“What AI Can Never Replace at a “creative” Agency (Hint, It’s in the Title)”

Artificial Intelligence has steadily permeated every sphere of our lives, and will continue to change the way we work, play, and even create. AI-driven content generators, whip-smart automated design tools, and other highly-intuitive technology will soon become the primary contributor to the content creation landscape. 

With all this in mind it’s easy to think that creative agencies (like yours truly here at Stauffer) will go the way of the dodo, but AI will never replace the unique, raw human touch that is essential for marketing and communication. In short, AI models can say something brilliant, but they can never say something creative or original.

The Rise of AI in Content Creation

Artificial Intelligence is no longer a novelty in content creation; it’s a reality. AI tools harness sophisticated algorithms and vast data processing capabilities to generate a seemingly infinite spectrum of content that will simplify the creation of not only blogs and reports, but images, video and AR/VR content. They can perform tasks at lightning speed too, reducing the time and effort needed to synthesize content.

Despite these significant strides, AI cannot replicate human ingenuity. Consider these 5 ways that artificial intelligence will find itself lacking when trying to communicate with a human audience:

1. Emotional Intelligence: Despite everything the Wachoski’s and James Cameron tells you, computers lack human emotional intelligence. AI will never be able to draw upon the sense memory of real emotion, it can only replicate the data it has on-hand and spit out algorithmic jumbles of text that simulate what a human sounds like. In Spanish culture there is a thing called “duende”, which is the spirit of creation that enters a human in a time of grief. AI can never serve duende, there is no feeling or emotion behind it, only words. 
2. Intuition: There is an innate connection between human communication that cannot be felt by a chatbot. Some may call it intuition, others a “gut feeling”, whatever we call it, that conscious and unconscious communication and understanding of how to engage with an audience only comes from the creative ability of one human’s skill in knowing how to speak to another human. These creative leaps in logic are not only key to real communication but part of the core fundamentals of humanity. While AI models like chatbots will continue to learn and adapt, it will always lack this intuitive understanding of content creation, nor will it understand how people will adapt their own perception in living in a world with AI and human content.
3. Empathy: The ability to understand and share others’ feelings is a skill only held by other humans, and maybe some dogs. The phenomena known as empathy is the string that connects kings to paupers and the backbone of messaging that resounds to all people regardless of the setting. Artificial intelligence as we know it now, will never be able to understand what it’s like to be a human and create content that can carry the weight of what a human can relate to their peers.
4. Thinking Outside the Box: For all the ground-breaking strides AI will make for our species it is important to always remember that artificial intelligence does not create new content. Chatbots, image generators, and every other piece of AI technology only operates based on the pre-existing data and algorithms it is fed. In contrast, humans are capable of pushing boundaries, thinking creatively, and coming up with ideas that defy conventional logic. This ability to ‘think outside the bun’ is a critical ingredient in content creation (it also cannot replace human’s mighty ability to drop in that A+ pop culture callback/pun like I just did).
5. Limited Scope: AI models cannot draw from other sources to solve things outside its scope. For example: it is very realistic that in the very near future that artificial intelligence will be programmed to use virtual experimentation to focus on, and cure, a once incurable disease. However, in lieu of creating unfathomable virtual iterations of cures and vaccines to find the one formula that cures that disease, we lose that hands-on interaction with each experiment. That fully-immersed human experimentation may be able to see alternative uses for their experiment that could revolutionize another field (like when we discovered Nutri-Sweet while trying to cure cancer or when we discovered Viagra trying to make blood pressure medication). 

I saw a thing on my feed recently that asked “do we really want to live in a world where humans do the labor and the robots make the art” and I think that’s something we as a species stuck in a rat race of reducing costs and being more efficient should remember. We have the ability to make tools and bring ease to our lives; we also have the need to create.

Creation is humanity’s compulsion to leave behind the statement that we were here, that we existed, that we matter. Emotion and empathy is why a red square at Home Depot is a paint sample and a Rothko at a museum is art. 

AI can handle the heavy lifting of data processing and pattern recognition, leaving humans with more time and energy to delve into the creative depths of content creation. It’s the synergy of AI’s efficiency and human creativity that will shape the future of content creation. This article in of itself is a composite of both AI prompting and my own ideas and thoughts. This is the future, this is how we talk now. 

While we are humans using technology to communicate with humans, it is important to remember that AI is technology using humans to communicate with humans, both literally and metaphorically, that one little tweak in this statement is why creative agencies will never go extinct.