Touch My Soul: Creative Perspective-taking in the Age of AI

Ever since ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, there has been fear and trembling among my fellow advertising creatives. Will copywriters go the way of stevedores? Will Midjourney turn art directors into lamplighters? How long until the bots give us creatives the boot? The answer depends, I suspect, on what we are creating.

I would like to suggest that there are two species of creativity. The first is what I will call technocratic creativity. Demand is high for this kind of creativity. It is very functional. It solves various business problems. For example, it interprets complex clinical trial results into a few digestible concepts that busy clinicians can readily take away. Technocratic creativity effectively communicates important messages. It changes, or at least influences, minds. Hence its considerable commercial value.

Here, generative artificial intelligence is a game-changer. GenAI can substantially lower the cost of producing technocratic creative outputs. Eapen et al name five specific creative functions at which GenAI excels. It promotes divergent thinking, challenges expertise bias, assists in idea evaluation, supports idea refinement, and facilitates collaboration. Granted, all of these functions require human leadership. Tools like ChatGBT, Midjourney and others are just that—tools. They require human intelligence to wield them. However, the amazing computational power of tools like these can help overcome inherent human limitations and greatly accelerate heretofore labor-intensive creative processes. Score one for the bots.

All is not lost for us humans, though. Technocratic creativity produced with the help of AI often has one glaring drawback. It doesn’t smell human. People can quickly recognize, for example, content produced by large language models. Although the English (or Icelandic, or Mandarin) is proficient enough, still it is spoken with a pronounced foreign accent. Clearly, such content is the product of a non-native speaker of humanity. It may be logically coherent and grammatically correct. But it is a beautiful corpse. It’s missing that spark, that touch, and that is its curse. Artificial creativity is soulless. And yet for many technocratic use cases, that may not even matter.

But it brings us to the second species of creativity. I will call it empathetic creativity. With technocratic creativity, the starting point is always the objective, the problem to be solved. With empathetic creativity, it’s radically different. Here, the starting point is the desire of human beings to connect deeply with one another. It isn’t so much a mind thing. It’s a soul thing. By soul I mean that furnace in which burns the passion for purpose, for meaning, for healing, for beauty, for justice. Empathetic creativity originates in the mysterious depths of human desire and suffering. That may sound awfully hifalutin coming from an ad guy. But great brands understand exactly this. Marketing at this level shares with great art the capacity to touch something in the human soul.

It is not easy to do empathetic creativity well. In addition to great craft, it requires genuine insight, sensitivity, taste, tact and, above all, compassion. At the moment anyway, these reside almost exclusively within human actors. I do not claim that GenAI has no role in empathetic creativity. Quite the contrary. As is the case with technocratic creativity, these tools can greatly assist creative empaths. The dialectic between human and machine can be incredibly fruitful. It can accelerate the formation of seminal ideas and help hone their ultimate execution. But I have noticed a wonderful irony here. Generally, the human collaborator is said to prompt the AI. In my experience, just the opposite is true. It is usually the AI which ends up prompting me. The toing and froing between me and my AIs has frequently led me to stumble upon ideas I would not have otherwise. Often enough, that is precisely the moment when I set the tools aside and rush headlong into an ecstasy of old-school creative inspiration.

All of this to encourage my creative colleagues. Without a doubt, the bots are here to stay. With our help, they can do some things faster and arguably better than we can do on our own, especially within the domain of technocratic creativity. But creatives, remember who you were always meant to be. You are soul touchers. Between 0 and 1 there is an infinity of decimals. This infinity has always been your native country.