Sorry, Sam. AI hasn’t made me obsolete yet.
We’ve been watching reruns of The Brady Bunch on Amazon Prime at our house recently. From 1969 to 1974, and for years after in syndication, there was no finer sitcom for kids born in the 70s.
For the uninitiated, here’s the story…of a man named Brady, an architect widower with three sons: Greg, Peter, and Bobby. He meets and marries Carol, with three daughters of her own: Marcia, Jan, and Cindy. Tending to them is a maid named Alice. They all live in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the Los Angeles suburbs. The storylines deal with boy problems, sharing bathrooms, lost hamsters, the occasional football to the nose, and attempts at pop music stardom.
I caught the tail end of one of the all-time great episodes, where Jan famously complained, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” to her parents. To this day, I don’t know how Eve Plumb didn’t win a Daytime Emmy. It’s a brilliant performance.
At the risk of hearing a chorus of “Drew, Drew, Drew!” echoing through the hallowed halls of 351 W Western Ave, Suite 200, I must say Drew McLellan has done it again. I don’t know if he’s infiltrated our inboxes or planted listening devices around the office, but it’s like he’s reading our minds. Take a look at this email about his take on whether AI is going to take our jobs:
Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), was recently quoted as saying:
“It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost be handled by the AI — and the AI will likely be able to test the creative against real or synthetic customer focus groups for predicting results and optimizing. Again, all free, instant, and nearly perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem.”
If I had invented planes, I would have probably predicted that cars would be obsolete soon. And I would have been wrong.
Before we as an industry go into a panic, let’s take a step back and recognize that AI is a tool. An amazing, time-saving, creative inspiring tool, but just a tool. For those of you who have been around for a while, do you remember when art directors did everything by hand and then the computer and this crazy software Quark came out? There were plenty of quotes from the Sam Altman’s of the day, saying that art directors would soon be obsolete.
Hasn’t happened yet.
Will AI change the way we work? Of course. It already has and we’re in the infancy of the evolution. But will it replace the most valuable aspect of our work — our ability to connect the dots, to understand human motivation and emotion, and to build complex strategies based on those connections and understandings?
No.
Here’s the rub. Do you know any agencies on the planet that aren’t using InDesign or one of Quark’s other inspired tools? I don’t. We have to be brave and open-minded enough to embrace the changes that technology is serving up. But we get to decide how they influence our work, how we serve clients, how we improve internal systems and efficiencies, etc.
AI is a powerful tool. It’s time to see AI for what it can do for us as opposed to fearing what it will do to us. For most of you, this is your moment to show the Sam Altman’s of the world just what it is you do that makes you invaluable in the equation.
You’re absolutely right, Drew. You can’t replace the human element when creating marketing that makes a difference. Rest easy, marketers. Everything’s gonna be alright.
