Years ago, a viral video of Will Smith eating spaghetti became shorthand for everything wrong with AI creations. The visual was a grotesque, uncanny imitation that barely resembled the Hollywood actor. Fast forward to 2026, AI can now generate a perfect replica, nearly indistinguishable from reality. Just days ago, Anthropic released Cowork, an AI tool that handles the work many depend on to survive. It checks calendars, builds presentations, prepares stand-ups, organizes files, and drafts reports, all the administrative tasks that once kept junior staff employed. Built in two weeks, Cowork represents a recursive loop: AI building AI, at a pace human workers can barely track. For Nigerian creatives already navigating an industry where opportunities are scarce and compensation is thin, emotions are high.
On the building front, Nigeria isn’t sitting on the sidelines. Obinna Okerekeocha founded the Naija AI Film Festival, accepting only films made with AI technology. In an interview with Culture Custodian, he argued that AI levels the playing field for filmmakers who lack access to expensive equipment or large production budgets. There is also Temiloluwa Babalola, who designed Spitch, an AI-powered speech model introducing African languages and accents to global platforms. Last year, Microsoft committed to training one million Nigerians in AI skills by 2026, recognizing the country as a strategic market for technology adoption.
The adoption pattern emerging in Nigeria reflects a global dynamic: creatives use AI to meet impossible deadlines, but they do so knowing that the tools helping them today are training on their work to replace them tomorrow. The conversation around AI and jobs often fixates on replacement. Research shows that AI adoption across creative industries could displace human labor even without fully replacing core creative work. The real issue is whether companies will pay for human screenwriters when AI can produce good enough content at a fraction of the cost.
Predictions of massive job loss have been confirmed by repeated waves of layoffs in 2025 across the entertainment industry, many explicitly linked to AI use. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI, recently warned that 2026 could be the year of significant job displacement, particularly for white-collar and creative roles. From the astronomical rate of AI development, this seems likely.
In Nigeria, where creative labor is already undervalued and poorly protected, the impact will hit harder. Entry-level positions—the internships, assistant roles, and junior jobs that once offered young people a foothold in the industry—are disappearing fast. A Lagos-based writer might find that the social media copy and research tasks that once paid their rent are now handled by ChatGPT or Claude. The barrier to production is lower, but so is the compensation for human work.
Previous AI tools required technical knowledge or coding skills to deploy. Newer versions, like Cowork, eliminates that barrier entirely. It allows users to designate a folder on their computer where the AI can read, modify, or create files autonomously. You don’t need to understand programming; you just describe the task in simple language. The tasks it handles, such as organizing research, drafting reports, and managing schedules, are precisely the responsibilities that once defined entry-level creative work. Anthropic markets this as efficiency, as giving creatives more time for “the important stuff.” But for many Nigerian creatives, those administrative tasks were the billable hours that kept them employed.
Beyond job displacement lies a more insidious issue: the foundational injustice of how these AI models are built. Tens of thousands of artists globally have protested against the unlicensed use of their work to train generative AI models, arguing that these technologies profit from creative labor without fair compensation or consent. This debate resonates in Nigeria, where copyright enforcement is already weak, and creatives struggle for basic ownership rights. If global AI models train on the work of Nigerian writers, designers, filmmakers, and photographers without clear structures for credit or compensation, the power imbalance deepens. It’s not simply that AI might replace creative jobs, but that the value of creative labor is being redefined without any input from the people whose work fuels these systems. Western tech companies harvest content created by African artists, train models on that labor, then sell those tools back to African markets as empowerment. The wealth flows in one direction, while the risk flows in the other.
Despite the disruption, resignation isn’t the answer. Nigerian creatives are already demonstrating that thoughtful engagement with AI can create opportunities rather than foreclosing them. Top creators emphasize that AI cannot replicate the human experience. The future depends on how creatives choose to work with these tools. AI can handle routine technical work, freeing up time for the reflective aspects of creative labor that machines cannot authentically replicate. A designer in Lagos might use AI to generate variations of a concept, but it’s the cultural insight that determines which variation resonates with a Nigerian audience. That still requires human judgment.
However, this path forward requires more than individual adaptation. It demands collective action and policy intervention. Industry analysts predict that by 2026, the most valuable currency in the creative sector will be production reliability, encompassing speed, quality assurance, and predictable delivery. AI is unlikely to replace Nigerian creators outright; instead, it will expose and outpace inefficient workflows. For this shift to be equitable, Nigeria must strengthen intellectual property protections, build fair compensation systems, and invest in AI literacy programs designed specifically for creative workers. As AI development accelerates and becomes impossible to ignore, the real conversation is not whether creatives can survive it, but how they can ensure that these tools expand opportunity without eroding human agency.
