Augmented creativity or absolute c**p?

Collaborator or Competitor? Limitless potential for good … or existential threat?

We’ve been playing with Ai for a while now. It’s intoxicating, mind-blowing and hugely exciting to us.

But not everyone is seeing it this way….from mass redundancies, to climatic catastrophe…the arguments against it are biggies.

To find out where people stand on the question of Ai’s impact on the creative industries Christian James and Jo Whiteley led an industry debate to determine whether friend or foe.

Every now and again, something comes along that threatens to annihilate creativity as we know it. Cameras will kill art, Digital will kill creative agencies, streaming will kill CD’s….yeh ok, sometimes it’s not just a threat.

So we’re taking Ai seriously here at If; exploring its potential to accelerate many time-hungry aspects of the creative process but also to test whether and how it can stimulate more potent originality.

We know we’re not alone on our (mid) journey. With support from Manchester’s Media, Digital and Creative Association (the MPA), we brought together leaders from across the industry for a debate to understand where other agencies stood on the subject.

Our CD, Jo Whiteley was joined on the panel by CTi Digital’s Anthony Diver and Bafta winning ex-head of BBC Creative, James Cross (now CCO and Founder of Meanwhile agency). And I got to fire questions at them as host….starting off with a light one: Are we just turkeys voting for Christmas here?

We went on to debate some amazing ideas, with the audience providing some great insights and questions for the panel to respond to.

Ai Alphabet – created in Midjourney by Jake Colling, If agency

Most agreed that, if handled correctly, Ai will actually force us to be more human rather than make us behave more like machines – buying time for original creative thinking.

And interestingly, (optimistically?), the predominant view was that Ai would create as many new jobs as those made redundant by its efficiency and speed…..from Data Curator to Search Sorcerer (someone who specialises in the dark arts of search terms for tools like DALL-E).

The partisan crowd swaggered with cocky pride when considering if Manchester had the potential to take the global lead in Ai driven creativity. Pointless question. With our strength and depth in Digital, Tech, Creativity and Academia alongside centuries of industrial and commercial innovation – of course we can.

No-one was under the illusion that brand powerhouses like Unilever or P&G could just decide to smash agencies out of the Ai ballpark and bring the innovation in-house. But like ‘digital’ before it, the smart money is on agencies proving their worth and staying one step ahead of clients; delivering the thing that no all-powerful Ai tool can deliver on its own. Original Creativity.

Well, not yet anyway.