Creativity / AI: Walking the line between PAIN and GAIN

By Nik Barkley, VP of Brand Experience at PAN

“How do you use AI to augment your writing? Can we just create some images with MidJourney? Is there a way to make things faster and cheaper with AI? How much do you use AI for website development? Because I have a friend who created a whole website with Claude in a few hours…”

We are getting these questions more and more, from both clients and prospects. And frankly, these are the questions they should be asking—with the growing need for AI to not just be a “buzzword” for creative teams, but something that is part of them. Or it should be anyway.

As creatives, we walk the line with AI and always have—and it’s a very fine line. A line that falls right between doing the thinking and executing the thinking, and there is a very big distinction there.

We at PAN, and I as the creative team lead, have not just “made peace” with AI, but have embraced it and integrated it into our everyday processes and workflows. It’s imbued throughout all our tools and solutions, and we have also augmented that with external ones that can help amplify or up-level what we do so we’re not limited to what’s “in” the tools. But the important difference is AI takes orders from us, not the other way around.

The Role of AI: A Flawed Creative Team Member?

“AI” in the creative realm is like managing a creative team that has:

• A really great brainstormer with no social skills. It throws out great ideas but is often scatterbrained and buries them amongst piles of mediocrity.
• A marketing writer that knows every idiom, every colloquialism, every turn of phrase, ever grammatical rule, but whose work oscillates between sophisticated storytelling, and trite predictable dribble. Oh, and they like em dashes way too much.
• An incredible illustrator that paints the Mona Lisa with precision and purpose, but with extra fingers, or clothes that are from a different century, or modern skyscrapers in the background instead of period appropriate villages and farms.
• A graphic or UI designer that has incredible skills, knowledge, and vision, but is just terrible at follow throughs and nuance. One that “delivers” on the creative brief with the right number of assets and sizes, but with designs that span from perfect, to passable, to downright pathetic.
• A web developer who can make the world transform through code but also has no sense of “clean code” or who will sacrifice page load speeds for a quicker solution, or who will build something aesthetically pleasing but impractical for a marketer to work with later on.
• A cinematographer or animator who possesses a great sense of framing and movement, just as long as you don’t care that the human body can’t bend that way, or that cars have to actually follow the rules of gravity.

The important part of all this is to know what’s great, and matches what the creative envisions, and what’s just not. And right now, that can only come from trained humans who know how to activate the tools, power the plugins, enable the apps and solutions, and can bend them all to their will. That’s the real power of AI, beyond the buzzwords anyway.

At the end of the day, AI stands for different things to different people and, in my experience, it is artificial and its “intelligence” is debatable. I would vote for AI standing for Augmented Ideation, Articulation Improvements, Artful Imagination, Aesthetic Inventiveness, Activating Illumination, Amplifying Insights, Aligning Intuitions, or Awakening Ideas. But Artificial Intelligence on base is an oxymoron.