AI Is a Junior Creative Now; But It’ll Be a CCO Before We Know It

Jon> The rate at which it's accelerating is astonishing. It's something that is going to change the way that we all operate. It's akin to Gutenberg's printing press. It's going to fundamentally change stuff. And if you think about every stage at which something has fundamentally changed, there have been people who said, 'it's a fad, it'll be fine'. The monks sitting in their monasteries writing illuminated text thought that they were the only methodology of information distribution. And suddenly that gets torn away from them. They would have been massively dismissive in the first instance. 

I think that any business that doesn't have some sort of AI strategy in place is really doing a disservice to its shareholders. You've got to understand that this is coming and it's going to change the way we work, the way we interact. Some of it will be for the better and some of it won't be. 

I'm learning and learning and learning and I'm loving it. I was right there at the beginning of bringing digital stuff into ad agencies years and years ago. And this is of a bigger order of magnitude. The time I'm not spending scaling a business, I'm spending learning about strategically how we deal with this and what we move forward into. It feels pretty fucking lonely at the moment. There's a bunch of tech people in. Very few agency folk.

You hear people talking about how it can do 80%, but we'll be OK because it still needs people to do the 20%. Hang on, 80% of what you do is going to be disrupted and you just go 'it'll be OK?' No, it fucking won't be OK. Let's be honest. Your job will change hugely, my job will change hugely. 

I've encountered things that have made me wake up that I had no idea existed, like conversations around UBI - universal basic income, what you pay humans when they've got sod all else to do. If suddenly you're going to produce the same but you can do it with 80% less people. Fucking hell, there's a seismic shift in society. What are we going to do? I've got rudimentary woodworking skills. I can use them maybe? 

You can't push back against it. We're not Luddites, we're not trying to destroy the weaving machines. But we've got to be cognizant of what we do. I've seen some businesses that are in AI talking about retraining budgets and how to reskill people. Some people are taking it very, very seriously. And it doesn't seem like we are at the moment. 

It's big and it's serious and almost no one is thinking about it. What bothers me and astonishes me is advertising as a business falls on the next shiny thing, whether it's NFTs or the metaverse. No one's even considering this. And it's not a tech blip. It's not a shiny thing. It's not a staging piece like the metaverse is. This is something that's going to involve HR and structure. I just wish more people were on it.

Jon> Suddenly, Adobe dumped Firefly on us. And everyone in the creative department is like, 'Oh!? Right'. It was fun trying to get ChatGPT to write a haiku for a month, wasn't it? Now, you can see how it actually comes in at the day job. And that's where things start to shift. You realise this is gonna get you 100 times further than you could have got before. 

Does that mean we're going to be actually producing exponentially more content? Who's got the time to actually consume that? Or does it mean that there will be considerably fewer of us producing the same amount of content? Is it going to increase the volume? Or is it going to decrease the people producing the volume? And none of us really know exactly which way that's gonna go. But it feels like you can do a lot more with a lot less. 

Natural business efficiency goes towards a lot more with a lot less. And for years, we've all had massive commercial pressure put upon us to produce more work for less revenue. Now suddenly I can see that probably by the end of the year, conversations are going to be happening with procurement departments trying to work out how much of the content was produced by AI. The perception is that's free and therefore, why should a client pay out for it? 

We don't charge hours. We charge for ideas. I'm not selling us; I'm talking about what's happening in the world. But if you're selling hours, human hours are X, Y, Z, you have different bands, and you'll have a big argument about those when you start your business relationship. How much for AI? How much are you using? Is AI going to have to do timesheets? Is it going to have to clock in? It sounds small, but that's going to be the intersection between a business that's got Bain or McKinsey or someone who knows what they're doing to work out how it integrates AI into its organisation, and the ad agency, the design agency or the production agency, who won't have. 

I think it's going to pervasively creep in a lot. I think that clients are going to be asking about it. I think that agencies won't necessarily have the answer. Consultancies will be smarter and will be out in front.

Jon> You've got to really be hard with the prompts, you've got to push it to give you what you want, whether you're using an image thing or a chat-based thing. But the minute you brief it properly, it'll give you 10 ideas. One of them will have something interesting in there and the others will be shit. That something interesting, you can turn into something if you hone in on it and push it. As a creative director, the relationship is sort of working like the placement creative. Look at how fast it's growing up. And it’s going to be the chief creative officer before you can say, "what the fuck was that?" 

Maybe it is like your writer if you're an art director or your art director if you're a writer - or just your partner if you're a creative. I've always worked best with strategists because I find that they push you into a different direction as a creative team. So if it becomes a creative partner, that means that one person can get further faster. It's power to you. And if you can harness it and use it properly then it's not a threat. It's an enabler, if you can get your head around it and do it right. What a company full of people like that could do could be phenomenal. But how many people does it take to do that? We don't know yet and we haven't even begun to work out. 

Jon> I've had it extract the strategy out of a famous ad campaign, reapply that to something else and spit me out a marketing plan. It gets a lot of the way there. I've seen worse coming out of marketing departments. 

Jon> What does the business look like in five years time? If you don't have an AI strategy in place right now, then you're probably not doing the duty to your shareholders that you should do. Because this is about longevity of business. It's not about if it can write haiku or whether it will ever do 'War and Peace'. It will. It's coming. So what are you doing to mitigate risk to your shareholders and to your talent?

As an ad agency, we probably don't have a right to start talking about getting UBI and societal planning. But then as you start to ladder it up, Creative UK as a representative body, what would they be doing? What's the plan for the creative industries within the broader piece? What's the conversation that's happening with government? How are we starting to think about it moving forward? The strategy can't be to hide under the table. 

We are not Cnut. The tide's coming in and how we respond is really important. This is the time to step up. If you're not in it then then you're utterly unprotected. Those that see it need to try and do something about it. There's huge hype. I don't think it's going to change in a fortnight. But I don't think it's gonna take that long before it starts to come into process.