No. 3 · 20 October 2026 · Dispatches from where frontier AI meets the creative industries.
The Field Kit.
We sometimes say that getting Claude is like being given a really powerful drill to build a treehouse, with very little explanation of how to actually use it to get what you need.
There’s loads of expertise in these models. But getting the right kind of expertise out of them, for the task in front of you, is much less simple than it sounds. Knowing what context, tools, background and reference points to put in, so the work gets done the way you want it done, can be really difficult.
Skills are a way of pointing the models much more specifically at a certain kind of task or a certain kind of expert area. That’s why we’ve put together the Field Kit.
It’s eight skills from different corners of the creative industries. Upload them and Claude can be your record label advisor, your pre-production manager, your catalogue consultant, your co-management partner, your live promoter, an adviser to your agency, your publicist, or a planner for the next drop on your fashion brand. All you need to do is follow the instructions below.
Turn on code execution, then in Claude open Customize › Skills, upload a skill and ask in plain English.
We think they’re really good and easy to use, and we’d strongly recommend having a play. We’d love to hear about the problems you’ve managed to tackle with them. Just reply to this email.
The people in a creative company should be doing way more of the work they love and way less of the work they don’t.
Napper
P.S. If you’re at ADE this week, I’m speaking on Friday morning at Felix Meritis. Say hello.
We sometimes say that getting Claude is like being given a really powerful drill to build a treehouse.
Five things from across the web
Each one read in full by one of us. The initials say who picked it.
1 · Music & live · MBW, 13 Oct · NT
Raye’s Royal Albert Hall show drew 1.8 million sign-ups for 5,000 seats, and she says scalpers used AI bots to make hundreds of thousands of them. Her team reviewed the list by hand to shortlist the people they believe are real fans. Her own line: “It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale.”
Our take
The room gets more valuable I think in person just becomes exponentially more valuable.
Atomised, then human The more agentic and automated and atomised that our work and the other parts of our lives become, the more profoundly important forming real in-person human connections becomes.
Human to human I have pretty high conviction that the importance and potency of human to human interaction actually probably even further increases.
It’s like a barbell. As AI eats the screen, the room gets more valuable.
2 · Law · MBW, 14 Oct · NT
Swift has filed sound marks of herself saying “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” in the UK and the EU, and Australia accepted one on 12 October. Writing in April about her earlier US filings, IP lawyer Josh Gerben called it “a new use of trademark registration that has not been tested in court before”. We view artists and creatives as the founders and CEOs of their own business. It’s about decision-making. Ownership. Being the prime mover of what you do, rather than being figured as a product.
3 · Music · MBW, 14 Oct · NT
Labels and distributors now tell YouTube whether each track is Fully, Partly or No Gen AI, and YouTube adds its own detection. Songs made “primarily using generative AI” get a label; it isn’t yet clear whether Partly tracks do. Proliferating content across channels with AI makes sense. But if you were just creating net new content with AI and just posting that more frequently, I think there would be high potential of compromising the product.
4 · Film & TV · The Ankler, 16 Oct · NT
Studios want AI to help create new characters and franchises, but in the US only work made by humans can be copyrighted. The Ankler: “Studios are eager to use AI to create more of their own.” Of course you can hire more people with great taste, but no two of them see things the same way. You can’t hire more of the person who hears a record and knows.
5 · Frontier · Black Forest Labs, 15 Oct · NT
An open-weight image model, 5.6 billion parameters, that makes and edits images on a studio’s own machines. It is free for commercial use at companies under $5M annual revenue. The case I’d make: agencies should own their AI rather than rent it.
Your turn
Which skill did you try first, and what did it get wrong?
Reply to this email. Know someone who’d use it? Send them to atlasstudios.ai/fieldkit.
First published on atlasstudios.ai. Field Notes is written by Napper Tandy, Kieran Mallon and Abdo El-Mobayad at Atlas Studios, applied AI for the creative industries. Forwarded this? Sign up at fieldnotes.atlasstudios.ai/subscribe.
Napper invests at the frontier of AI through Principia (Anthropic, xAI, Replit). We say so whenever we cover them, and never write about valuations, rounds or share prices.