New is easy. Right is hard.

New is easy, right is hard.

While this statement is true of many things in life, in this case I’d like to apply it to the impact of AI on commercial creativity.

It‘s seemingly impossible these days to discuss creativity and AI without ending up either happy clapping or hand wringing depending on which side of the debate you’re on.

Yes, there will be many opportunities along the way to reimagine, for the better, how we get things done. At the same time, if you are a student of history, you know there will be many pitfalls too. After all, as humans we have form going all in on something new at the expense of common sense.

For what it's worth, I believe we must be wary of easy wins.
We must be wary of appropriated and aggregated intelligence.
We must be wary of thinking faster is better.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about things made by real people, in real life, that's a whole other can of worms. I’m talking about creativity applied to business outcomes.

I'm talking about Marketers that use execution to work out what they really want. Businesses that think AI is the answer to all their problems and hustlers who like to move fast and break things, often confusing agility with speed.

Because there are no short cuts to long term success.
Because you only get out what you put in.
Because crap served at the speed of light is still crap.

And of course there will be many more, less obvious pitfalls.

I'm not saying you should ignore the new, easier ways of doing things, far from it. You should be using AI to help explore, educate, organise, iterate and execute - just be wary of thinking you don’t need curious, complicated, unpredictable human judgement to make clever, unforgettable and iconic work.