The pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity
〰️
The pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity 〰️
Workshop
KEEP YOUR VOICE
A working creative’s guide to LLMs
Five modules on directing language models without losing yourself. For strategists, creatives and executives who already have a voice and don't want the tools to flatten it.
Who this is for
For strategists, creatives, designers, writers, and founders.
Anyone who directs work and has to answer for it.
The question isn't whether or not to use AI.
It’s whether it sounds like you when you do.
Most AI training is about what the tools can do. This workshop is about what you bring to the table that they cannot.
We go deep on voice, judgment, and the uncomfortable places where AI pressure-tests your creative identity.
You leave with a framework for working alongside these tools without becoming indistinguishable from them.
WHO’S TEACHING
Two people who actually do this.
Founder & Creative Director,
FUTURE CREATIVEDré Labre is the founder and creative director of Future Creative, a practice that teaches working creatives how to direct AI without handing over their voice. Through workshops, writing, and hands-on creative direction, he helps people fold these tools into real work, the kind with deadlines and clients attached, while keeping the judgment that made the work theirs to begin with.
He spent more than 20 years as a creative director, making award-winning work across advertising and creative technology, at agencies like Rethink, DDB, and McCann, and at his own studio, Never. He came up building for web, activations, and robotics, arriving with the ideas and the means to build them. That mix of creative and technical shapes how he teaches: human-first, grounded in the belief that taste, judgment, and intention are what separate work worth making from output.
CO-LEADS THIS WORKSHOP
Ronit Novak
Editorial Director,
THE GRAINRonit Novak is the founder and editorial director of THE GRAIN, a platform exploring the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creative work. Through writing, events, workshops, and public dialogue, she helps people navigate technological change while staying connected to what makes their work uniquely human.
Grounded in editorial leadership, visual storytelling, and the psychology of creativity, her work focuses on creative agency, authorship, and judgment in an increasingly automated world. She also helps photographers and visual storytellers develop a stronger voice, clearer point of view, and more intentional creative practice.
CO-LEADS THIS WORKSHOP
Dré Labre
What’s covered
Five modules. One through-line.
Module 01
Your relationship to AI
Before tactics, there's posture. How you relate to these tools — with curiosity, skepticism, or anxiety — shapes everything downstream. We start here.
Module 02
How AI actually works
(and what it doesn't do)
What these tools are, what they're not, and why the gap between the two matters. The mental models most people never get.
Module 03
The prompting spectrum
From bare commands to rich direction — the full range of how you can speak to these tools and what each level actually produces.
Module 04
Creative and professional integration
Where AI fits into real work: the workflows, the handoffs, the moments to lean in and the moments to step back.
Module 05
Your AI constitution
Leave with a working set of principles that are yours — not borrowed rules, not best practices from someone else's practice. Yours.
This workshop focuses exclusively on large language models — not image generators, video tools, or other AI categories.
What you walk away with
A working mental model for directing AI tools, not just poking at them.
A clear articulation of your creative voice and what makes it yours.
A point of view on AI-assisted work you can defend in a room full of opinions.
Your own framework — not borrowed rules — for navigating the shift.
The nerve to stop pretending you have it all figured out.
Date
July 15, 2026
2pm – 5pm
Location
MaRS Discovery District
Collaboration Room 3
101 College St,
Toronto, ON. M5G 1L7
Open in Map
Our Approach
Why this workshop is different.
Most AI workshops focus on tools. This workshop focuses on the person using them.
You'll learn how to work with AI without losing your voice, judgment, or creative agency. Rather than teaching a fixed set of prompts or workflows, we'll help you develop a practical framework for thinking with AI. One that can evolve as the tools evolve.
Through discussion, hands-on exercises, and real-world examples, you'll learn how to use AI intentionally, critically, and creatively, in ways that reflect your own goals, values, and professional practice.