Ai Questions: Is this the end of human creativity?

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you won’t have escaped the hype around generative Ai. There’s a ton of excitement around this new technology. But there are concerns too.

Ai tools undoubtedly have the potential to boost the quality and creativity of our work designing and delivering live events, while improving our productivity and efficiency. But when our MD Luke Brown spoke about Ai at the EDPA Access event in Florida late last year, he was surprised by the fear in the room.

“People are concerned about job losses across the sector,” he said. “Maybe there’s a bit of paranoia, but there are also genuine worries about jobs and the impact on creativity.”

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We’ve had a head start on some of these questions. As part of MISSION Group plc, we’ve been investing heavily in generative Ai for several years, creating a new group-wide Head of Data Science and Creative Technology role.

We’ve ploughed significant resource into understanding how we implement Ai technology in safe, effective ways. And we’ve thought hard about what it all means for our people, for the work we do, and for the future of creativity.

So will people lose their jobs?

No. Or at least, not immediately. We see the role of Ai as augmenting people’s existing expertise and freeing them up to concentrate on the tasks human beings are better at.

Ai will soon permeate all roles and teams, so people who choose not to engage with the technology risk putting themselves at a disadvantage in the future – in the same way they would if they ignored the role of MS Office in any knowledge role today.

Ai won’t take people’s jobs. People who can use Ai will take them.

Does everybody have to learn to use Ai?

We encourage everyone to get comfortable using free tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard. The beauty of generative Ai platforms is their intuitiveness. Their natural language processing means anybody with a rudimentary grasp of language and grammar can jump in and start using them right now.

We’re training specialists and building a team of Ai developers to create our own tools and platforms. All our visual creatives are trained on Midjourney.

Is this the end of human creativity?

This is where we came in. When we digitise the ability to come up with ideas, what does it mean for our creative professionals and their craft?

Generative Ai can quickly access, interpret, and combine massive volumes of contextual knowledge faster than any person. Used properly, we’ve found it can speed up the process, helping creative specialists come up with large numbers of ideas and solutions faster.

But we found something else, this process makes the role of human creatives more important than ever. Generative Ai’s unnerving ability to surprise us with new ideas comes with an occasional tendency towards glaring factual errors and extremely wonky logic. Without expert human oversight, it’s a risky crutch. Too risky.

"Ai represents a quantum jump in technological evolution and the current fear is that we (as humans) can’t keep up with it. As a creative I don’t see Ai as a threat but as another creative tool. We have to use Ai to help us realise our creative vision rather than let it (Ai) be, or dictate, the creative vision… we should use it as a tool, not a solution”

Jim Mac, Creative Director, Bray Leino Events

Our people bring an accuracy, social and cultural sensitivity, emotional depth and nuance that generative Ai cannot yet replicate. As General Motors found when they promised imminent mass production of fully self-driving cars, that last 10% is the hardest gap to close.

As the platforms improve, it’s up to every creative business to decide how much creativity they’ll cede to Ai.

But we would caution everyone to stay alive to the risk of falling into habits that rob the work of its emotional vitality and human unpredictability. That’s why generative AI augments our creative processes, but humans have the first and final say.

If there's a solution, we find it. If there isn't, we innovate.