San Francisco is not short of AI conferences promising to reveal the future. Most deliver a parade of demos and a lot of vague optimism.
Upscale Conf, organised by Magnific (the Spanish company formerly known as Freepik), was different, not because it avoided the hype, but because the people on stage and in the hallway conversations kept circling back to something more interesting than the technology itself: what happens to human creativity when the cost of producing it collapses.
Also Read: Magnific bets on human‑led AI infra for marketing and film work
Over several conversations with a Singaporean digital artist, an HBO-trained movie director, and the CEO steering one of the world’s fastest-growing AI creative platforms, five ideas kept resurfacing. None of them are the ones you’d expect from a typical AI conference recap.
1. The real risk isn’t AI replacing creativity; it’s AI replacing depth
Wenhui Lim, the Singaporean artist behind niceaunties, has spent years building an entire speculative universe around the figure of the Southeast Asian “auntie” using AI image and video tools. Her warning to founders wasn’t about job losses or copyright. It was about shallowness.
“If you use AI purely to extract value or to scale output, you will hit a wall,” she told e27. “The metaverse is a good cautionary tale; it felt like an escape from physical, human experience, and ultimately people returned to what connects us. AI has more longevity because it can be used to go deeper into the human experience, not away from it. But that requires imagination, not just a roadmap.”
It’s a distinction worth sitting with, particularly for Southeast Asian startups racing to bolt generative features onto existing products. Volume is easy now. Meaning is not. Lim’s other quiet provocation — that she dislikes the term “AI artist” because “there is no such thing, there are artists working with AI”– is a useful filter for any founder currently rebranding themselves around a tool rather than a point of view.
2. Hybrid is the only honest answer, and the scarcity mindset is the real enemy
Noah Wagner, a film director who spent seven years at HBO before making an AI-themed thriller a decade before generative tools existed, made a case that cuts against both the AI-skeptic and AI-maximalist camps. His argument: nothing about storytelling fundamentals has changed, even as everything about production has.
Wagner is currently juggling three projects that sit at wildly different points on the AI spectrum, from a fully generative claymation series to a romance feature that uses AI only for background environments, never for the human performances at its centre. His advice to studios chasing efficiency was blunt.
“Don’t go into any AI endeavour with a scarcity mindset; don’t lead with ‘where are we saving money?’” he said. “Go in with an abundance mindset: how do we maximise what we’re doing creatively? The savings tend to follow. It could be five per cent on one project, 50 per cent on another. It genuinely depends on the problems you’re solving and the people involved. But that should never be the starting point.”
Also Read: How creativity, commerce and AI collide in mid-2026 marketing mix
For Southeast Asia’s under-resourced but fast-growing content industries, that reframing matters more than any specific tool. Wagner’s point about democratisation wasn’t abstract flattery, either: “The same way it’s been empowering for me, it’s going to be empowering for anyone who has a story to tell but doesn’t have millions of dollars to tell it.”
3. Southeast Asia isn’t the next market; it’s already the biggest one
If there was a genuine surprise buried in the conference, it was this: Magnific’s largest user base by country isn’t in the US or China. It’s India, followed by Brazil, with the US in third place. Indonesia and Thailand aren’t far behind.
Joaquín Cuenca, Magnific’s co-founder and CEO, was refreshingly unbothered by the usual anxiety about American or Chinese AI dominance.
“People don’t look at the label to see if a product comes from the US or not; they just use the product that they want to use,” he said. He also made an unexpected case for being a European company operating in Asian markets: “For enterprise customers, it’s a little bit like Switzerland. It’s not the US, it’s not China. They know that their data is going to remain private.”
This isn’t a minor footnote for a Southeast Asia-focused audience. It suggests the region isn’t waiting to be served by generative AI tools built elsewhere; it’s already one of the primary users shaping how those tools evolve, price sensitivity and all. Magnific’s entry price sits around US$6 to US$8 a month depending on the plan, deliberately low enough for the price-sensitive markets that built its original user base.
4. Isolation from Silicon Valley can be a structural advantage, not a handicap
Cuenca’s own founding story runs counter to the standard startup script. He built his first company in Cox, a town of a few thousand people in southern Spain, bootstrapped Freepik without raising a single round of venture capital, and credits that isolation for the company’s discipline.
“We were not native speakers. We are different from the average entrepreneur in San Francisco,” he said. “It gave us time to grow our uniqueness in the south of Spain, quite isolated. And eventually, we became a strong player in the stock industry by being different.” That same distance from Silicon Valley’s conventional wisdom, he argued, is what allowed Magnific to rethink its business “from scratch” when generative AI arrived, rather than inheriting assumptions built for a different era.
For founders operating far from the usual capital hubs, a familiar condition across much of Southeast Asia, this ought to be reassuring rather than discouraging.
5. The next competitive battle isn’t the prompt; it’s organisational memory
Perhaps the most consequential announcement of the week had nothing to do with flashier image generation. Magnific unveiled a trio of enterprise products — MCP, Flows, and Agents — designed to solve a much less glamorous problem: what happens when only two people on a 40-person marketing team actually know how to get good results out of AI, and everyone else is stuck bottlenecking around them.
Also Read: Is AI the end of originality or a new dawn for creativity?
“Access isn’t the same as building,” Cuenca said. “Building means your team can run it, not just you. It means the AI remembers your work, not just your last message.”
Omar Pera, Magnific’s CPO, framed the ambition more plainly still: “We’re much more interested in what humans can do when they have the right tools. Our goal has never been to replace creators. It’s to give them the power to create things that previously required larger teams, larger budgets, or more time.” For agencies juggling campaigns across Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City simultaneously, that shift — from clever prompting to shared, governable workflows — may end up mattering more than any single model upgrade.
Taken together, these five threads point to a conference that was less about marvelling at what AI can generate and more about the harder, less photogenic work of figuring out what it’s actually for. Southeast Asia, it turns out, isn’t just watching that conversation from the sidelines. It’s already in the room.
The post The scarcity mindset is killing creativity, not AI appeared first on e27.