Why Generative AI Threatens Creative Roles In Media And Entertainment – Forbes

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Why Generative AI Threatens Creative Roles In Media And Entertainment

ByNelson Granados, Contributor. I cover digital trends in travel, media and entertainment.

Mar 19, 2026, 09:58am EDT, Mar 19, 2026, 04:28pm EDT

Generative AI is causing a major buzz and boom across industries. A November 2025 study from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab found that early-career workers have experienced a 16% reduction in employment. Yet last year MIT released a report that 95% of GenAI pilot projects fail. So what will it be? Do major industry transformations await or is it all just hype and buzz? What industries and human talent will be the most disrupted once the dust settles? After careful analysis and reflection, I predict the media and entertainment industry, together with the many roles creatives play, will be at the top of the list. Here’s why.

GenAI Failures Explained

As a scholar and consultant who studies technology disruptions, I rely on existing predictive theories and frameworks that stand the test of time. There are two theories that reflect the debate currently underway about the impact on work of GenAI: adoption theory and task-technology fit. That is, are we facing an adoption problem, whereby unmet needs by GenAI implementations explain resistance to adopt, or do failures stem from trying to overfit GenAI into everything we do? The answer is both.

It is well known that somewhere between 60% and 70% of IT projects fail, even for mature technologies. Pilot projects are experiments, and many of these trials with emerging technologies are bound to fail to produce learning and knowledge. With this in mind, that GenAI projects are failing at a high rate is not surprising.

However, one major problem with current GenAI projects in particular is that many companies and entrepreneurs are blinded by the buzz and the boom, by skipping the analysis about whether the technology fits the task at hand. It reminds me of the internet boom, where at some point many innovators bet that much of business was going to move to e-commerce, until the market corrected this prediction for experience goods and services that consumers want to touch or examine in person before purchasing. Naturally, the internet bubble burst.

GenAI in Media and Entertainment

After the GenAI bubble bursts and the dust settles, I predict that media and entertainment will end up being one of the most disrupted. A new task-technology fit framework for GenAI by Hemant Bhargava and Abhinav Kishore from UC Davis helps articulate the rationale. They posit that GenAI is a better fit for generation-dominant tasks like those that involve creativity, and less for retrieval-dominant tasks that simply retrieve and leverage existing data or knowledge. Bhargava adds: “Often, the risk in using GenAI is when construction of the output, either through retrieval or generation, involves fabrication or confabulation which goes against a ground truth.”

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