Meet Your M-AI-Ker

In the second part of today’s double bill of AI panels on the LBB & Friends beach in Cannes Lions, we tried to forget the hype and scare stories so we could find out how AI is really shaking up the day to day workflow for strategists, creatives and producers. Where is it working well, what frustrations or shortcomings are becoming apparent and what are we learning on live projects?

The panel included PJ Pereira, founder, creative chairman at Pereira O’Dell, Drew Weigel, senior director, 3D and immersive at Shutterstock, Carren O’Keefe, chief creative officer at Digitas, Dan Gardner, co-founder at Code and Theory and Priti Mhatre, managing director strategic consulting and AI at WPP and Hogarth.

While the first conversation was top-line, this was about how we really use AI and get creative with it to do our jobs better.

Priti sees it working on three levels in increasing grades of profundity: helping non-creatives with mundane tasks like writing emails, then at a creative level (“content creation, local content creation of scale, hyper-relevant content, understanding the data signals”), and thirdly completely rethinking the content supply chain with AI, finding ways to do “AI-first work”.

As someone who’s been running a business at the convergence of tech and creativity for over two decades, Dan took an understandably contrarian view. The day to day isn't really what’s interesting to him. “We're all using the tool, because it's a better tool. And the tools are evolving,” he said. “But that is not what is interesting.” What is interesting to Dan is that “the internet sucks" and AI could help us all change that.

Carren recognised that the joke of Cannes this year is asking people "have you heard of AI?" We’re all overexposed to thought leadership on how this will change everything. But it’s true. "It will be a big fundamental shift and we're going to remember this moment in time" she said.

There have always been a suite of tools using AI, noted Drew from Shutterstock. They've just got better recently. But with demand for 3D content hugely increasing, he noted how AI has the power ”to fill that at scale.” That is the application that excites Drew.

In true creative chairman style, PJ compared moving from traditional ways of working to AI to getting on a horse when you’re used to riding a bicycle. "It makes decisions, regardless of what you want – that’s a different way of dealing with computers.” Another metaphor if you prefer it from PJ – “A friend of mine told me that using AI is like having an intern that is slightly drunk every day. So we don't know what's going to come back.”  It doesn’t seem like something that can just fit into advertising as we’ve been doing it, he suggested. “I'm not sure that what we do should be what we have been doing. And there should probably be something completely new that is possible,” he noted, but admitted that is more of a provocative question than an answer.

Getting AI right is difficult but Drew stressed that it needs a proper creative eye and a process. "It's a big challenge of expectation versus reality," he said. We’ve all experienced less than satisfactory results working with these tools. That said, that’s still pretty exciting. “If this is the worst it's going to look, that's a very interesting future,” he added.

It’s not been totally revolutionary, continued Dan, sharing his surprise at agencies with traditional backgrounds talking about a tool as if it’s going to change everything. “One thing I've been wrong about is I thought that the death of traditional advertising would have been years ago. But you know what? Now all I hear is traditional ad companies go, ‘we're so great at AI because we do Stable Diffusion, we’ve enhanced our process and we can get data now.’ Like, great, welcome to the world.” 

What these tools have done is allow creatives to take on a less hands-on role. “If you think AI is automating and democratising content production, the role of creatives becomes that of curation” said Priti, although Dan disagreed, arguing that imagining things is much more intrinsic to the creative process than simply applying your taste to decide what is the right option.

The future is not prompting, he said. It will be the other way round before long. "It will be prompting us and it will be stimulating us to be creative." It’s in the processing of data to make sense of humanity for us that AI’s power lies. "I will understand human needs, wants and desires, I will build systems that will be able to take all the crappy parts of the job and be able to refine it. But at the highest level, it will inform me back on those user needs, wants and desires to come up with incredible ideas.”

Ultimately, it seems that the outcome of integrating generative AI into creative businesses’ workflows allows for better outcomes on the whole. Carren recounted how Digitas ran a study recently. The basic result was; "Human + AI is more creative than human or AI alone."