AI for Creative Professionals: AI Tools & Prompts for Designers, Writers & Marketers
AI for Creative Professionals is the show for copywriters, graphic/web designers, marketers, social media managers, illustrators, photographers, video producers/editors who are curious about AI but honestly a little overwhelmed by it. Every week I test AI tools for creatives, and tell you exactly what worked, what didn't, and what I'd never touch again. If you're a freelancer or in-house specialist wondering whether AI is going to replace you, or you just want to know how to write AI prompts that don't come out sounding like a robot wrote your brand voice, this is where you'll find real answers. No coding required or even pretending I have it all figured out either. I mess up plenty of these tools live on the show and tell you about it. We cover AI tools for designers, AI tools for writers, AI tools for marketers, AI tools for photographers, and AI video editing tools, plus prompt engineering for beginners who don't want to read a manual to get a decent result. And the stuff not a lot of people are talking about: how to keep your creative voice when half your process now involves a chatbot, what it actually means to disclose AI use to a client, and whether "AI ethics" is something you should care about or just more noise. This is a show for creative professionals and freelancers trying to stay relevant, stay employed, and stay themselves while the ground shifts under the industry. New episodes every Wednesday.
Episodes
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...
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 chanc...
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: cl...
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 recrea...
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 have a clean answer. But I'm thinki...
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...
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 busine...
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 creative freedom vs. financial success and...
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'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.
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.
"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.
If you've felt exhausted before you've even opened an app, you're not imagining it — content overload is a real, measurable problem, and it started well before AI showed up. This episode traces it back to 2015, debunks the "humans have shorter attention spans than goldfish" myth that never had real science behind it, and gets into why AI didn't create the over...
Here's my actual AI-assisted podcast production workflow - no editor, no team, recorded to fully scheduled in under two hours most weeks. If you're a solo creator wondering how AI tools actually fit into a real production process (not a fantasy one), this is the unglamorous, specific version.
In this...
If you're a working artist trying to understand the AI copyright lawsuits actually happening right now — Disney, Midjourney, Stability AI, Andersen v. Stability... this episode breaks down what's real, what's legal precedent, and what it means for your work. I spent a night deep in r/ArtistHate and came out with the data, the court documents, and the industry reporting to back it up.
What I discovered kept me up until 3am. 26...
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 alway...
Will AI replace designers, writers, and other creative careers? The real data says it's more complicated than the panic headlines. Graphic designers went from "moderately growing" to a top-11 fastest-declining job in two years, but the picture isn't uniform. This episode walks through the actual research on AI and freelance income, career adaptation, a...
These are the AI tools for designers I actually use for real client work — not the ones I wish I had time to master. This episode covers AI image generation tools for creatives who need usable results fast, with an honest breakdown of what's worth your time and what isn't.
Just got back from Greece (yes, I was working on holiday because my brain...
If you've ever read AI writing and cringed at "unlock your true potential" or "elevate your business game," this episode is about exactly why that happens — and how to make AI writing sound human instead. I found the AI-written podcast description that inspired this deep-dive, and we get into the specific techniques for keeping your creative voice intact.
Ready to go past basic AI prompts? This episode covers advanced prompt engineering techniques for creatives — chain-of-thought prompting, comparative prompting, constraint-based prompting, and reverse prompting — so you stop getting the same predictable AI output everyone else gets.
I'm sharing some advanced AI prompting tricks that'll help you break free from those bland, generic AI responses we're all tir...
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