Listen to the Skateboarding Hedgehog: What Surrealism Can Teach Us About Creativity in Age of AI

What was the first image you made with AI? A kitten astronaut? A skateboarding hedgehog? Dogs playing a spirited game of billiards in the style of the 17th-century Dutch masters? For many, when they first jump into generative AI, it’s a double backflip into the surreal.

This is not a coincidence. Surrealism - from Dali’s melting clocks to Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait with her head on an arrow-wounded deer to the dream-logic of Twin Peaks - still has a hold on us a century after it burst into the creative consciousness. The movement, which started as a response to the rationalism of the early 20th century, is as much a style as it is a creative method, and the staying power of surrealism can teach us some important lessons for advertising in the age of AI.

Leave Room for the Unexplainable

A gorilla plays the drums for a candy brand. 'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like' is on a horse. Why? It’s not exactly clear. Not only is this okay, but it’s interesting. The unseen and the unknown are important pillars of surrealism and powerful tools for our work in advertising.

AI seeks completion. The model wants to finish the pattern, guess the next word, fill in the next pixel, and close the loop.AI can make the kitten astronaut, but there is always an odd attempt at perfection to the image, a striving for some sort of logic that undermines the sense of originality. It misses the ambiguity that makes a surreal image so powerful.

Ambiguity draws viewers in and entices them to complete the story on their own. How many hours have fans spent debating the meaning of Twin Peaks? If the meaning were obvious, if everything were complete and logical, there would be no need to debate and no room for the audience to make the story their own. We are not making Twin Peaks, but we can learn something from that world: dreams stay with us in a way that logical reality rarely does, and a way to stand out in a world of polished AI content is to create something ambiguous and surreal. We have to be willing to take a risk and leave the story unfinished or leave a detail tantalisingly unexplained to activate the viewer’s imagination.

Be Intentionally Unintentional

Surrealism isn’t just a style; it’s a process, something very human that is very different from what AI can do. Salvador Dali would fall asleep with a brass key in his hand, and when it fell to the floor and woke him from his dream, he would paint whatever was on his mind. As creatives, we can use our subconsciousness as an additional tool for ideation. Experiment with removing conscious thinking from your process. Write without thought and see what you can find in the words. Send yourself cryptic half-asleep emails at 3 a.m. and then try to decipher them in the morning. Take your ideas and your partner’s ideas, cut them up, and randomly paste them back together. What will you get? A lot of it will be confounding and confusing, but maybe you’ll also find something surprising that you probably wouldn’t get otherwise, a germ of an idea that you can then build on or incorporate into your more rational storytelling. This process - random, imperfect, and incredibly human—stands out from the autocomplete world of AI, connecting to the audience on a level beyond pure surface understanding.

Provocation

The Surrealist movement believes that great art provokes. Great advertising can also provoke. This doesn’t mean we need to be purposefully offensive, go out of our way to anger people, or push buttons in a manipulative way. It means we can use the unexpected to get an authentic response from our audience. AI is great at creating more of what we already have, but it doesn’t have to be used this way. Use AI tools not to automate, but to exaggerate, subvert, and push. Even small provocations, an odd image, a surreal phrase, or a question with no answer can help a brand feel alive. We can fill Paris streets with massive handbags or turn whole buildings into giant wrapped presents. We can free ourselves to look at a brief from an unexpected angle that could catch the audience off guard and challenge how they look at the world, and AI can be a tool in all of this if we choose to use it in this way. In a big way or a small way, these provocations can break through to audiences and help the brand stand out.

Let Your Dreams Be Your Prompts

Surrealism is more than an aesthetic. It’s a creative defence against the predictability of the algorithm. So, write without thinking. Feed your dreams into the machine and then see what it gives back to you. Cut up your notes and randomly Scotch-tape them back together. Don’t be afraid of the nonsensical or the incomplete. Let your subconscious be your guide, but let AI be your tool to get from dreams to screen. If some unexpected image or phrase has some resonance with you, use it, because the chances are someone else will find it interesting, too.

The skateboarding hedgehog is trying to tell you something. All you need to do is close your eyes and listen.