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2000 was the year I declared my first major in Cognitive Science/Artificial Intelligence. I was fascinated by the world of AI as we knew it 24 years ago. It was about neural networks, the psychology of language, how brains developed, and how computer science could ultimately intersect with mimicking and mapping what human brains did.
I was obsessed with all things language—how we learn, retain, and deploy information—and eventually leaned more into the education and learning application, which ultimately led me to the career I’m in today.
So, when the topic of AI emerged as a conversation a few years ago in advertising circles, at first I was beyond excited. “We’re going to talk about the power of natural language and how we can use it to understand incredibly complicated things more easily!”
But so much of what we were talking about was automation or shortcuts and making our everyday tasks a little easier. This is all very cool, but really the power of AI is how computational models can understand natural language. It’s not just about gen AI here.
We talk a lot about computers getting closer to humans, but I’m excited about the other way around. Getting computational things, aka the complicated bits, to understand ordinary language is magical in so many ways.
The ‘AI’ in advertising
The psychology of language often gets overlooked in the conversations around gen AI, but language is at the heart of all of it. We are nothing without our prompts and the ability to ask in the most interesting way. Further from that, chatbots like ChatGPT are just one small part of the whole cacophony of exciting things AI can actually do.
Big agencies and corporations are pummeling billions (yes that’s B) of dollars into building the next great model and LLM to decimate the need for human eyeballs and brains to do many things. Humanity has survived multiple technical and industrial revolutions that replaced the need for humans to do certain things. What doesn’t scare me is the power of humanity finding a way to take these technologies and use them to make themselves better. I’m thankful for the wheel in the same way!
AI is going to be brilliant at helping us better decipher large datasets, faster than ever before, which allows for more actual evolutions in the work. Media optimizations will happen at a speed that will make our heads spin. Versioning (the creation and management of multiple product releases) is going to be done in a fraction of the time that we’ve had historically.
Smart creative and strategic people are going to be able to imagine their brilliant ideas faster and more efficiently than ever before. And love (or hate) them faster than they have before. How many times in a young art director’s life will they be told, “Maybe we could get another comp to help me understand,” only to stare an all-nighter in the face to get that Photoshop comp just right?
These gen AI tools have the potential to change the ad business in the best way. But with some caveats.
Humans in advertising are just as critical
What is scary is that folks don’t always know what they’re talking about when they spin the next “AI Agency” or that our entire creative class will be automated.
Ultimately, there does need to be a sharp, well-rounded human steering the ship with sharp, smart language shaping the ship. Can some of it be automated? Sure. But in most cases, the higher and larger the expectation, the more humans we need steering the ship. And then all of a sudden, the ship looks a lot like something we knew before, just with a much better set of navigational devices.
A dear friend often says that creativity will be the last true vocation—something I agree with emphatically. In many ways, one’s imagination can be replicated, extracted, and computationally analyzed. But they’re all things we have already done.
The way our brains magically superimpose problem-solving skills on our experience as living, sentient beings, plus our feelings and emotions, cannot be replicated. And it can’t be replicated because it hasn’t happened yet. AI is predicated on the past and things that have already been created, and how it (cleverly) can put the puzzles back together. But it’s not new. It always feels familiar in not an awesome way. Which is why mediocrity better watch out—AI will eat that for lunch.
An idea can come from anywhere
Ideas come from our shared understanding of abstract concepts like love. Or fear. Or heartbreak.
Sure, AI can extrapolate some things and put them back together into novel “concepts.” But they can’t take the life I’ve led, the upbringing I’ve had, the experiences as a creative person, the hundreds of art exhibitions, shows, albums, and concerts I’ve been to, and use those to apply to the next creative idea or strategy.
Rather than worry about what computers and AI can take away from us as creative professionals, let’s focus on what is not codified, recorded, written, indexed, or automated.
Focus on the things that make you a beautifully interesting creative person and find ways to apply those things to your work. The tools are getting better and sharper to help articulate those ideas, which is wonderful. But if we get so wrapped up in the “how” and we forget the “what,” we will find ourselves back in the world when we first started using “The Digital.”
In the world I chose to live in, AI becomes a wonderful tool for making creative people more creative with the ability to experience a creative life more readily, when some of the 0s and 1s are taken care of.
