's just me. No team, no production days, no back and forth with anyone. And fro...

I spent a night in the r/ArtistHate subreddit and followed every link I could find, and what I discovered kept me up until 3am. 26,000 artists documenting the real-time collapse of their careers, backed by hard data, court documents, and industry reporting. In this episode, I examine what AI companies don't want you to know about how generative AI training data actually works, the measurable impac...

AI productivity tools are supposed to help creative professionals work faster, reduce repetitive tasks, and create more in less time. And they do, but I’ve noticed a strange AI productivity paradox in my own creative workflow: even when ChatGPT and other generative AI tools help me finish my work earlier, I somehow end up working longer. In this episode, I explore why AI efficiency doesn’t always...

Okay, I'm just gonna say it... I went down a two-week research rabbit hole for this one and came out the other side with a lot of feelings and about 15 open browser tabs. This episode is me walking through the actual data, live, reacting to it in real time, and trying to figure out what it means for us. Some of it is not great, some of it is genuinely wild. One story involves Tyler Perry and $800...

Hey Creative Friends! Just got back from Greece (yes, I was working on holiday because my brain literally cannot turn off when I'm following AI newsletters and finding new tools to test). Today we're discussing AI image generation - specifically the tools I actually use for real work, not the ones I wish I had time to master. I'll be honest - I'm not an AI art expert. I use these tools for specifi...

Hey Creative Pros! So I was hunting for new podcasts the other day (as one does when you have a podcast addiction), and I found this personal development show with like 200 episodes and tons of reviews. But then I read the description and... oof. It was SO obviously AI-written. Like painfully obvious. "Unlock your true potential," "elevate your business game," "unleash your superpowers" - you know...

Hey Creative Friends! In this episode, I'm sharing some advanced AI prompting tricks that'll help you break free from those bland, generic AI responses we're all tired of seeing. Remember those basic prompting principles from last week? Well, now we're taking the training wheels off! I'll show you how to get AI to surprise you with genuinely creative ideas instead of the same old predictable stuff...

Tired of getting bland, generic responses from AI tools? In this episode I break down the art of effective prompting - think of it as learning how to give AI the perfect creative brief so you actually get what you want. No tech background required, just practical techniques that'll transform your AI interactions from frustrating to fantastic. 🎁 BONUS: Get all the copy-paste ready prompt templates...