Living On The Edge

Embracing AI without crushing creativity.

Anyone writing about AI today has to accept that their perspective is only as complete as their ability to synthesize the most current and relevant intel, and even then it’s possible that our fingers cannot type as fast as AI is evolving, so today’s post comes with a big fat caveat: I have no idea how this is all going to play out, and I don’t think that there are enough people who actually do, quite frankly, so let’s just hold hands make the most of whatever innovation or destruction comes of it, shall we? 

Imagine 

Okay, with that out of the way, I have been thinking a lot about how AI may affect our personal and professional lives in the near-term. If I try to think about its global impacts over the next 10-20 years, I short-circuit. But, when I look at it up close, I see a potential trajectory unfolding.

On a micro-level, most of us are somewhere on the spectrum between anxious and inspired by all the ways AI can optimize our day to day lives. I’m currently exploring the latest tools that can help me organize my calendar, schedule meetings, create branded decks, and help me book travel and dining reservations. I haven’t found anything that I trust enough to make these decisions for me, but I’ll let you know if I do. (And if you have recs, share in the comments below please and thank you.) I’m also aware that AI is working behind the scenes to serve up lewks on IG that I might like, and I’m not mad about it.

Most of us have moved beyond the fear that AI will take over our jobs and we’re now excited about all the ways we can leverage it to help us move faster, think harder, look further, analyze deeper, and for some people who struggle with written comms, write better.  

On a macro-level, AI, along with its younger, more methodical sibling, Blockchain, hold the keys to solving major problems around sustainability and transparency. We’re already seeing how brands like Kiki World and Prose have integrated AI and blockchain to reduce waste and create hyper personalized products and customer-centric brands. And what’s emerging within the contemporary digital and public art space with the explosion of generative AI is fascinating. These things give me hope.  

Both Sides, Now 

In both personal or professional contexts, there are two general sentiments that seem to be trending: 

1. AI will always need human oversight to fact check and insert emotional intelligence. 

2. AI will free us up from mundane things so we can do more human things. 

This is where I begin to feel some dissonance. While these things might be true today, I think it’s a Pollyanna-ish prediction of the near future. 

The speed at which AI iterates, updates, and accelerates is exponentially faster than human capability, so it’s not too farfetched to assume that artificial intelligence will become as factually accurate as an encyclopedia, and as emotionally intelligent as a trained therapist. 

Also, the idea that AI will give us more of our time back is a fairytale…the same one we told ourselves with the advent of the internet. The technology made our manual processes more efficient, which saved us time. But we still didn’t own our time; our employer did. And our value was measured by our output. So, we worked more to produce more, setting a new bar for what one person could accomplish in a work week. And because we were rewarded for our output, we wore our productivity as a badge of honor. 

I don’t think we will respond to AI any differently. I predict that AI will eventually need little to no ‘supervision’, and it will speed us up rather than free us up. 

If this is true, we won’t be worrying about AI taking our jobs. We’ll be confronting the fact that AI is our boss. 

Rage Against the Machine? 

Let’s look at a real-time example and imagine how this might play out. In the beauty industry, we’re using AI and predictive analytics to synthesize search data to reveal what consumers are interested in. This is search at scale, it’s unbiased, and it’s a good measure of what’s trending. Certainly it provides useful insights into consumer behavior and the popularity of a brand. With this data at our fingertips, we can refine our product development pipeline, tweak our SEO strategy and brand messaging, and redirect our marketing efforts to align with the tailwinds of culture. 

This is best practice, and a smart way to utilize data. 

But the moment we stop using AI as a useful tool and begin using its output as the strategy itself, we’ve lost to the machine. We’ve granted technology sovereignty. We’ve given it ultimate authority over original thought, expert knowledge and creative instinct.   

And while we may convince ourselves that this strategy de-risks product development and ensures each product is a hit, I would suggest that overly relying on data and predictive analytics could just as easily stifle creativity and tarnish the brand. Because, of course, every competitor is looking at the same data. If this becomes a company’s default strategy for NPD, they’ll be known for imitation rather than innovation. 

The fear of creative risk + rapid production cycles + AI-powered predictive analytics = a toxic blend for innovation and originality.  

We’re frighteningly close to becoming a culture that has lost its ability to think critically and create things of quality, because we are rewarded for speed of our productivity. And because human output can hardly keep pace with culture, much less technology, we will be forced to rely on AI more and more to keep up with production demands.

Content will be the easiest way to spot this crisis of quality and creativity. As LLM’s and multimodal models become more sophisticated, I suspect we will become more tolerant of fully AI-generated content. We will come to accept it as the norm in the mainstream, primarily because the speed and the quantity of content we produce will be rewarded by the algorithms, and there will be no way to sustain output without technological support. 

We will consume this content as a form of news and snackable cultural updates, and it will be optimized for our ever-shortening attention spans. And even though it’s not original thought formed by a human, it will have a quality of originality to it, because AI is connecting new dots from the data. It will feel original to us. And we will give it authority.  

In the not-so-distant future, AI could become a culture creator. It will not only inform our strategies, but define our strategies. It won’t just help us ideate, it will tell us what to create.

If we let it. 

Living On The Edge 

I’m not anti-AI. But I am pro-human. And I worry about a creative class that becomes overly-reliant on AI to meet the demanding business mandates for “lead, speed and greed”. 

Certainly, I believe there’s an alternative to this dystopian future where creatives lead with their own intuition, insights and interpretations, intentionally leverage AI tools, and ultimately maintain control over the creative process. But I think we have to fight for it. 

The culture creators and brands that resist lazily trusting algorithms over their own intuition, expert knowledge and creative instinct will be the ones to define a new standard of quality. They’ll be the ones who:

• Commit to living on the edge of AI and human ingenuity and imagination.

• Balance “meeting the cultural moment” with “creating the next cultural current.”  

• Cling to their willingness to take risks. 

• Voice a healthy skepticism of mainstream “truths”. 

• Maintain a spirit of innovation that lives beyond the data. 

I’ll leave you with the best quote of the week, from Lynn Pina, CMO of GeoBlue, in this Chief article: 

“There is always an element of risk when it comes to translating ideas and concepts into actual creative campaigns and we have to also be comfortable taking a leap of faith and not over-testing to the point that you end up with the lowest common denominator/least creative work.”

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