🪐 The Orbit Dispatch: Issue #7
To AI or not to AI
📝 Quick Summary:
🌍 Orbit Spotlight: To AI or not to AI
🛠️ Toolbox Addition of the Month: AI Tools
🏆 AI x Cannes Lions: A look at few winners
📣 What’s New: Something is coming!
👉🏼 (Not) Another AI Hot Take
You’ve heard it all before:
AI is taking our jobs. AI is saving the world. AI is writing this sentence. (It’s not. Pinky promise.)
Let’s pause that noise just for a second and zoom into the weird, wonderful middle:
The place where AI isn’t a villain or a god, but just useful. Sometimes quietly brilliant. Sometimes laughably wrong, but constantly evolving.
The goal is not to argue for or against AI, but to ask a more useful set of questions: How does this new tool work? Where does it fail? How do we use it without losing what makes us human? And how can it be wielded to not only make our Mondays less terrible, but to free us up to do the work that only we can do?
👉🏼 AI Won’t Replace You - But It Might Make Mondays Suck Less
When Photoshop arrived in the ’90s, people said it would destroy photography. That it would cheapen the craft and flood the world with fakes. Today, it’s one of the most widely used tools in creative work — not because it replaced photography, but because it expanded what was possible.
Same with Auto-Tune. It started as a behind-the-scenes fix — and was quickly blamed for ruining music. But artists like Cher and T-Pain didn’t just use it; they made it their sound. It turned from “cheating” into a defining feature of pop music.
AI is probably going to follow the same path. Some people will use it badly. Some will ignore it completely. Some will freak out. And some will figure out how to make something new with it.
We're still in the "figuring it out" phase. Which is actually kind of exciting.
Forget the "AI will revolutionize everything" headlines for a second. Can we talk about the genuinely useful stuff?
For example:
You’re a copywriter staring at your 47th product spec sheet this month. "Water-resistant, 15-inch laptop bag with multiple compartments." You can practically feel your soul slipping out of your body. So, you feed it to ChatGPT and make coffee instead.
Maybe you're digging through old demos from college. Back when your "home studio" was a closet and a $20 mic. LALAL.AI can now separate those vocals from the instrumental in about three minutes.
You're a designer at 2 pm, staring at a blank Figma file, wondering why you chose this career. A few Midjourney prompts later, your brain is unstuck. Not because the AI made your mood board, but because it gave you something to react against.
A life coach discovers Otter.ai and stops frantically scribbling notes during client calls. Now she listens instead of trying to write "breakthrough moment about relationship with perfectionism" while maintaining eye contact.
A screenwriter starts asking ChatGPT to write terrible versions of his scenes. His logic: "If I want to see what's wrong with my dialogue, I ask AI to make it worse. Then I know exactly what not to do."
A photographer finds Topaz Labs and watches three hours of careful Photoshop work shrink to twenty minutes. More client work, fewer weekends stuck at the computer.
None of this is going to make headlines. But it's making their Mondays a little less terrible.
Try this: think of the most numbing part of your creative process.
Now Google: "[that thing] AI tool."
You might find something useful. You might find something ridiculous. Either way, let us know!
👉🏼 What's Actually Worth Your Time Right Now
So, if you're going to try any of this, here's what people are actually using (not just talking about):
For writing stuff:
Grammarly - Still the best at catching typos you miss
Claude - Better at understanding context than most others
Notion AI - If you're already living in Notion anyway
Tome – Quickly generate polished presentations from text, ideal for pitches and meetings.
Otter.ai - Transcribe meetings so you can stay present
For visual stuff:
Adobe Firefly - Built right into Photoshop/Illustrator
Midjourney - Still the go-to for "make me something weird"
Topaz Labs - Photo enhancement that doesn't look fake
Remove.bg - Does exactly what it says, does it well
Khroma – AI creates personalized color palettes to elevate your creative projects.
Looka – Design complete brand kits, including logos and marketing materials, with AI help.
Descript - Edit video by editing the transcript
For audio stuff:
LALAL.AI - Separate vocals from music
Moises App - Separate instruments, remove vocals, all that
ElevenLabs - Clean up audio without making it sound robotic
Uizard – AI-powered UI/UX design tool that helps you quickly mock up interfaces and streamline user-focused design.
Most of these have free tiers. Start there. See what sticks.
👉🏼 The Magic Happens in the Messy Middle
AI is kind of like having a really smart intern who's also slightly drunk.
Sometimes it will suggest a metaphor that's so perfect you wonder if it's reading your mind. Other times it will confidently tell you that giraffes are carnivores and Wednesday comes after Friday.
The weird middle space is where things get interesting.
The key is treating AI output like a rough sketch, not a finished painting. It gives you something to react to, argue with, build on.
AI can start the conversation. Only you can finish it.
🏆 AI x Cannes Lions 2025
We know Cannes Lions isn’t everyone’s favorite — between the yacht parties and the brand ego trips, it can feel a little… out of touch. But every now and then, something interesting slips through the gold-dusted cracks. Let’s look at a few campaigns where brands used AI in genuinely creative, weird, or thought-provoking ways.
👉🏼 Don't Lose Your Weird
Look, AI is getting scary good at sounding human. But it's not scary good at being you.
Your weird obsessions, obscure references, or the lived experiences that shape your voice. Those are irreplaceable.
AI can help you move faster, but it can never make your work feel like it came straight from the core of your soul.
Use it like a really efficient assistant. Let it handle the research, the first drafts, the boring parts. But the weird leaps of logic, the unexpected connections, the part where you decide to make the entire project about something completely different? Keep that.
The 30% rule: Let AI handle about 30% of the grunt work. Keep the other 70% for yourself. That's where your voice lives.
👉🏼 The Real Plot Twist
In the end, the fears didn’t hold up. Photoshop didn’t kill photography — it expanded it. What started as a digital darkroom became a collage tool, a painting canvas, a playground for pushing creative limits. It gave photographers and designers new ways to bend reality, build surreal worlds, and break out of what the camera alone could capture. Today, over 90% of creative professionals use it. Not because it replaced their eye or their vision, but because it replaced the darkroom and the paste-up board — offering a new, more flexible space to make the work their own.
Here’s something that took me way too long to figure out:
AI isn’t exciting because of what it can do. It’s exciting because of what it frees you up to do. Sure, it still can’t wash your laundry or do the dishes (goddammit!), but:
When you're not spending three hours cleaning up audio, or writing the same type of brief for the tenth time this month, or manually removing backgrounds from 200 product photos...
What do you do with that time?
That's the real question. And that's where you get to be human. AI can handle the repetition. You handle the magic.
📣 What’s New:
🛒 Check our Creative Market shop! We have our Editorial Calendar for Substack on Creative Market + some new funky social media templates 💅🏼 → Grab it here
🎧 Podcast Episode 3 Just Landed: → Off Script: How to Write Your Way In with amazing Sandra Valencia. Listen on Substack or wherever you stream.
🪐 Orbit Update: We’re working behind the scenes on some tweaks and fixes to make your reading experience even better. We’ve realized our content has been a bit all over the place lately, but hey - creativity is messy, and we’re learning as we grow! We’re confident these upcoming changes will give you clearer, more inspiring, and more enjoyable content moving forward. Thanks for sticking around.
👉🏼 Got a story where AI actually helped (or spectacularly failed)? Hit reply.
Still figuring this stuff out? Join us. That's literally why we exist.
Stay weird,
The Orbit Team
P.S And remember — no matter what the purists, gatekeepers, or AI-phobic uncles on LinkedIn say… you get to decide what counts as your work.
what a great compilation there! Thank you for featuring us 💛