Everyone is obsessed with one word now. It’s like the creative community's crack: CRAFT.

Historically, craft referred to manual disciplines: woodworking, pottery, tailoring, painting, and so on. But in contemporary creative practice, it describes the skill, judgment, knowledge, intentionality, and refinement involved in making something, whether the execution is physical, digital, computational, or hybrid.

The word comes up in almost every creative conversation. It’s in pitch decks, spewed from mouths at awards events, talks, podcasts, and panel discussions. I’ve said it myself, many times. It’s become ubiquitous, almost omnipresent. It might even take the place of "delve," a word whose use rose by around 1,500% in academic publishing following the rise of LLMs, according to a recent Scientometrics study.

Why?

When an image or video can now be generated in seconds, saying "I made this" tells you much less about what someone actually contributed. "Craft" has become an extremely useful umbrella term, and the rise of AI has shifted its meaning from the ability to make to the ability to choose.

The irony is that AI hasn't killed craft; it's made us talk about craft more.

And the results are visible. There's a growing need to reveal the time, techniques, people, processes, and multitude of tools involved in making something. But above all, the decisions made along the way.

Behind-the-scenes (BTS) is making a comeback.

I love BTS. Always have. It's a look behind the curtain, a glimpse into a world, usually Hollywood filmmaking, that most of us will never set foot in (though I do have some stories from being on the set of Fantastic Four in Vancouver at 2 AM while drunk, but that's for another time).

In the generative AI space, BTS is becoming one of the most important ways to demonstrate what actually goes into making the work. Whether it's a fully AI-native production or a hybrid of live action and generative tools, the finished piece rarely tells the whole story. The process does. We're seeing more breakdowns, workflows, iterations, and creative decisions brought into the spotlight. It's the craft of showing the craft, while everyone talks about the craft.

Not to drop another plug, but serving on the CICLOPE AI CRAFT jury, I saw this firsthand across roughly 100 pieces of work from creative teams around the world; some of their processes. Almost every entry included some form of BTS: image breakdowns, case studies, or written explanations. It was fascinating to see not just what people had made, but how they got there. And perhaps more importantly, why they made the decisions they did.

In the end, it doesn't matter if a piece of work is made by an individual on their weekends or a team collaborating with an agency, brand, and client. Whether AI-native or hybrid, good work still requires judgment, knowledge, intent, refinement, and that other favourite industry word, taste.

That's what defines craft today.