​Riding the tiger: being a creative person in the age of AI

Let the record show AI came for my job first. It could have been a lawyer. Or a travel agent. Or a synthetic Peloton spin class instructor. Nope. AI wanted to be a writer.

It’s been over two years since the foretelling of the AI apocalypse, in which all creative people will be replaced. The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, recently predicted that 95 per cent of advertising people will soon be replaced by AI at no cost. Well, Sam, what’s taking so long? Everybody’s pumping billions of dollars into this stuff. Why hasn’t AI bumped us all off yet?

Like the ancient Zen parable said, when you meet the tiger on the road, if you try to run from it, it will kill you. Try to fight it; it will kill you.

One answer is that human beings are still better at original thought, and there’s a good technical POV on this regarding human-generated “thought tokens” that AI needs to get smart, hence the plagiarism lawsuits. But the titular answer is that you and I are riding the tiger. Like the ancient Zen parable said, when you meet the tiger on the road, if you try to run from it, it will kill you. Try to fight it; it will kill you. Instead, said the monks, you better jump on its back. Wild metaphor, but let’s all agree, AI is fucking wild.  

Jimi Hendrix's track All Along The Watchtower is arguably an outstanding alchemical concoction that draws on previous tracks in the way AI can remix old ideas. 

AI changed the way my agency worked almost overnight. It did not take jobs, it made our lives easier. Our creative teams quickly taught themselves to use Midjourney in the messy middle ground of ideation and pitching ideas. This changed everything for us. For my entire two-decade career, our creative teams struggled to paint a picture of a concept for our clients. We could see in our mind’s eye what the idea could be, but we could not get our clients to see what we saw. Now, with the right prompts, in about five seconds, Midjourney actually paints a picture. 

This is one of AI’s most shocking creative capabilities. Not the digital output but the human result. In the same way, visionaries can persuade large, disparate groups of people to dream the same dream, Midjourney is able to gel our imaginations. My teams now routinely use Midjourney to get us over the mental hump — recently for a major product launch for a Fortune 500 company, where we had an approved new product name, but no alignment on what the product should look like. Midjourney came through in the clutch on a Zoom call. 

That’s how human beings got here. We fuck with stuff we’re not supposed to fuck with. Adam ate the apple, Pandora lifted the lid, and Jimi Hendrix kissed the sky. 

If we look at creativity on a structural level, as [filmmaker] Kirby Ferguson points out, every so-called new idea is a remix. It’s A + B = C, where A and B are familiar to us, but C blows our minds. In 1965, nobody had ever heard anything like Jimi Hendrix, but his version of All Along The Watchtower (my favorite song of all time) is undeniably Bob Dylan plus Muddy Waters. It’s more than that, of course. Hendrix was an alchemist. But his music was, technically speaking, a derivation of two pre-existing things. 

This is how my teams use Midjourney on a daily basis. We prompt it with smart As and Bs, and it creates beautiful, striking, aspirational Cs. 

No doubt, AI will eventually eliminate not just jobs but entire professions. After four rounds of layoffs in 2023, Meta’s revenue and profit are both way up in ‘24. Hmmm. I wonder who’s doing all the work? Couldn’t possibly be AI. I hear streaming audio ads for Canva AI now, claiming it writes and designs ads without, get this, people. 

And maybe you heard Tyler Perry canceled plans for his $800 million live-action studioin Atlanta when he saw what OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora can do. But this is the nature of invention. This, my friends, is why we have to ride the tiger. 

My agency, BarkleyOKRP, used Chat GPT to write a fruit-themed romance novel for our client, Smoothie King. Leo Burnett launched a social campaign for KFC, thanking AI for its weird predisposition for putting extra fingers to lick on human hands. MullenLowe used AI to bring six mass shooting victims back from the dead, using their voices and likenesses to advocate for gun control. Is that exploitation? Creepy? If it saves one life, most of us would agree it was worth it.

This impactful campaign against gun violence used AI to create a sinister but powerful humanitarian message.

Whether creating with AI is right or wrong, it is inevitable. Frank Lloyd Wright declared he was morally obligated to use the new construction materials of the Industrial Revolution, concrete, I-beams, etc., and he gave us the cantilevered Falling Water and the nautilus-shaped The Guggenheim. 

AI is now the creative equivalent of I-beams. We will use it to its maximum load-bearing strength because that’s what we do. That’s how human beings got here. We fuck with stuff we’re not supposed to fuck with. Adam ate the apple, Pandora lifted the lid, and Jimi Hendrix kissed the sky. 

Which gets me to my final point on creativity in the age of AI. I use Chat GPT all the time, but I won’t let it write a sentence for me. Not because it couldn’t write a better line. I’m sure it could.  But because it would deprive me of the opportunity. Writing this took a lot out of me. That was the point. 

Being creative is an act of imagination, but the result is a discovery.

Advertising taught me how to write. I copied my heroes and practiced on journal pages until I found my own voice. It’s still a test every single time. Writing is never, ever, not hard. I still get a knot in my stomach as I type, realising even after my 10,000+ hours of supposed mastery, I commit the sin of clichés. I write shitty, clunky, weak-ass sentences. I contradict myself. The act of writing blunts your arrogance and sharpens your thinking.