AI, Or Not To Be
I’m pretty sure AI is going to become our creative partner. But will it get our jokes?
A few weeks back I learned, from the excellent Studio360 podcast that you should definitely subscribe to, that the very place where Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke hatched the idea for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Trader Vic’s on 5th Avenue, is now the site of New York’s flagship Apple Store. It’s true — the very spot where ideas about AI ethics once flowed with the Mai-Tais is now where you can buy a tiny black monolith to carry in your pocket that can do nearly everything the HAL 9000 did except murder you in space, and I think the jury may still be out on that.
We’ve been thinking about AI in science fiction-terms like that for a long time. You know, good versus evil, life and death stuff, about whether AI will be our destructor, our salvation or somehow sort of both. And a few weeks back we found out, as a copywriting robot beat a copywriter in a John Henry ballad for our century.
So. From here on out, our creative partner will be a robot. Just like Poole and Bowman on the Discovery, trapped with it on the giant hamster wheel that is agency life.
It’s going to go far beyond copywriting. AI is going to be intensely integrated with all of what ad tech is becoming. And just so we’re on the same page about what I mean by ad tech here, this is how I explain it to someone like, say, my 70-ish mom:
“Our industry’s goal has always been to collect truckloads of data about your behaviors — now we do it when you consume media or browse sites, or buy things, order an Uber, fill up with gas, or roam about town with your phone — to create a warehouse of up-to-the-second knowledge about you, or at the very least, all people like you. We have such granular data now, our aim is to use it to predict what you might be in the mood to buy right this very second versus that other second a second ago; we want to “know” what gets your blood pressure up, what medicines you’re likely to be on to get that pressure down, and create dead-on recommendations and predictions about how many episodes of Grace and Frankie you’re likely to watch and how much sodium you shouldn’t be ingesting but probably are anyway and adjust your insurance rates –”
Then she cries. Because I am a terrible son.
But, regardless of everyone’s worst privacy fears and the ridiculously ineffective covering of everyone’s laptop’s camera with black tape (cams should be the least of your worries), compiling as much behavioral data as possible always been the goal of this industry.
Here’s what happens next.
Our AI creative partner has a distinct advantage over a traditional writer of ad copy (let’s call him, “me”) whose brief may be a month old, who has only the most perfunctory description of a general target audience that, let’s be honest, he probably just glanced at after writing bad puns for two hours. And who can only imagine the contexts people are in when they read his witticisms, hoping against hope that he’s guessed right, or at least close to right, about the best way to convince folks to buy his client’s brand of cat food.
But our AI creative doesn’t need a brief, because you (and my mom) are like a chess piece, and it’s already calculated your next 30 moves. It’s capable of mapping what you’re 93% likely to do with yourself in the next hour. It already knows that Tuesday is when you usually do the sushi via Grubhub and which credit card you are most likely to use to pay for it. Maybe not you personally, but you the hyper-subset consumer. And it knows that your cat is 81% likely to be giving you the hungry meow… right… this… second!
Our AI creative partner will have all the tools and contexts to deliver exactly the right ad message to exactly the right person in exactly the right way in real time. In the tone each person likes to respond to. In the political bubble each person lives in. In a way that sounds exactly like that person’s most trusted peer, because it knows a whole lot about your likes and social footprint. And, yes, it potentially could even know what your cat’s hungry meow sounds like. You user-agreed to let it know when you bought your smart speaker.
The core tech for this is already in place. Firms like Persado offer copy customization via AI because it “understands” audiences, contexts and applies “best practices” and does it in the blink of an eye. Combine that with the fact that iOS 13’s Siri has never sounded more human. Or the fact that we’ve spent a decade feeding massive databases pictures of ourselves, our friends and our families. And that we can now turn Jack Nicolson into Jim Carrey with almost no effort.
Synthesize all of this into a creative robot that seems almost psychically plugged into the consumer and, wow.
It’s not much of a leap to see how that kind of synthetic creativity might expand to become synthetic friends that love what you love, recommend things you love and make conversation and tell jokes only you and it will get. Because it “knows you” better than your human friends ever can.
What’s a creative person to do? Welcome our robot overlords? Welcome our perfectly tailored robot actors, directors and production designers?
Here’s the thing. We creative people are, and have always been, in the entertainment business. Even our most perfunctory assignment is an invention we create to gain a human being’s interest. The robots will beat us at engaging via context and “knowing the target in the moment” every single time. Like John Henry, we’re not going to win this thing by working the way we always have, only faster.
The creative robots are going to be phenomenal at radical customization. But I’ll bet maybe they will terrible at inventing real delight, at creating and baiting that big hook. We human creatives will still need to create the things that matter, the things that are magnetic first — then we can let the robots make them deeply, compellingly customized. AI may indeed be our salvation.
If not, well, we’ll make great pets.
