AI has access to all of human knowledge, every fact, case study, every insight, every strategy deck that’s been uploaded or scraped. Ask it for a campaign concept, and it will give you one. So, why do we need people?
In the ‘80s, Dan Wieden was trying to come up with a tagline for Nike. They had a bunch of different options floating around, and nothing was really working. What they eventually landed on came from a memory he had of convicted double murderer Gary Gilmore. When Gilmore stood in front of a firing squad for his crimes, he said “Let’s Do It.” Wieden changed it to “Just Do It.”
An LLM can generate you a thousand taglines for Nike. Quite frankly, it could probably even generate “Just Do It,” but it would arrive at that string of words through pattern recognition and previous creative. It wouldn’t find inspiration from the last words of a convicted killer, it can’t sit in the room the night before a deadline pulling from a specific, strange inventory of a life well lived.
The film Aftersun is focused on a father and daughter on vacation at a Turkish resort. It’s a beautiful-looking film, and the whole thing feels like a home movie, almost like you’re watching a memory. The film was written and directed by Charlotte Wells, whose father died when she was 16. She wrote the film based on old summer vacation photos, and purposely had the cinematographer shoot the father character through glass panes or at an arm’s length to represent how a child’s memory retains a parent after losing them.
The film doesn’t tell you any of these details, but as you watch, you feel this sense of melancholy, and the whole trip feels like a memory. You have to go looking for the backstory, and the backstory adds depth to what you see on screen.
An LLM hasn't lived a life, it’s just pretending to. It hasn’t been in an argument at a bar, it hasn’t dealt with love or loss.
We can't out-idea these models. We can out-human them. They don’t have access to our weird, specific, over-researched, personally strange realities. The things we think about late at night, the things we can’t let go of.
Xx, Caitlin
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
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