By Pam Fujimoto, Executive Creative Director 

A Revolution is Here 

What does it mean to be creative? As AI shifts the ground beneath creativity as we know it, it’s also creating opportunities for entirely new kinds of art and moving the focus of creatives away from labor and craft toward ideation and exploration. Soon it will be a tool that makes us faster and nimbler, makes creativity more accessible and opens new possibilities that are only limited by our ability to imagine it. It also presents a lot of new challenges and dangers in the wrong hands, or when it lacks guardrails. 

What to Expect 

AI isn’t new. We’ve been using it for creating workflow efficiencies to cut down time on tasks like image editing and transcription. But with generative AI, the ability to create imagery, video or poetry from text prompts of anything you can imagine is truly disruptive.  

ChatGPT acquired 1 million users in its first five days and is writing high school essays, code and songs – and we are simultaneously amused, confused and scared shitless. Tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are blowing our minds and haunting our nightmares with what they can do, in that serendipitous place where control meets surprise. But they also are stirring debate around ownership and copyright – all as the world plays with its new toys and tests its limits.  

How Brands Can Win 

• Speed and agility. Because we can take something from idea to execution so much more quickly with AI, brands can be much more responsive when something happens in culture. Whether that’s activating on a trend or a crisis management situation, we can more quickly bring a response or well-crafted campaign to consumers while it’s still relevant.  
• Personalization. The ability to tailor messaging and visuals to an individual at scale has great potential for engagement, brand love and relevancy. We can create immersive, responsive, highly personalized digital and in real life experiences for people, as well as opportunities for consumers to be creators within a brand experience.
• AI as team member. Consider how we can come up with the most effective prompts for AI as a tool to generate thought starters and jumpstart the creative process, anything from naming to product innovation to quickly prototyping an idea. 

But tread carefully. For example, consider the ethics and copyright implications of using the tool to borrow from a style of a living well-known artist and the potential backlash. Also, like any shiny new object, it’s not about using AI for the sake of using it – the idea itself must be great, relevant, and right for the brand.  

Why it Matters 

The intersection of AI and creativity will be much more than a fun diversion or novelty, it will be a part of our toolkit. Creatives will need to learn a new skill and language of how to prompt AI tools to get closest to what they are looking for. Because of all it can do, AI will inspire us humans to go to places it can’t. It will push creativity into places that are more idea-based, conceptual and imaginative and less about crafting and making. It will open new avenues of art and creativity that are only limited by our ability to dream up new ways to use it.  

There’s a magic in what you get back when you put a prompt in, and it’s delightful, strange, and hilarious. The creativity is what you can think of. It’s still only as good as you can prompt it. And because of that, the place where the human mind and the tool meet is where the leap forward can be.