Viral music creator shares five ways comms can boost innovation with AI instead of outsourcing it.
A recent MIT Media Lab study suggested that AI usage can reduce creative thinking—reinforcing what creative teams already fear: that generative AI tools may reduce originality rather than boost it.
Add in shrinking budgets, faster production cycles and increased pressure to “do more with less” and it’s no wonder that some teams are skeptical of leaning too far into AI.
But Will Hatcher — better known as “King Willonius” — sees things differently. He believes that AI allows creators to “create at the speed of culture with a full studio in their backpacks.”
The Time 100 AI honoree and board member of the American Society for AI argues that AI doesn’t have to replace creativity. Instead, it can amplify your creativity — if used correctly.
1. Use AI to extend expertise — not replace your thinking. “Instead of thinking about what AI is going to take from you, reframe it and think, ‘What could I create and what could I imagine with this amazing tool?’” he suggests. “AI really amplifies anything you’ve already mastered — the skills that you’ve put your 10,000 hours in to build.”
AI doesn’t invent expertise, it extends yours. “Use it to extend your strengths, sharpen your ideas and stress-test your work instead of as a substitute for those things,” says Hatcher.
For example, if your team already brings:
- Deep audience or sector insight
- Strong messaging discipline
- Sharp storytelling instincts
AI can:
- Generate headline options in seconds
- Pressure-test messaging across personas
- Explore alternative framing for different stakeholder groups
2. Build your team’s AI culture around the 4Cs. When asked for a practical checklist for creatives, Hatcher doesn’t start with tools. He returns to what he calls the “4Cs”:
- Curiosity: “You have to constantly cultivate curiosity,” he says, adding that curiosity isn’t passive. It’s continued and protected experimentation. That means giving teams space, encouraging testing and rewarding iteration instead of penalizing imperfect drafts.
- Community: “You also need a strong community that you can tap into,” he adds, “AI evolves quickly and without shared learning, teams fall behind.”
His advice is to build internal working groups, swap prompts, integrate AI skills into your L&D curriculums and to collaborate more closely with IT and data teams.
- Creators: Hatcher believes AI innovation stalls when it’s reduced to compliance. “Every organization should have a creator on their team,” he says. “Lean into and learn from creators you work with. Let them be themselves and try not to confine their thinking.”
- Creativity and process aren’t antithetical, however. Hatcher advises defining the audience, goal and outcome for a project before you even open AI.
“Then use those guides in your prompts,” he says. A simple prompting framework like CREATE (Context, Role, Task, Example, Action, Tone, Evaluation) should do the trick.
3. Curate your creative AI toolbox by outcome. Hatcher uses a wide range of tools beyond Copilot and ChatGPT. They include Claude (his favorite), Midjourney, Gamma, NotebookLM, Nano Banana, Adobe Podcast, Eleven Labs, Veo and Suno.
But the point isn’t to accumulate subscriptions. It’s to deploy the right tool for the right job:
- For visuals: He recommends Midjourney for mood boards and campaign visuals to help secure budget approvals. “Midjourney really is the best for images,” he says. “And Gamma is great for quick pitch decks so leadership can see your idea before approval.”
He’s also a big fan of Google’s Nano Banana. “It does amazing image edits and is almost like a Photoshop replacement,” he says.
- For video: “AI video is a race right now,” Hatcher says. “Kling, Seedance and Veo3 are all phenomenal and close—but Google’s Veo seems to be making the biggest strides.”
- For audio: He suggests NotebookLM for digesting long documents and exploring key themes in an audio format. “It’ll create a podcast with two hosts from anything you upload like an article or book,” he says. “It also lets you dig in deeper with the hosts.”
He also loves using Adobe Podcast to clean up audio recordings. “And ElevenLabs is the best voice cloning tool,” he says. “You can also use it to create sound effects and music.”
Hatcher admits that Suno is a guilty pleasure. It’s great for creating AI music and what he calls internal “culture-building moments”—like jingles for internal celebrations or songs for light-hearted employee moments, including town halls.
That said, he warns against “shiny object syndrome.” Always start with your goal or intent—not the technology or its features, he advises. So before selecting any tool, define:
- The outcome you need.
- The audience you’re serving.
- The emotional response you’re trying to drive.
4. Remember that taste still wins. One advantage remains deeply human in an online world crawling with AI slop. “It’s all about taste,” Hatcher says, “That’s still our greatest human attribute when it comes to creative and communications work.”
AI can generate 50 headline options, 10 videos and remix messaging in minutes. But someone still has to decide:
- Which version aligns with brand voice.
- Which idea resonates emotionally.
- Which message truly earns trust.
That’s your job. It’s what you do every day. AI can assist. It can suggest. It can scale.
But it can’t own the decision. Don’t abdicate that.
Brian Pittman is a senior Ragan event producer and AI analyst for Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy. A veteran journalist, Hollywood screenwriter and surfer, he can be reached at brianp@ragan.com.
The post 4 ways to amplify creativity with AI appeared first on PR Daily.
