Is AI the definition of Best Practice?

The advances in generative AI to create pictures and video from descriptive text seems to have all us creatives’ attention right now; I admit it’s impressive. Only last year I wrote how I felt it wasn’t quite there yet, how generative AI images lacked soul and were obviously unreal. But it’s continually improving, and with the right prompts and perseverance, it’s much easier to output genuine looking visuals. And there’s no doubt it’s making marketing more accessible and reducing the cost of historically big budget productions. It’s changing how we and other agencies operate – there’s not as much need for studios, film crews and laborious Photoshop retouching, or artists, illustrators, copy writers… It’s enabling agility and faster turnarounds, streamlining processes along the way. And we’re embracing this new way of working, but we’re also being careful with how we use it.

I don’t know how it will evolve, but I can’t yet see how AI can replace human creativity. Because while AI can present you an image in the style of Greg Rutkowski or Matt Groening (surely an IP issue? but that’s a different argument) it couldn’t reference those artists or styles if they’d never lifted a brush. And if AI drives commercial artists and writers away from creative industries, we’re heading for a world without new influences, radical ideas, or imagination. Will children in the future still enjoy writing stories and painting? I hope so – it would be diabolical if instead they describe the picture they want pinned to the fridge for DALL-E to regurgitate from a stagnant creative snapshot.

Sir John Hegarty wrote recently that ‘best practice’ was a dangerous phrase in creativity because if you follow best practices, you’ll get what everyone else has – best practices are the death of ingenuity. If AI is learning and generating based on what has been done before, that’s the definition of best practice and can only result in ordinary rather than extraordinary.

However generative AI develops, creativity, imagination and know-how is (for now) still the key to producing powerful and effective advertising. Marketing experience, audience understanding, and ideas are still the commodity of advertising and marketing agencies. AI is just a tool, like After Effects or Photoshop, or stock libraries, or a thesaurus, or a calculator. It means we all need to update our docks again (MacOS reference). The skill in using AI should be driven by a human spark, an emotional connection to the desired outcome – a tool shouldn’t dictate the end product, it should help you realise it. Having good ideas and knowing how to activate them is still and has always been how the best creatives earn their money.

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