If Creativity Is Automated, What Happens to the Joy of Surprise?
Nobody truly hates surprises. Or at least not all surprises. There’s a kind of mystical, intangible beauty to good surprises in a creative context, for example. When we listen to music, there’s scientific proof of a link to feelings of “euphoria and craving” as our brains release dopamine, and our hairs begin to stand on end during the emotional peak of a composition. Call it art or call it science, there’s no denying that the joyful surprise of discovering great new music is a phenomenon that carries a deep power.
In the world of advertising, there’s an understanding of this. There’s a reason why video ads are far less effective when they play out on mute, after all. Music has the instructive power to persuade us, on a psychological level, to feel things. And there are few composers in the industry today who grasp that power like Robert Miller, founder of Sound Industries and a celebrated composer in the worlds of TV, film, and commercials.
“In advertising, the gift of the composer is to bring about empathetic, emotional reactions to what we see on-screen”, he tells LBB. “That’s why music is such a key component in helping stories to come to life”.
But, looking at the state of trends in the industry today, and in particular regarding AI, Robert is concerned. It’s less the technology itself that gives him pause (“I’d say congratulations to the engineers behind large language models on their accomplishment”, he says), but more how it fits into a worrying trend towards efficiency and bypassing the surprises that come with organic, human-driven work.
“The best work I’ve done in my career has been the opposite of predictable”, he says. “It’s been about letting it fly. You might not hit the bullseye every time with that approach, but if you don’t allow for it then we’re going to end up with billions of anaesthetised people staring at screens all day without feeling anything. Where’s the space for competitive advantage in that?”
In fact, the story behind how Robert first made his start in the world of commercials offers the perfect case study of that unpredictable dynamic playing out in practice. “My background is as a classical composer, and I’d first made my name in scoring work for film and TV”, he says. “It was my mentor, Aaron Copland, who persuaded me to be open-minded to commercials. So when an opportunity did come along, I took it and began to experiment”.
What followed was an overnight success story, with Robert being offered more and more work by his then-agency partners. “It felt right - it was still fundamentally about storytelling and I was simply bringing the same skills that I built up in the other worlds of entertainment”, he recalls.
But, looking back, there was another key factor in his success that he wasn’t quite aware of at the time. “With the benefit of hindsight, I feel confident in saying that it was my lack of familiarity with the advertising industry - its politics and its rules - that gave me a creative edge”, he says. “It’s the privilege of the outsider. I literally didn’t know how to make work that was the same as everything else, so I made stuff that was different. I made stuff that was me”.
On the one hand, that anecdote has little to do with the industry’s current debate on artificial intelligence. But scratch the surface, and it has everything to do with it. Robert was able to carve out a space for his own commercial career - and write stellar music for the benefit of brand clients - because he wasn’t surrounded by the politics and dogmas of everything that had come before him in the ad industry. Generative AI, on the other hand, can never be an outsider. Everything that has come before it is all that it knows. It can iterate, but not invent.
“I don’t want to come across as pretentious or pompous, but I do believe this”, continues Robert. “In everything I do, I never feel separated from the concept of mind, body, spirit, and soul. I think that’s essential to any creative endeavour. Commercials shouldn’t be separate from that; at least not if they want to have any kind of human impact”.
Serendipitously, Robert can point to a piece of his work that makes this point on its own terms. “Difficult Is Worth It”, an ad for Mercedes, plays out as an ode to taking the road less travelled - or the path to true originality.
“People will say that there are some ads which don’t need such a high-minded approach, or that can get by without the human touch of an original piece of music”, acknowledges Robert. “But my worry is that when we start down that path, and use AI as a kind of cheat code, we won’t know where to stop”.
Robert’s belief is that there is humanity at every stop along the creative process, and that human outputs require human inputs. The innate spontaneity and free-form nature of that approach might be uncomfortable for those who would rather settle on a simple formula for creative success. But being uncomfortable is better than being un-human.
“When I’m working on any given project, I’ll be taking influences from other work that I’m doing simultaneously”, he says. “Right now for example I’m composing for two separate films. One looking at the rise and fall of cryptocurrency and the other, as chance would have it, exploring the intersectionality between art and science. Oh, and I’m composing for the New York City Ballet. So that’s my personal creative headspace, and that will inevitably play into any additional work I start on in the near future. I can’t predict the impact it will have, but that’s part of the joy of it”.
And ‘the joy of it’ is important. Not just for the industry’s creatives and makers, but for audiences too. As Robert puts it, “you don’t make people’s hair stand up by being predictable”.
But you can do it by surprising them. As industry decision-makers grapple with the as-yet unknown potential of generative AI, that’s a creative lesson worth remembering.
