Riddle me this… creative
Did you know that humans find it almost impossible to resist answering a questions? Even when we don’t know the answer, we try and help out with whatever we can muster. This is the most simple demonstration of the fact that everyone is creative. Every questions challenges us to frame what we know if a new way in response to the prompt of a question.
Did you know that, at the heart of every successful large corporation in any industry you can name, lies a piece of intellectual property? A proprietary chunk of information that is what makes them who and what they are.
Someone dreamed that up. That indefinable piece of intellectual output is what enables the value of everything that business offers. And yes, the art and skill of creativity is pushed aside and frowned on and diminished in every conceivable way every day at work… as if, because it is difficult to measure, it has no value.
AI also responds to prompts. In a far more liner, logically rigorous and comprehensive way than humans. It is better at answering fact based questions than most humans will ever hope to be. The Large Language Model on which generative AI is trained, contains massive datasets which it scours, looking for probable good answers to the prompt you input… In short, it tries to find a way to answer your question, but its faster and better at it than you.
But what it can’t do (yet? Ever?) is what happens in your brains when you are in the shower and you suddenly spot the pattern or realise the overlap between two massively diverse issues, and see how they relate and how to solve the problem.
That’s what humans do. And that’s what we exclude when we say that creativity has no real value.
Every time you bring in the creatives to dress your solution up in a nice, attractive way, you have missed the point. You have missed the opportunity for the real magic sauce. Every time you denigrate someone’s ability to make unexpected connections, you are willingly refusing to engage with humanities super power.
Data-driven marketing and Generative AI driven businesses have one thing in common: Everything they produce and talk about is aggregated: It is a probabilistic output in response to their questions. In short, they are using predictions as answers.
Before long, we will be so used to these answers that will no longer seem as shiny and wonderful as they (rightly) do today. And we will start to miss what the humans brought to the equation all along.
Differentiation is a key marketing strategy in an overcrowded market. By doubling down on what makes you different, you can stand head and shoulder above the crowd. Ask Apple.
But in our keenness to embrace data-driven approaches and AI-driven solutions, we are doing the opposite, We are racing to the bottom of the aggregated pile. Now is not the time to conform or to obey this herd instinct.
Now is the time to rebel, to stand up and be counted, to fly your freak flag and stake a claim for your individual identity.
It won’t be long before the pendulum swings (nothing takes all that long any more, does it?). Be firmly seated on the band wagon before the rest come piling in.
Be human. Make mistakes.
Extend and break the patterns.
Break new ground.
Do not allow high-speed probabilistic predications calculated from our collective past be the sole determiner of our future. Learn from the past, and take it somewhere. Don’t allow algorithms to dictate what happens next.
