Much has changed since The Turing test, introduced by Alan Turing in the 1950’s – a measure of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour that is indistinguishable from a human.
However, the test only measures a machine's ability to imitate human-like conversation and does not assess the originality of a machine's thinking.
In recent years, advances in artificial intelligence have allowed machines to generate new ideas, solve complex problems, and even create art and music, which suggests that they can indeed produce original thinking to some extent. But the question of whether machines can truly have original thoughts and creative ideas like humans is still a topic of ongoing debate and research.
I put this question to ChatGPT:
So, if the role of a human working with machines is to provide the creative thinking in the first place, what is the value of this?
ChatGPT’s summary,
“Humans play a crucial role in providing the creative thinking that serves as the basis for many AI systems. Humans provide the original ideas, insights, and training data that machines use to generate new ideas, solve problems, and make decisions.
The value of this partnership between humans and machines lies in their complementary strengths. Machines can process large amounts of data quickly and accurately, while humans bring to the table their creativity, intuition, and critical thinking skills.
By combining these strengths, humans and machines can work together to achieve results that are greater than what could be achieved on their own.”
So, what does this mean for the business, creative agency relationship?
Byron Sharp, a renowned marketing professor and author, argues that businesses use creative agencies to help them stand out in a crowded market, communicate a clear and consistent message to their target audience, and create strong emotional connections with consumers.
He quotes, “The primary task of (advertising) agencies is to generate outstanding creative ideas that viewers will notice and be willing to process over and over in order to refresh memory structures”
To be clear, much of the role of creative agencies is to bring the insights and ideas that a client would not come up with. With the accessibility of AI, businesses could be forgiven in thinking they can do a lot of the ‘creative’. This means agencies need to work even harder to bring the science, the best-practice creative process, and the intuition that creativity springs from.
As Louis Pasteur said in 1854, “Chance favours the prepared mind.”
My good mate Ian, who I worked with on a large re-naming job said to me, at the end of a long day, “I’m not sure how I come up with stuff. It’s 70% science and 30% magic. But I don’t know where the magic comes from.”
I’d venture ‘the magic’ comes from a combination of a best-practice process and the expertise and experience in doing creative work. In other words, ‘prepared’. Creative agencies should bring ideas to clients that they would not think of and cannot execute.
With or without AI.