Nothing beats AI. I mean, of course, to substitute the “A” here with any of a number of words other than “artificial.” But we’ll get to that later.

For now, an assertion: None of anything is made by AI.

This is true on a variety of levels. For one, as many users would agree, AI still needs human input to yield products of creative value, at least in our industry. You need to ask it the right questions, describe what’s in your mind with the right detail. Prompts must be engineered thoughtfully so that the software knows what instructions to follow. 

On another, more important level: Nothing of true creative power has yet been produced by AI. Definitely not by itself, at least. And if one takes a cursory look at all of the best advertising work that has come out over the last years, one shall see that even as AI language models and visual innovation engines have become more powerful, the most affective, most memorable, most award-winning advertising work have all been products of the human mind.

And so we say that nothing beats AI: Nothing beats Actual Intelligence.

Be that as it may, there is some justifiable anxiety over AI taking over the creative industries. I suppose this stems from the speed with which generative AI has evolved, which has been nothing short of astonishing. When just a few years back, it can barely animate a human face, now, it can come up with entire audio-visual narratives, from drone shots to close-ups, based on a single text prompt. 

If intelligence is the capacity to learn, to improve and evolve, then it’s only a matter of time before AI catches up to us. At this point, it’s already helped us come up with driverless cars, diagnosed illnesses that have left doctors clueless, come up with models to project the behavior of financial markets more accurately. It’s long been accepted that chess engines can handily beat the highest-rated grandmasters. 

Creative ideation, however, is a territory that AI has yet to colonize.

Any true creative or artist understands this, and it’s the challenge that those in the tech industry have yet to crack: Creative output, at its highest level, is a product not merely of communication, but of emotion. And emotion is a function of experience– human experience.

The stories we tell, the ideas we come up with, can only have been produced by someone who has actually gone through the human experience. If, as we said earlier, intelligence is the capacity to learn, then AI can only learn what it experiences. It can only experience what is fed to it through machine learning models– not joy or heartbreak or struggle or triumph or loss, but a mere simulacra of it. No one learns how to swim by just reading about swimming. If AI cannot feel in the first place, then it cannot learn how to feel. And while it can reproduce artwork, it cannot recreate the feeling of color, of compositional irony, of the artist’s agony with every stroke of the brush.

AI, of course– aided intelligence– has and will continue to change the landscape of the creative industry. It has and will continue to change the culture inside our agencies– relegating menial tasks to computers so that the creative may be freed to ideate, to pursue the true task of creation. Automation has become a gift to marketing: When all you need is to relay information, then AI deserves some gratitude for the scale it is helping us achieve.

But the thinking still comes from us. It always has, and will do so– at least for the foreseeable future.

IdeasXMachina’s founder Third Domingo has had a fascinating path into creativity. He grew up in Bilibid Prison and his early years were spent around inmates. He believes this experience made him the leader he is today.