The word “creativity” often conjures up images of painters, sculptors or other people who work with their hands. But creativity starts in the mind. In fact, creativity is defined as “the ability to produce original and unusual ideas, or to make something new or imaginative,” per Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary.
Creativity is particularly important in marketing, where the entire job is the production and placement of commercial messaging that measurably influences people’s opinions or changes their economic behaviour.
Given the vast amount of competition and the immunity most people have to adverts, today’s advertisers require ideas that stand out - which increasingly means ones that take risks and do something out of the ordinary. If an idea doesn’t stop the scroll and make a rational or emotional impact on the audience, it has no chance of ever persuading.
So creativity in advertising is needed now more than ever.
We are fortunate for all the technological innovations that are currently available to us to help express our creativity in new (and in some cases more efficient) ways. For example, digital graphic design or animation presents unlimited possibilities for visual imagery beyond hand-drawn illustrations. While technological innovations would and could not exist without creative minds to dream them up, one in particular has advanced to the point where some people are feeling that creativity itself is being threatened. That technology is - you guessed it - generative AI.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, generative AI (or gen-AI) is a machine-learning model that is trained to generate strings of data, words or images based on the frequency of associations on data it has been fed. Products like Open AI’s ChatGPT are among the largest and most complex, with seemingly endless parameters trained on an enormous amount of information, including the majority of what is publicly available (and some copyrighted - but that’s a whole different issue).
For the product to produce content, users must first input a prompt or instructions for what they’d like to generate. Prompts can include tone of voice, examples to follow or specific formatting details. A user may go through several rounds of prompts and amendments. Generally, the more information provided, the better the results.
With these tools now at the disposal of anyone with an internet connection, the use cases are endless and have slowly been integrated into various workplaces and processes, especially in the marketing and advertising industries. Ads and slogans can now be produced at the click of a button (and with the help of proper prompts), saving valuable time and resources. But how do the results stack up against human-powered projects?
Let’s say multiple agencies are developing an ad campaign for cereal. They are all using AI to generate their deliverables, so they all input very similar prompts and get back the same sets of output. Starting to see the problem?
The paradox, sadly, is that the more people rely on gen-AI to create content, the more similar content we’ll begin to see. AI isn’t able to push boundaries and think outside the box - it lacks the ability to think creatively like humans because it is limited to the information it’s been fed and spits out the average of that information based on the prompt. While it can be a useful tool in a lot of ways, it will not generate new creative ideas or copy.
Not only that, but gen-AI has a tendency to continuously creep more to the mean, which leaves a lot left on the table at the outer fringes. The more content that AI produces, the more its own content gets fed back into it for training, creating a sort of nonvirtuous circle, spitting out mass amounts of mediocre, middle-of-the-road content (aka AI slop).
Gen-AI, particularly the most widely available versions, is still far from perfect. While it's constantly improving, most of us can still distinguish between real and AI-generated content due to its shortcomings and bizarre misses at times (human hands, anyone?). You’ve undoubtedly seen images or read articles and said to yourself, “That’s AI.” Using this type of gen-AI content without correcting any inaccuracies or improving low-quality components shows laziness on the part of the creator and communicates to their audience that they don't really care about the quality of the content they are producing. This can also lead to a bigger divide between true creatives who take care and pride in their work vs. people who prioritize quantity over quality, churning out as much AI slop as possible. Basically, exactly what creative marketers are trying to avoid and not produce. It’s the very antithesis of creativity.
So, how can we use AI while still maintaining our creativity? One interesting use case comes from copywriter Shruthi Subramanian, the most successful person in her field, who, according to The Drum, uses AI to filter out the most predictable (read: boring) options.
“It’s incredibly helpful in weeding out the unoriginal, the most logical answers, all to push your brain to think beyond a chat window,” She says, and when this happens, “you can sit down to craft something that tops it all.”
Senior art director Victoria Rocha (ranked as the sixth-most successful art director in the world) cautions others (via The Drum),
“[Do] not treat AI as a single answer input/output tool. Make sure you input as much information and detail as you can and prompt a range of responses. You can then take the best parts of the information and create something unique yourself. In a way, you [and the machine] are prompting each other, but in the end, as a human, you have more agency in the process to actually bring your ideas to life. You’re in the lead.”
Our own Art Director, Rachel Morris, likes to use AI for automated tasks in projects.
“It streamlines mundane tasks so I can focus my time and energy on more important work. It is a powerful tool to expand creativity if used the right way.”
It’s important to keep in mind that AI, when it comes down to it, is just another tool in a creator’s toolbelt. It can only be as effective as the humans at its helm, and furthermore, it would be nothing without the learnings it has been fed, created by fellow humans. While we recommend using AI to streamline certain tasks and to support creativity, it should not be used as an outright replacement for creativity.
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