A creative reframing: AI, content, and your livelihood

The threat from AI to creatives is overblown for reasons often overlooked, says Studio Giggle’s creative director and founder, Steve Garratt.

When it comes to AI and the workforce, there are certainly threats on the horizon. 8/10 drivers, for example are likely to lose their jobs as a result of AI learning automating cars and delivery vehicles. For creatives, however, the issue is far more nuanced, because what we do involves a deep understanding, or intuition over what makes humans ‘tick’.

Content production is at the heart of what we do as an industry, and it’s what differentiates the good from the great. Take a typical PR creative brainstorming session. You pick the brains of the relevant brand stakeholder, and get refining their core idea and messaging into a script, or inspiration for a brief.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth, sure, yes, it is possible for AI to generate fully written scripts from those bullet points. So why doesn't this cut it?

Originality over everything

Think of the vastness and diversity of the authors you’ve read, or the film scripts you’ve seen brought to life. While it's true that these have underlying themes, and styles you can pastiche, the fact remains: it doesn’t matter how many ChatGPT prompts, or Midjourney renders you carry out: Ulysses, or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Guinness's Surfer will never be churned out.

For truly moving storyboarding, scripting, direction, production or messaging, resonating with real people is the end goal. It’s about creating an original and captivating voice, or else, everything starts sounding the same: hollow, uninspired, and generic.

This is not why you started a creative agency, and it is not why a brand selects one.

The search for meaning

AI-generated content is possessed not with humanity and urgency, but rather with an ‘uncanny valley’ effect. It’s akin to films like Polar Express. The animation is rendered with skill and accuracy, but people found the characters unsettling. AI content feels the same way: almost human… but not quite right.

You might argue that this is something technology can learn to overcome, but the truth is AI would need a ludicrously advanced language model to capture real human nuance. Right now, tools like ChatGPT, Google's models, or X’s AI assistant don’t sound natural.

The problem goes deep, because AI doesn’t, and indeed can’t, truly understand universal themes. It can’t start with ‘tragic love’ and build a meaningful story around it, anymore than it can inhabit a company’s unique story and motivations. An AI just regurgitates patterns without comprehension, to cookie cutter formats.

Content has rules, sure, but knowing when to bend these rules is what makes content great.

If you really wanted an AI to analyse tragic love, you’d have to train a model specifically for that. But what is the point in spending £10bn building an AI that will be worthless in five years because everybody will have it? Familiarity and tedium will once again set in because the world, our tastes and our passions are constantly shifting.

Even a young child can spot something inauthentic. And, honestly, it’d be faster to ask an English Literature graduate to summarise three novels with that theme than to train an AI.

Hope and resolution

AI is in its infancy, sure. But so far it is not intelligent, just artificial. It summarises data in a fantastic manner, and can assist in pretty much any of the competencies involved in the creative industry. But it doesn’t create connections the way humans do.

If you’re reading this, you probably work in the medium of communication, so I suspect, more than most, you can tell immediately when content is not human. Indeed, for this very blog, I tried to get ChatGPT to come up with copy based on a long form interview transcription. All of its attempts felt synthetic and dull, so, rest assured, all of this is based on a real conversation, and written ‘by hand’.

It’s easy to dismiss your AI skepticism as being a defence mechanism, born out of protecting your job. But that doesn’t mean your instincts are unfounded.

AI is just a tool. A very useful tool, sure, but one that should only make your livelihoods livelier.