The debate around AI vs human creativity is intensifying across marketing, media, and creative industries. When Disney Animation Studios reportedly explored bringing hand-drawn animation back into its film slate, the reaction was predictable. In an era dominated by CGI, generative tools, and production pipelines optimized for speed and scale, the idea felt almost nostalgic — even regressive.
But Disney doesn’t make nostalgic decisions lightly. And this one isn’t about rejecting modern technology. It’s about recognizing what gets lost when efficiency becomes the primary metric of progress. That distinction matters more than most organizations realize.
The Assumption We’ve Accepted About AI
Many organizations increasingly frame AI as an inevitable replacement for human creativity. The logic is straightforward: if models can be trained on enough examples, guided by the right prompts, and refined through feedback loops, they will eventually outperform people. More ideas, generated faster, with fewer constraints.
Technically, that argument holds water. AI excels at recognizing patterns, recombining existing inputs, and producing outputs at a speed no human team can match. It removes friction, accelerates execution, and enables scale in ways that were impossible even a few years ago.
However this framing misses something fundamental that leaders can’t afford to ignore: AI can reproduce patterns of creativity. It cannot originate meaning.
No amount of data changes this reality.
Why Disney’s Decision Isn’t Backward — It’s Strategic
Hand-drawn animation is slower. It’s more labor-intensive. It resists the clean efficiencies that modern production pipelines are built around. And yet, it carries something digital perfection often erases: intentional imperfection, emotional texture, and unmistakable human presence.
Disney understands that its cultural impact was never driven by technology alone. The tools evolved, but the differentiator was always storytelling that felt human — stories shaped by taste, judgment, and creative risk.
Reintroducing hand-drawn animation isn’t a rejection of innovation. It’s a reminder that not all value comes from optimization, and not all progress is linear. That lesson extends far beyond animation.
Where Brands Are Quietly Going Wrong
Most organizations aren’t struggling with AI because the technology isn’t powerful enough. In fact, they’re struggling because they’re asking it to do the wrong job.
Something subtle but damaging begins to happen when teams treat AI as the primary source of ideas. Voice begins to flatten. Creative edges smooth out. Outputs become interchangeable. Efficiency increases, but distinction fades.
Over time, brands start to resemble one another. Not because they lack ambition, but because they’ve optimized away the very things that made them recognizable in the first place.
In a market saturated with AI-generated content, sameness is the real risk.
Creativity Isn’t Output, It’s Judgment
Human creativity isn’t just the ability to produce something new. It’s shaped by lived experience, cultural context, emotional intuition, and taste developed over time. It’s the ability to know when to follow patterns, and when to deliberately break them.
Those qualities don’t scale cleanly. They can’t be fully encoded. And they shouldn’t be treated as inefficiencies to eliminate.
AI is most powerful when it accelerates execution, expands exploration, and frees humans to focus on higher-order thinking. However, it becomes dangerous when it replaces creative ownership and judgment altogether.
The Competitive Advantage Most Teams Are Overlooking
As AI becomes ubiquitous, the advantage won’t belong to organizations that automate the fastest. It will belong to the ones that understand where automation stops making sense.
The strongest brands will define themselves by how intentionally they preserve creative ownership. They will invest in people who can direct, critique, and challenge AI outputs. And they will be intentional about preserving the parts of their creative process that resist optimization.
Disney picking up a pencil in a digital world isn’t a step backward. It’s a signal.
The Bottom Line
AI should be embraced. It should be learned, tested, and applied aggressively where it creates real value. However it should never be mistaken for the source of what makes a brand distinctive. Technology will keep evolving. Tools will continue to improve. Human creativity — imperfect, opinionated, and deeply contextual — remains the differentiator.
If you’re willing to protect it.
Geri Carrillo, Sr. Principal
