AI, are we all fishing in the same pond?

April 6, 2023

The rise of artificial intelligence is prompt. All of a sudden it’s there. It shows that in the shadows, groundbreaking technology that touches our profession is constantly being worked on.

ChatGPT and MidJourney did not emerge overnight. OpenAI, as the founder of the GPT-4 model didn’t spend a weekend creating a tool. It was an absolute brain-teaser, believe me. How do you teach a computer to learn at all? How many behavioral scientists, programmers and data engineers do you need for this? But the essential, and perhaps most ethical question is: What do we actually feed this new machine with? Or will we all continue to exclusively extract creativity from it from now on?

Let me be clear. The added value in the creative process of this new tooling is obviously a no-brainer. Especially within the conceptual phase of our projects, it helps to quickly and effectively portray what we come up with creatively. The form we get back from the machine in that creative process is based on a lot of, especially historical, data. Even now that ChatGPT can make use of the real-time Internet, it remains information that has been made available online by anything and everything for years, and thus has been created by someone somewhere. Artificial intelligence is thus a mirror, so to speak. It reflects everything created together by a collective of writers, scientists, technicians, philosophers, creatives and artists. We may question this mirror individually through prompts. The art in prompt engineering, in doing so, is to tap into the right data. And that’s all f*cking cool.

But what if we stop feeding this mirror further?

“What happens if we stop feeding AI?"

Where everyone is positively amazed at the improbable output and the growing degree of control over it, I would like to focus on the importance of the input and how the machine is trained to learn and give back.

Because are we all now going to ask questions to the exact same system that has been fed the exact same data? I, as a technocrat and creative, hope not. The future is for people with imagination and creativity who have the ability to make sense of technology and train their own models. That sounds like a conviction. And it is.

Example. Many AI Prompts conclude with in the style of Banksy or in the style of Japanese Anime. Some prompts even go so far as to name the specific camera lens or lighting with which to create the output. But then are we all going to fish in the same pond and use only the art and culture that has been instilled until today?

I wonder who will be the artist or the founder of a new style that will feed artificial intelligence with new insights and creative direction precisely. Perhaps a creative who has that as his sole purpose and will be rewarded for it. Either way, we have to find a way to assign value precisely to the creatives who provide the input for this modern form of creative output.

Within the walls of the marketing domain and the advertising profession, we are ultimately taught to look for unique “ownable” insights. And to be different from the competition in promise and positioning. All with one goal: to stand out from the crowd. Let us uphold that goal and not hesitate to use artificial intelligence in our own creative hand. Because from our creativity, we make the difference.

This article previously appeared in MarketingTribune 05, 2023