As technology ramps up the speed with which something can be created, one’s sense of the value of what’s created can rapidly depreciate. Think of online comments, for one. I remember the days when my father would call an emergency family meeting because one of his letters had been printed in The Times. The effort, care taken, and scarcity of page space meant getting published was a big deal. Now, in comments sections under news items you can find such gems as “LOL, nope”, “tl;dr yawn”, and “Yeah, ok Hitler”.
Decreased requirements in time, effort and therefore mental barrier to entry leads to lower consideration and care. How many of those posting insults online would bother handwriting, licking an envelope, stamping, and then walking seven minutes to a letterbox just to post the word “Cuck” to a journalist? (This by the way, is my often touted solution to the meaninglessness of online communication: GPS-enforced ‘Send’ buttons that only post once you’ve moved a set distance).
If reduced time and effort has impacted our relationship with communication, we can expect AI to change our attitude to creative output too. We’re seeing changes already, interestingly more from the client side, and it’s clear to see how and why.
Even only six months ago, if a client wanted a creative change, this would use up a round of changes. A half day. Money. Course correcting, even at the scamp phase, meant paying people with a high level of skill - accrued from potentially expensive qualifications - chunks of time to apply themselves over hours to think through, and then enact, the necessary changes. This meant there was an inherent cost to changing things - because they required effort - which means you had to really want to make those changes. Putting your money where your feedback was made casual, not-really-thought-through notes a waste of money. This weeded out (for the most part) feedback that hadn’t been invested with at least some serious deliberation.
Now that changes can be made with far less effort, the apparent ri$k to clients in a$king for them decreases. The temptation will be to let more drip-fed, “I just had a random thought” notes to come through, because, well, it’s only a few minutes of someone’s time AI-prompting for a new result. Just like the shift from licking stamps to simply clicking a button led to such gems as “Cuckface”, the decreased barrier to entry for changing ideas means less-considered feedback risks no longer being weeded out. The “Can you try the same ad but now instead of people, they’re all horses?” era may soon be upon us. Random notes. Why not energy. Easily fired off. Totally wrong.
The issue is that a reduction in time to produce a visual - and now entire videos - risks depreciating the value of the time taken to think of, and consider, the idea behind it. But the time taken to produce an idea and the time taken to use one’s qualifications, experience, and sensibilities to conceive of it are two separate things. AI can speed up the former, but agencies and their clients may be tempted to conflate that with assuming the creative process itself can also speed up, or somehow ought to now be more on the fly, flexible, and happenstance.
Just as email and text sped up our expectations for a speedy reply (“Three minutes. Are you ignoring me?”), AI means clients will expect what were once considered large changes to be made faster. But ideas don’t move that fast: only bringing them to life does. The creative process is, at least for the time being, a deeply human experience (especially if you want something genuinely inspired, unexpected, and left of field). I’ve sat in a room jamming with our creative team, sometimes solving a creative idea in minutes. Others it’s taken a day or two, and only on a toilet break has a flash of inspiration hit on the second, frantic, panicked day. On the days I work remotely, occasionally I’ve left my home office and gone walking around Narrabeen Lagoon to solve a creative problem. That’s nearly a two-hour walk, but it works almost every time, far more than had I stayed sitting at my desk headbutting my keyboard.
Once that idea is settled, then bringing it to life can almost be instantaneous. But to change the idea? That’s not a production or AI-generation solve. That’s back to the creative again. Moving forward, agencies will have to guide and educate clients who may lack creative literacy and are getting tempted to shorten deadlines, throwing out production time with the creative bathwater.
Ideas are often slow, organic things with the turning circle of a cruise liner. It used to be that the creative and production process were unofficially intertwined. Now we’ll need to ringfence the creative sprint. And just because we can bring a client’s 7am “I just had a thought”, one-line emails to life, if their wildest dreams don’t work, just because the barrier to entry is now zero, it doesn’t mean we should entertain them. The ideas will need defending. We’ll have to get better at saying “That’s back to the drawing board then” and more creative time. As making gets easier, we’ll have to get better at thinking much harder.
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land upon which we create, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.