Last week, we got stuck while working on a social media post for a client. After searching through hundreds of stock images, we found one we liked for the subject: a group of young adults excitedly watching a football game drinking beer. Yet, we needed to depict different forms of alcohol in the image.
After sending it back to our graphic designer, they returned the image with a wine bottle placed in the image. It reflected the light of the television and the darker atmosphere around it, fitting into the photo seamlessly. I asked the designer how they had done this incredible job so quickly and they responded “with Photoshop generative AI.”
Adobe: Painter or Paintbrush
AI has already infiltrated the advertising industry, most notably in the Adobe Creative Cloud, the industry standard for agencies around the globe. Adobe’s AI tools use machine learning to analyze objects and their surroundings to effectively manipulate them. The results are staggering. These tools can, for example, remove unwanted objects from videos or create shorter or longer versions of a song to match your desired length. What once took hours, now can be done with a couple clicks.
Adobe, like many other companies, has worked AI into their platforms with brazen velocity. Some creatives (me) wish they’d fix problems with existing features before racing to join the others on the cutting edge, yet it is difficult to deny the power of these tools. For the most part, they are adding speed and precision to laborious and often inane tasks, and, one could argue, expanding the creative possibilities for creators. I may be mincing words here, but within the Creative Cloud suite of software, AI is helping us create, not creating itself.
OpenAI: Our New Creative Director
However, other AI tools absolutely create. We can feed ChatGPT prompts for a social media post and it will spit out a plethora of options for us to further refine using the platform. It can write scripts, analyze data, make strategic recommendations. Other AI platforms like Sora (like ChatGPT – an OpenAI product) can create entire videos from prompts, often with shocking realism. These nascent advancements haven’t reached the integration of the Adobe AI tools yet, but inevitably they will find their way into our workflow before we can comprehend the consequences.
Bad actor but good investor Ashton Kutcher remarked about the future of Sora: “Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate then watch my own movie.” At the core of this conflict in general, and Kutcher’s comment specifically, is the removal of authorship. Would a movie you “generated” surprise you? Are these your ideas or AI’s? And what’s wrong with watching a movie somebody else created?
The Currency of Creation
We go to the movies, read books, listen to music and experience art to appreciate and understand other’s perspectives, not only through experiencing the content, but also analyzing the creative choices and the creator’s vision. This content communicates to us, for the most part, in emotion. It begins as a feeling experienced by the author and, with some time, skill, a great team and a little luck, comes out the other side provoking an emotional response in the audience.
Even in the somewhat trivial environment of advertising, we tell stories in hopes of eliciting emotion. It may just mean a chuckle at a line for ED medication, or a tear from a detergent commercial, but when we encounter thousands of advertisements per day, even minor emotional resonance can capture our attention.
Turing Test 2.0
Does AI understand humor? Probably. But can it experience inspiration? I’m not sure how it could. Ideas come to us on walks, in the shower, brushing our teeth. They don’t tend to come sitting and staring at a computer screen. I believe good work comes from deep inside of us, in a place we don’t fully understand, but that is free of logic and structure, allowing for pure inspiration. The challenge comes in interpreting the output, communicating it, putting down on paper and structuring it to achieve one’s desired outcome. AI is good at this part, or at least built to be. But, inspiration and that ineffable place inside us remains the dominion of humans.
AI can’t experience emotions, so how can it create something truly original that inspires it in others? I don’t think it can, and I don’t think we should let it try. And I’ll stand by that, at least until the singularity arrives.
