AI – Embrace or avoid. The creative’s dilemma

At the beginning of September, City St George’s, University of London launched the Institute for Creativity and AI. Its purpose is to blend research and practice in areas of creative work and artificial intelligence and understand how AI can impact creative work.

And if this doesn’t convince you AI is here to stay, how about the fact a whopping 78% of in-house agencies are already using it? Okay, it might be primarily for testing and learning at this stage, but this is in spite of ongoing concerns around privacy, bias, IP violations and copyright infringement.

The reality is if you work in marketing embracing AI is the way to go, but then again, is it? We take a look.

Embrace for more efficiency

People are naturally wary of AI as they think it will eventually replace the whole of the marketing function. After all, why do you need copywriters, graphic designers or creatives if AI can do it all for you? And while that fear may not be unfounded, it is rather short-sighted.

AI is no different from Photoshop, InDesign or even Canva, in the sense that it’s a tool. And as we all know, a tool is only as good or as bad as the person using it.

We’ve all seen Photoshop fails (the cat backpack!!) and AI is no exception. Fluffy Happy Snakes – seriously how, and more importantly why, did anyone come up with that concept?! But that’s the point. Just like creatives need to be briefed so does AI, and it needs to be briefed by someone who has vision, imagination and the germ of an idea that has the potential to be amazing.  It can only ever be as good as the input, otherwise; you’ll just end up with fluffy happy snakes!

It’s best to think of AI is as nothing more than a toolbox, admittedly a powerful one, but a toolbox all the same that helps you work more efficiently. We are still the engine and therefore need to give it instructions on what we want. For example, to help write this blog, AI could have been used to come up with a list of pros and cons as a starting point. To be clear, it wasn’t! Or it could be used to summarise a 100-page document, brainstorm initial design concepts to see if they are viable or help with technical writing.  It’s no different to giving the work to a junior apart from the fact you’ll get the results a lot quicker, and you need to be explicit in your instructions, as unlike a junior AI won’t ask questions.

Basically, AI does the leg work for you and then you take this ‘starter for ten’ and work your magic. Tone of voice, emotion, brand personality – adding in all those creative aspects which turn the mundane into something original, smart and memorable. In other words, AI is about developing your work not about defining it.

Avoid if you want to stay creative

“Being creative is part of who I am”. This is a quote from Rosh, our Creative Director and it highlights one of the key drawbacks of using AI – it lacks the human touch. Yes, it will produce something if you tell it to, but it won’t think outside the box, and it definitely won’t have one of those wonderful lightbulb moments which transform good creative into something out of this world.

AI lacks emotion. It lacks integrity. You could even argue it lacks originality as what it produces is based on what is already out there. It’s unable to pick up on all those subtle nuances and the unwritten subtext, which are implicit and instinctively recognised by a human.

Yes, when you brief AI, you can include cultural, time-sensitive, emotional and social explanations, but let’s face it, if you have to work so hard to get the input right to produce quality output, maybe you should have just worked on the output in the first place.

And then of course, there is the old adage “use it or lose it”. If you’re not using your own creativity, whether that’s writing copy, coming up with campaigns, or creating artwork, and are completely reliant on AI to do the heavy lifting for you, don’t you risk losing your own skills? We’ve all had experience of forgetting how to do something if we don’t do it very often, and surely this is no different. Do you really want to compromise your own abilities in favour of a computer doing the work for you?

So, should creatives embrace AI or not?

In many ways the arrival of AI is no different than when digital cameras first came in. The heated and protracted debates about whether film or digital cameras were superior saw people convinced digital portended the death of real photography. But the question is – would someone like Ansel Adams, the renowned American landscape photographer, really have shunned the advances of technology, or would he have embraced the new exciting opportunities offered?

AI is not going away. It’s the future and if you don’t know how to use it to your advantage then you will get left behind, especially given 70% of in-house agencies are already using generative AI to work up ideas and visualise different concepts.

AI is a tool, and like any tool, if you know how to leverage it properly, it will save you time and energy; time and energy which can be put to good use elsewhere. It’s inevitable AI is going to become more advanced so it’s better to embrace it now, than play catch-up later.

And ultimately, no matter how good AI gets it will never be able to replace the expertise, knowledge and emotion that comes from simply being human.