aaCould AI lead to the homogenization of creativity?

Well, the trap of sameness has always been a thing in graphic design, advertising, and branding. How many logos are blue? How many lightbulbs, chess pieces, older couples walking on the beach at sunset, …etc.…

It’s unfair to blame AI for sameness. At the end of the day, we humans prioritize what we value. We can blame sameness on fear, lack of data, or failure to build consensus, but we can’t blame AI for sameness. Humans will use AI to perpetuate sameness until we better prioritize what we value from creative services — from ourselves. This is a very human problem — a culture problem — not an AI problem.

Could AI creative tools create derivative work?

Yes. AI-generated creative generates lawsuits over ownership because AI tools aggregate what already exists — and it takes more than clicking ‘refresh’ or a few filters to find original re-imaginings, for now. Again, AI is not to blame. Creativity has monetized the derivative for some time. For instance, older technologies have generated scores of logos that can’t win a trademark. So maybe the better question here is: will humans create even more derivative work using AI?

Can AI be truly creative?

Well . . . This is a simple question calling for a profoundly complex answer, and author Marcus du Sautoy is one of many to try.  — I think we need to answer another, more fundamental question first. Our primary question should be, what does it mean to be human?

I have always loved how Hampton Fancher explores this question in the dystopian Bladerunner 2049 — a world where a replicant (an artificially produced humanoid) can create memories for other replicants, dream of being human, and give unconditional love. I think that the answer to what it means to be human may lie at the critical intersection of imagination and empathy. When creative humans employ AI we need to see these tools as extensions of what our hearts and minds have to offer.

Now, let’s examine what the upside of  AI might be …

Is AI a valid creative tool?

Depends. The GUI interface removed all the hours of handwork, paste-up, and airbrushing, but the GUI also killed kerning, type rag, nuance, color, and more of what we held sacred on paper. Like many other past technologies, the rise of Apple/Adobe also drove the demand for fast over good. Whether AI further degrades or brings back some of the craft we have lost remains to be seen, but there are some current upsides to AI tools if we are willing to try.

Junction 11 Creative Studios integrated AI tools into what they called a ‘mixed-media’ creative output, resulting in the 2023 Christmas campaign for David Morris Jewelry. According to the agency’s creative director Darren Giles — “integrating data-driven and generative AI brought new ways to channel our creative aspirations, allowing us more opportunities to craft, play and refine.” — Women’s Wear Daily.

The reach and speed of AI tools open more opportunities for the creative process — and I find the most hope for creative professionals in this power to ideate at the speed and scale of our imaginations. As more AI-generated creative enters our digitally-fueled culture, we may all be pressed to adopt AI in order to adapt at the speed of brand. A motorcycle will come in handy to adapt to that pace.

We will also have to socialize failing faster, and that’s a positive because humans learn by failing — we ‘think different’ by ever-adapting. While the GUI drove us to produce fast over good, AI may be an opportunity to remove some of the time/money barriers and unleash our expansive imaginations.

If we make room for an expansive creative process, then AI tools will help everyone spend more time in rich, right-brain thinking. This will be a profound shift from the conventional race to an appropriate answer for the ask. Right-brain thinking builds toward a fruitful, creative nexus. Informed by that nexus, the ensuing, necessary, tactical, left-brain thinking benefits from a rich, strategic foundation. AI can take time and resource barriers out of the iteration process and produce better outcomes. Like Tony Stark using JARVIS to discover a new element, AI may make the creation of anything possible.

When professionals are creating, if there is no room to imagine, expand, and even fail, the deliverable outcome may be within all parameters, but it will never be as original as it fulfills the requirements. Again, it’s a culture problem.

To overcome inertia and not give in to ease, weary creatives looking to AI to make it all easier must have the discipline to tame our worst impulses, cultivate the space to imagine, and find the courage to convince our clients. When a team wins the permission to ideate at the rate of imagination, we can all move at the speed of brand.

Now, what if we stop talking shop and ask ourselves some broader questions….

 Yes. 40 thousand-year-old cave paintings reveal that humans have needed to make meaning and belong since the Paleolithic — like their prehistoric, indelible hand prints, great brands are meant to resonate indefinitely.

Brand is a narrative, and humans exist because of the meaningful stories we tell ourselves. AI is a motorcycle to activate brand, because the success of AI in advertising, design and branding are not just generative or quantitative. Glimmers of human behavior can be excavated from any data set, and humans have given their hearts and minds to the cloud for years. As a result, the cloud beams a complex haze of the best and worst of us. For creative professionals, AI can analyze a massive fog of data to distill meaning we can bottle, or in the words of author Neal Stephenson, “to condense fact from the vapor of nuance.”

So, can AI creative go where no human has gone before?

Yes, but…Like the James Webb telescope, AI enables humans to bring into focus mind-blowing things that were once just nebulous pixels, taking us light years further into challenging new frontiers. AI gets us closer to the audience while also challenging what we think we know about them. The flip side is that this knowledge saddles us with unburdened awareness —

Everyone has a data burden that AI will lift at the price of knowing the truth.

If we see the truth as a gift and get comfortable knowing that we don’t know, a universe of twinkling outcomes will be within reach, but great power comes with great responsibility.

Does AI burden a creative’s responsibility to humanity?

Yes. This existential question goes far beyond the battle against sameness, culture, craft, and the demand to produce at the speed of brand. The power of creativity burdens us with the responsibility to defend our very humanity from technology, as always.

As an undergrad at The University of the Arts, science transformed my understanding of the role of creatives in society. We had an entire semester of science dedicated to teaching all the BFA first-year students how to build a very, very big bomb … the recipe for the bomb, the optimal places to set off the bomb, how many guards around the stash of plutonium at the Philadelphia airport on any given day … The class was designed to distill an ugly truth and inspire us to see a more significant purpose = Creatives must challenge humanity to question what we value because the human vs technology stakes are high.

The stakes of AI put creatives on the front lines.

We must build a culture to maximize AI’s opportunities and impose guardrails to protect creativity and humanity because AI is more powerful and more transformative than tech of the past. As we confront our misgivings and harness this power, we need to remind ourselves that we are just human — anyone can launch off the upside or fall to the flipside — like using nuclear technology to light up a city or using nuclear technology to ‘light up’ a city.