The Future of Creativity
The Evolving Partnership Between AI and Humans
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This special edition is a collaboration between myself, David Webster, and Claude. We took a unique approach to writing that paired conversation, collaborative thinking, and AI. Further details on our writing process are provided at the end of the article. Now onto the content.
The rapid advancement of AI is transforming industries across the globe, and the creative fields are potentially feeling it more than any. As AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, questions arise about its potential to reshape, augment, or even replace human creativity. We believe the future lies not in competition between humans and machines, but in leveraging the unique strengths of both in a symbiotic partnership.
Waves of Adoption and Advancement
If AI adoption occurs in a similar way to earlier technologies like Internet, Mobile, and Social, then we’d expect the impact and opportunity to unfold in waves. The first wave, which we have seen and are nearing the end of, has been focused on using AI to perform familiar tasks more efficiently - think generating copy variations or rapidly iterating design layouts. The second wave experiments with new creative possibilities unlocked by AI's capabilities – think Sora and creative models that allow for production techniques and outcomes that would not have been possible before. And then it's in the third wave where the real commercial opportunity presents itself as AI to pioneer entirely novel products, services and business models.
While new businesses and industry leaders tend to be created in the first stages, it’s in the third stage where their economic advantage becomes most pronounced, or in this case where the most disruptive creative potential will be seen.
AI's Limitations in Emotive Creative Expression
Focusing first on the impact today, commercial creativity and marketing, with clearly definable inputs, outputs and success metrics, is one area where AI is quickly showing an ability to surpass average human performance. Advanced language models can already generate coherent ad copy, musical jingles (and whole songs for that matter), and product designs with impressive speed and variety. Generative AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney can conjure up vivid (if sometimes surreal) imagery from text descriptions. For many routine creative tasks, AI has already become an indispensable efficiency multiplier.
However, AI's limitations come into focus when considering the emotive creative expression that flows from an individual's accumulated life experiences, emotions, and sense of meaning. An AI model, no matter how expansive its training data, cannot draw upon a lived human existence. It has not known love, loss, awe, or struggle - the very stuff that fuels so much great art. A bot may paint you a pretty picture, but it cannot imbue it with the poignant subtext or de novo creative potential of a Rothko or of a Levi’s Laundrette Ad for that matter .
The challenge today is that where AI is proving its potential to drive efficiency in creative production, the mere fact that it is trained on past work, and then thinks probabilistically about what will work in the future means that it will tend to replicate past formulas. And while this is powerful, it fails to capture the opportunity of standing out by breaking the model entirely. Where AI can be trained on your brand guideline and create copy and imagery in that style, we would question it’s ability to create a brand that stands apart and different as Liquid Death did for example.
Holding onto First Principles in Creative Work
Here the concept of "first principles" comes into play. As creative professionals, what are the foundational, immutable truths we must hold onto even as tools and trends shift around us? One is surely the power of art to move the human spirit in profound and surprising ways - something no algorithm can yet fully replicate. Another is the importance of critical thinking, of questioning assumptions and imagining radical alternatives. These are the north stars that should guide us as we integrate AI into creative work.
On the consumption side, AI offers intriguing possibilities for aligning content with individual preferences and needs. Imagine an AI agent that not only understands your tastes, but encourages you to diversify your media diet, surfacing important viewpoints you might otherwise miss. Such agents could be a powerful antidote to the filter bubbles and confirmation bias that plague today's online spaces and social promotion algorithms. But this vision depends on building AIs that are optimised for user agency and an expansive worldview, not just narrow commercial incentives such as promoting fear to drive clicks.
Reshaping Skill Requirements and Educational Priorities
Another challenge we must consider as creative professionals and marketers is how AI will reshape our industries education and training priorities. It’s been said that as we automate skills like writing snappy ad copy or sketching up mood boards, the roles of junior creative people will disappear forcing us to ask the question, how will they learn? While the answer is still ambiguous, we believe that other aptitudes will grow in importance - curating compelling prompts to focus AI's outputs, combining those outputs into cohesive campaigns and experiences, creating AI and multi-agent workflows, and evaluating AI-generated work against strategic brand goals.
Despite usage skills still being in their nascent stages and adoption being limited, it is imperative that we address the challenges of brand safety and the ethical use of AI before we create similar challenges to those that exist in social media. While big tech is trying to address this through language and prompt recognition, clever prompt engineering - or prompt injection attacks - can bypass intended results.
In one recent example, an artist cajoled an AI art tool into generating an image of one bodybuilder injecting another with steroids - something it had refused to depict when asked directly, on ethical grounds. Through a series of incrementally modified prompts, the human guided the AI step-by-step toward the edgy final composition, not unlike how a savvy parent might convince a toddler to eat their veggies. While this is a negative example that must be guarded against, it’s also a reminder that even as AI grows in sophistication, human creativity and social intelligence will remain essential.
So how can those entering creative fields prepare for this AI-infused future? Paradoxically, by nurturing deeply human capacities such as imagination, curiosity and questioning, empathy, and the ability to connect disparate ideas in novel ways. At the same time, educational programs should double down on cultivating agile, curious minds over rote technical skills. The keys will be learning how to learn, how to adapt fluidly to new tools and platforms, and - crucially - how to ask incisive questions that spur groundbreaking creative leaps.
Summary: Co-evolving with AI Toward a Vibrant Creative Future
So while headlines love to claim that AI is ushering in the "death of creativity", that feels greatly exaggerated and more like a clickbait designed to go viral through fear. What's emerging instead is a new kind of creativity, a "centaur" model where human intuition and machine brute force and rapid speed combine in powerful ways. As with previous technological disruptions, some creative tasks will fade into economic irrelevance, but let’s be honest, few today mourn the lost art of printing press typesetting, or of putting slides into a carousel to take them physically to your next presentation. The truth is that change is scary, but these new tools will unlock new creative opportunities and commercial paradigms.
Ultimately, AI is a tool - albeit an incredibly potent one. It's up to us as a creative community to wield it thoughtfully and responsibly in service of artistic visions and innovations we can scarcely imagine today. This means that we need to consider the impacts and the ethics of “progress” so we can stay true to our core values, while enabling ourselves to benefit from AI's vast possibilities. In this way, our industry can evolve with this transformative technology toward a more vibrant creative future.
Actions:
How to prepare yourself for the future of AI enhanced Creativity
The robots aren't here to steal our jobs - they're here to help us dream bigger. But knowing how to dream is going to be essential. Here are 5 suggestions of what you can do as creatives and marketers to make sure you stay ready and stay in the game.
Embrace AI as a collaborator:
View AI not as a threat, but as a powerful tool to augment and enhance your creative process. Experiment with AI-driven ideation, prototyping, and content generation.
Tools you’ve probably already tried, but just in case you haven’t here are links:
ChatGPT - Leading provider of LLM with services that includes text, voice, and pictures. Or as they say omni-modal capabilities.
Claude - Built by Anthropic. Focused on ensuring transformative AI helps people and society flourish.
Midjourney - Image model that is mostly accessible via Discord.
Ollama - Allows you to access and try open source LLMs.
Develop AI literacy and prompt engineering skills:
Invest time in understanding the capabilities and limitations of various AI tools relevant to your field. Cultivate the skill of crafting effective prompts that guide AI systems to generate desired outputs. The ability to "speak AI's language" will be a key competitive advantage.
There are a lot of free classes to accelerate AI literacy. Below are a few links, but with a little research you will find a lot more:
Double down on uniquely human skills:
While AI can automate many tasks, it cannot replicate the depth of human empathy, imagination, and contextual understanding. Sharpen your skills in areas like storytelling, emotional resonance, and strategic thinking and questioning. These skills will become even more valuable as AI takes over routine tasks.
Great reading that can help you hone your human craft:
Think Again by Adam Grant
Start with Why by Simon Sinek
Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg
Foster a culture of lifelong learning and adaptability:
The pace of AI's evolution means that continuous upskilling will be essential. Commit to ongoing learning, not just about AI tools, but about emerging trends, technologies, and creative techniques. Techniques you can employ to do this:
Carve out time every week for online classes
Learn about people through conversation and observation with people who are different from you
Never take things for granted and always ask why
Watch this TED Talk
Prioritize ethical considerations and transparency:
As you integrate AI into your creative workflows, prioritize ethical best practices around data usage, content attribution, and AI transparency. Be proactive in communicating to stakeholders and audiences about how AI is being used in your creative process. Building trust and accountability around AI will be critical for long-term success.
By taking these proactive steps, marketers and creative professionals can position themselves to not just survive, but to thrive in this new era of AI-enhanced creativity.
How we wrote this
This article and the writing process is the brain child of both Justin Peyton and David Webster. Our process started with a call where we agreed to the subject of the article and a few questions that we wanted to explore in our text.
The process then deviated from standard in that instead of typing a draft, we organized another call. That call was 90 minute and it was recorded and transcribed. The transcriptions were then given to Claude as an AI partner along with a prompt to guide it on writing the article and a few of the key questions we wanted to address.
Using our base text, Claude then wrote the article. Several prompts were created and new draft were generated until we arrived at a solution that required only minimum editing. That said, there was a human pass through and edit which was critical to the process.
This approach was a proof of concept that allowed for the following benefits:
Accelerate the time from concept to draft
Create a collaborative writing approach that rewarded quality of ideas and not focus of the editor
Remove the potential for lost ideas
In writing, sometimes great ideas wind up on the cutting room. The ambition was to make sure that our AI companion prioritize some of the most salient points. Prompting the AI to identify ideas that exist in the transcript but were not present in the article allows for QA of idea maintenance
This was just the start and we have many more ideas for how we will transform conversations between two people into accessible insights for many people.
This article was concepted and co-authored by myself and David Webster.
David is a pioneer in the area of collaborative working and creativity. He is current the CEO of The Carrot Collective, a co-founder AICreate, and was previously the Managing Director at BBH in Singapore.
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