Creatives Must Remember That With AI, "Everyone Has Access to Mediocrity"

“In today’s creative landscape, everyone has access to mediocrity,” Jeremy Jones, global head of creative at Mailchimp, said of the increasing availability of AI tools.

Jeremy oversees one of the agencies at the forefront of leveraging AI for creative ideation, Wink, the in-house creative team at Intuit Mailchimp.

“The baseline has changed. So being a creative, you've got to acknowledge that – and now an idea is even more important, especially because these tools allow you to get to execution so quickly," he said, speaking at Mailchimp's FWD conference in Sydney this week.

Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, AI has been adopted at an increasingly fast pace. As of last year, over 75% of global knowledge workers were using AI in their daily workflows.

The team at Wink continuously tests emerging AI tools, and because Mailchimp’s brand personality is a bit offbeat, it can accept – and embrace – the strange things AI occasionally creates.

“Our brand's a little quirky, and AI is also a little quirky. The things that AI comes up with or mistakes it makes, as our brand, we embrace them.”

However, he acknowledged that while AI can streamline aspects of creative work, it still requires human oversight. After all, creativity has been identified by the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, and global business analysts as the key to future economies.

“You still have to have that human element to put it over the edge, it gets you 85% of the way there. And then you have that craft, the human touch, to get it over the edge. I think it gives you that foundation, but it's not all the way there,” said Jeremy.

Beyond using AI as a creative tool, Wink has also focused on training AI models to create work that aligns more closely with Mailchimp’s visual identity. By creating AI-generated imagery to match Mailchimp’s existing style, the team can produce on-brand visuals quickly.

“We have a very unique photo style that we show our customers, and we've trained our AI to learn that style over time,” Jeremy said. “We can quickly have stuff that looks so real that we take with us when we brief our photographers or directors.

“We've gained so much time back to again allow us to focus on the craft and the little things that really make a difference. It's a really great tool, it really speeds up that process.”

Ultimately Jeremy said the team aims to “put the wink in the work” – a slogan inspired by the Mailchimp mascot, a winking monkey named Freddie. Whether the team is using AI or not, the mission remains the same: “That wink for us is our connection to you.”