Artificial intelligence can generate creative strategies and campaigns for free in the blink of an eye – and a lot of people in our industry are on edge about what that means for our collective future.
But we’ve been here before. AI is just the latest plot twist in a long history of us humans worrying that we’ll be replaced by robots. Over the past 27 years at RDG, we've witnessed many of those moments, starting with the Mac desktop in the 1990s. Remember those colorful beauties? We in the design business were convinced that production artists would lose their jobs to this new tech.
That same decade saw the evolution of desktop publishing, which brought fears that “anyone could design” and we’d become irrelevant. The early 2000s introduced us to stock agencies, which put illustrators and photographers at risk, and 20 years later the introduction of Insta-ready publishing tools like Canva and Capcut tripled those fears.
Today, it’s programs like ChatGPT and Imagine that pose the biggest threat to our livelihoods. Optimism aside, I know that many creatives can’t help but imagine their clients trading them in for bot-created blog posts, images, naming projects, seasonal campaigns, and everything else we do in the branding and marketing world.
The good news is that we’ve survived every piece of “threatening” technology for the past 30 years. And the reason, I believe, is that we stayed a step ahead and used that tech to help us work smarter, not harder.
We also knew (and still know) our value.
We know the power of the human touch.
And we know that AI is all brain, and no heart.
AI vs Branding
I once saw a sign at a restaurant that said “Fast, good, and cheap. Pick two.” That’s a pretty good reflection of how I view this tech in its current state – it’s definitely cheap, it’s ready in real time, but we’ve seen at least one AI-generated image where a person has eight fingers.
The copywriters I’ve spoken to have said the same thing: ChatGPT can be an amazing assistant when it comes to initial research, but it can’t pull the most recent data and the final output reads like a fifth-grade book report.
Across the industry, opinions on AI run the gamut from utter excitement to fears that we’re jumping head-first into the Wild West, where our robot masters run the town and we duel at noon.
As a business owner who’s responsible for a team of human creatives, I’m somewhere in the middle. And I have questions. What role will AI play at RDG? How can we best use it to our advantage? And how can we future-proof our organization against whatever comes after this?
The approach we’re taking is to view AI as just another efficiency tool, like Siri or Alexa. A recent article from The Drum put it perfectly: “AI helps creatives brainstorm faster, like having an extra set of hands or an Iron Man suit.”
If we look at AI from this perspective, it’s not the enemy. In fact, it’s more like a personal assistant who handles all the left-brained stuff that many creatives struggle with. It can gather momentous amounts of data, for example, or help us conduct competitive research. It can help us sift through huge stock-image databases that can take hours to research by hand.
It can even help us in the brainstorming process. If we ask AI to come up with some brand names or new product, it might give our brainstorming a boost. Think of it as the tech equivalent of shouting “What’s another word for…” to the office.
The one caveat is that we should always ensure that AI never gets promoted from the assistant position. The hard work of creativity is something only humans can do, and our powers of discernment, nuance, interpretation and most importantly, understanding other humans, will outshine the bots every time.
Use AI to Your Advantage
As Pum Lefebure, cofounder and CCO at Design Army, mused: “We won’t lose jobs to AI, but we will lose jobs to people who know how to work with AI.” So that’s our job: Spend the next few years staying on top of this tech and figuring out how to make it work for us, not the other way around.
Here’s an example. The intelligence of these programs is truly artificial – the output you receive is based only on the input, called “prompts,” you give it. A bot’s responses will be exactly what you ask for – no more, no less – and can only draw answers from the current information available.
Shutterstock has a new feature for creating AI-Generated images. I typed in the prompts “moose and jockey” for fun, and in an instance, it spit out this apocalyptic scene.
This means that if your prompt is generic, like “Create a brand name for a large sneaker company,” the answers you get won’t be sentient, but rather an amalgam of everything on the internet that’s already been said about large sneaker companies. Will it be presented in a unique way? Sure. But does it take into account that this brand is blowing up on Tiktok right now? Not even close.
If you want nuance from AI, you have to ask for it, refine it, then refine it some more until you get what you want. It can be a daunting and frustrating process. (Design Army designed an entire marketing campaign for an eyewear company using AI. Their process, insights, and results are worth the read.)
How I See It
At RDG, we’re going to stay focused on the foundational brand strategy approach that we’ve perfected over the years, while using AI to help with smaller tasks. With success, we’ll slowly test the waters on a wider range of big ideas. And I imagine our designers working side-by-side with an AI virtual assistant within five years.
If we do it right, this will set us apart from our competitors. We’ll be able to lead our clients, educate them on what is and isn’t possible, and be seen as thought leaders who are grounded, yet open to new ideas.
It will be fascinating to watch what AI does and where it goes, but I don’t think we should hold our breath in the meantime. If we work together as a collective, we can harness this newfound power to enhance our craft, not undermine it.