Creators Aren’t Competing With AI. They’re Feeding It.
The Performance Creator · Insights · 17 September 2026
Creators Aren't Competing With AI. They're Feeding It.
The IAB put it in writing this Creator Week: the content AI learns from is overwhelmingly made by creators. That changes what a creator brief is for.
There is a line in an IAB piece that has been doing the rounds this week, and it deserves to be read twice.
“The creator economy isn’t just producing content. It’s producing the training data that makes AI feel human.”
That is the trade body for digital advertising, in its own blog, during its own Global Creator Week. The piece is called Creators Aren’t Competing with AI. They’re Powering It, and its argument is simple. AI does not create knowledge in a vacuum. It is trained on, and increasingly influenced by, what exists across the internet. Today that is overwhelmingly creator content. And AI doesn’t only learn from what creators publish. It learns from how people respond: every comment thread is a live dataset of questions, reactions and trust signals.
So the question a brand used to ask about creator work, did the post perform, has a new sibling. Does this content shape how the brand shows up in AI-generated answers?
The question has changed
Jasmine Enberg, who has analysed the creator economy for over a decade, says it plainly in the piece: “Most brands now have a sense of how often they’re showing up in LLM responses. Many aren’t happy about it. The savvy ones are now turning to creators to change that.”
Her practical advice is more concrete than most: structured, searchable video; authoritative, trusted voices; community-driven conversation. Small things matter, like chapter titles. Repeatable structures and credibility matter most. Much of that is what good creators already make, often for YouTube, which the language models lean on heavily.
What the rest of Creator Week added
The blog was the thesis. The research released around it is the evidence.
Consumers want it. The IAB’s Creator Signal study (2,200 AI-assisted shoppers, five markets) found 56% prefer AI shopping recommendations that draw on creator reviews, rising to 65% among Gen Z and Millennials. What makes a creator trustworthy enough for the AI to lean on? Credibility, consistency and expertise. Follower count came last.
Marketers are already moving. The IAB’s September Outlook update says optimising content for AI-generated answers is now the number one area of increased focus for US ad buyers, at 76%. Creator and influencer partnerships are the ad type most planned for increased investment, at 54%, ahead of every other format. And 86% of buyers are changing how they measure because of conversational AI; nearly half now measure brand citations inside AI tools directly.
The trust hierarchy is the same everywhere. IAB Australia’s Creator Connect research, out this week, found 61% of Australians discover brands through creators, 85% of under-40s. Before acting on a recommendation they weigh the brand’s reputation (86%) and the creator’s own expertise (84%). Same signals the AI is being asked to weigh.
And the human part is the point. At the Podcast Upfront, IAB’s Jason Adamski summed up where the successful creators have landed: “AI is for the workflow, not for the microphone.” The content that connects is the content that sounds unmistakably human. Which is also, not coincidentally, the content that AI systems are trained to recognise as trustworthy.
What this means for the brief
For years creator marketing was judged on reach and engagement. That still matters. But if a creator’s honest, repeated, well-structured answer to a buyer’s question is now part of what an AI reads before it answers that buyer, then the creator brief is doing two jobs at once. It reaches people this week. And it becomes evidence the machines consult for months.
That reframes the budget. A one-off post is rented attention. A creator who has answered your category’s questions properly, consistently, in a place the models can find, is an asset that keeps working.
The question for your next creator plan is not “how many people will see this?” It is “which buyer questions does this make us the answer to?”
We built Answerz to measure exactly that: the share of your buyers’ questions where you come back as the answer, across AI, search, social and video. tribeezsocial.com/answerz-check
Sources: IAB, “Creators Aren’t Competing with AI. They’re Powering It,” Zoe Soon with Jasmine Enberg (Scalable), iab.com. IAB, The Creator Signal, 9 September 2026, n=2,200. IAB 2026 Outlook Study September Update, 10 September 2026, 200+ US buyers. IAB Australia / Pureprofile Creator Connect, 17 September 2026, AU n=1,079. IAB Podcast Upfront, 16 September 2026, via Podcast News Daily.
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