The creatives' antidote to A.I.

"I can do it all with A.I. now, thanks Reader,"

I was wracking my brains over this all too popular belief about a week ago. A lot of the people I speak to are feeling despondent because this is what too many of their former / potential clients are saying. It feels like a barrier they are continuously coming up against.

I'm probably older than you and have been through a handful of digital revolutions – where the promise of new technology threatened to upend the world as we knew it.

I concede A.I. is a much bigger deal. Now we only half-joke that the future-safe careers are limited to undertaking and bricklaying.

But in my wracking, I still can't put down the idea that (like Macs, and Photoshop and so on) A.I. is JUST a tool.

Human-made premium

'Human-made premium' is a phrase I first saw in an article about the creative backlash to A.I. The perceived extra value that consumers are now seeking within content that is genuinely human-made.

A hammer and chisel are just tools... but put a tool like A.I. in the hands of an equivalent, modern day Giuseppe Sanmartino, tools can create masterpieces.

(Sanmartino's Veiled Christ is possibly better than Michelangelo's Pietà – which [so far] is the only work of art in whose presence and beauty I have genuinely wept.)

In my wracking, I reached out to marvellous marketing maverick Sally Day and asked her, "what can we do to celebrate and encourage the idea of human-made premium?"

How can we create a 'vaccination'...

...for creatives, to inoculate them from the noise and fear of A.I.?

I imagined something two-pronged:

1. A mindset conversation that resets the projected fear around technology and gives us confidence to embrace new tools and create real art
2. A constructive, creative piece that goes beyond mindset and puts actions into the theory (i.e we MAKE art)

Sally and I are overdue a conversation on all this BTW. I think there is some mileage in this, though (do you agree?).

Subject, consumer or citizen?

Last week, I attended the Creator Day conference in Dorset – 300 marketers and creatives exploring the bond of community and citizenship without the yolk of technology. A full-day agenda where A.I. was not intentionally mentioned once... can you imagine?

The brilliant Jon Alexander (author of 'Citizens') proposed that (globally) we are at a critical point in time. As the dominant consumerist systems of government and organisation begin to fail, there is an opportunity for the emergent system to thrive.

My take on his words – The challenge is whether this new system will subjectify humanity (using technology) or allow us to flourish (because of technology).

The answer is within our own hands. We either pick up the hammer and chisel to create works of wonder... works that inspire and delight... or we allow technology (and those behind it) to chip out ever-depreciating cookie cutter mall-art.

A.I. can't do it all

It can only do what we ask it to do.

What if we ask it to do better? And in the nature of our questions, we remind our customers (our audience) that we have value (value worth paying for).

Better still, we remind ourselves that WE have value.

Thoughts?

Mark Franklin, The Four Fears® Guy
​www.markfranklin.co.uk

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