The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing and advertising is already becoming a game-changer, transforming the way businesses analyze consumer behavior and make creative decisions. But with great power comes great responsibility: How does quickly generating ideas and artwork change the industry landscape for better, or for worse? How does this impact plagiarism? How do we protect and emphasize original ideas?
To discuss these questions and more, Struck spoke with several of its employees across various disciplines to discuss the benefits, concerns and slippery slopes associated with AI.
When do you think it’s appropriate or inappropriate to utilize AI in our industry?
Julie Comstock | Associate Creative Director:
I think AI, like Chat GPT, is appropriate to utilize whenever it’s helpful. It can provide a good sense for what’s in the zeitgeist, or for exploring ideas and questions about topics. However, answers from AI need to be taken with a grain of salt.
When thinking about intellectual property, I’m not sure we should enter exact words or artwork, asking AI like Chat GPT or Midjourney, to rework things into a bunch of different assets, especially when those concepts haven’t been released yet. If proprietary art direction or copy doesn’t yet exist on the internet, AI can’t yet scrape it. To feed it to an AI could violate a client’s intellectual property rights.
Nate Healy | UX Strategist:
We are responsible for what we create. We shouldn’t use AI without somehow verifying the information it generates.
How might AI be used as a tool for strategy work?
Molly O’Neill | Brand Strategist:
I see a big opportunity for amassing research quickly and efficiently. We’d give ChatGPT our research questions, have it spit out a bunch of data. Seems like AI could easily identify white space in the market for brands we work with—target segment and positioning. Of course, we’d still need a human to evaluate results and make final decisions, but its information-gathering capabilities might be really valuable for strategy.
There has been a lot of talk about AI being utilized to help with efficiency. Do you agree or disagree?
Nate Healy | UX Strategist:
If I can use AI for quick research and get to a starting point more quickly, that’s definitely a win for efficiency. In the future, if it could somehow help with usability testing, that would save a lot of time and money.
Jess Vice | Strategy Director:
If we’re striving for efficiency, then what are we losing in the process? I think you lose quality right off the bat. Something like ChatGPT in particular, but AI in general, is logical and built on code and function – but a human doesn’t always think logically, and that is the beautiful thing about the way Struck finds solutions to our client’s problems. We’re always thinking in different ways and connecting dots that may not be connected, whereas AI is looking to connect dots.
Ultimately, AI can help build the foundation of a thought process, research, or strategy framework by pulling more resources in half a second than I could find in 20 Google searches, but we shouldn’t rely on AI for producing a final outcome.
Julie Comstock | Associate Creative Director:
There are a lot of tasks that don’t need to be novel or groundbreaking. Some things we do are formulaic. AI can help do those tasks. But, when creativity is needed, human insight, experience and empathy are beneficial.
Molly O’Neill | Brand Strategist:
Sometimes I do think that AI might replace researchers completely, and even strategists—since these are less “subjective” roles and tasks within the creative process.
Julie Comstock | Associate Creative Director:
The one thing about strategy, though, especially at Struck is the need to find the “a-ha!” moment. Our One Star campaign for Snowbird is a great example. It shows clear insight into the mindset of the audience and how to connect with them. That is something that AI is not currently able to do. The creative strategy provides the team the “tip-of-the-arrow” for how to differentiate from competitors—AI cannot show us how to differentiate from what’s out there, it’s only showing us what is already out there.
Do you think AI will make your job easier or more difficult? Why?
Nate Healy | UX Strategist:
I think it could go either way. You could give yourself more work by always having to check for and fix AI errors.
Molly O’Neill | Brand Strategist:
It’s like a bad intern or assistant! Sometimes you feel like you should’ve just done the work yourself to get it done faster and more to your liking.
Julie Comstock | Associate Creative Director:
I feel the same as Nate and Molly about how a platform like Chat GPT doesn’t always give me the answers I want—it’s usually easier to just get them on my own instead of tweaking prompts.
But, I also think that AI will obliterate the “jobs of the average,” which I find scary and sad. People who currently have above-average intellect, creativity, and taste are still safe, but eventually they won’t be. All those who don’t have those advantages, whether by luck or circumstance, will be quite hurt. I’m worried about it. I worry whether we, as humans, can adapt to learn new skills fast enough to make a move in our careers when an entire industry is wiped out?
Jess Vice | Strategy Director:
Ultimately, there are humans who are inputting the information, so AI will naturally prioritize the values of whichever human is teaching it. I think this makes my own job harder because I’ll have to tell clients why an AI answer isn’t good enough. I think clients will recognize that AI provides easy solutions, but we have to help them understand that those solutions are inherently biased by the information they’re fed, by the person creating the algorithm. We can use AI as a starting place, but we’ll always have to do the work of evaluating the output in the context of equity, justice, intersectionality… For example, in UX, we trust those with a lived perspective when it comes to something like disabilities or accessibility issues. We have to hold ourselves to rigorous standards, and I’m not sure AI can do that without our help.
When you are creating something like a moodboard or initial copy, or generating research to help determine brand strategy, do you think that work should come with a disclaimer when presenting to a client that it was produced utilizing AI?
Julie Comstock | Associate Creative Director:
No. We don’t say when we’ve altered an image with Photoshop. We’ve never felt the need to say whether typography was set by hand or by a computer. Maybe the opposite will be emphasized? Maybe we’ll start showcasing that a narrative was hand-written vs AI-generated. Maybe we’ll start labeling creations as “Human-created” to distinguish our work from the mass output of AI.
What, if any, slippery slopes should we at Struck, and those in the industry as a whole, watch out for when applying AI to our work?
Julie Comstock | Associate Creative Director:
There’s a stock photography company currently suing an AI generator because an image it generated shows its watermark. As a user, we don’t know where the AI engine is pulling its information from and whether it’s infringing when it does.
Nate Healy | UX Strategist:
I think assuming that AI is accurate, original, and unbiased.
Julie Comstock | Associate Creative Director:
Another slippery slope, and maybe the biggest downfall across every form of AI, is increased bias. AI currently adopts the bias of people who are inputting information. So if more men, or whichever demographic of people, are currently inputting information, how will that impact future outputs from AI?
In more general terms: How do you think AI will alter advertising and marketing, for better or for worse?
Nate Healy | UX Strategist:
For better – I can see AI helping me get started with certain tasks. For example, if I am creating a sitemap for a client, in an industry unfamiliar to me, it would be helpful to have AI go through competitor sites to establish standard patterns. From there I can build a custom sitemap that is built on those patterns familiar to audiences of the industry.
Tosh Brown | Creative Director:
You cannot teach a computer taste. I think AI is super beneficial for concepting & thought-starting, but ultimately our output as an industry comes down to personal influences, stylistic interests, and so on. I think there is harm in the fact that AI scours the internet for what’s already out there, so it’s negative more so for artists and plagiarism than it is for curation. As designers, we aren’t necessarily starting anything from scratch, we’re just curating and stylistically saying: “This is what your brand could look like.”
Julie Comstock | Associate Creative Director:
As a parallel, look at Starbucks coffee. When their coffee became ubiquitous and easy to get, it elevated the art of the true barista. People started wanting specialty coffee and locally-roasted beans, hand-crafted drinks, and local coffee shops took off.
If AI has a similar effect, it could elevate our expertise. It’s not unusual to see backlash when things become too commonplace. It’s in these settings that excellence stands out even more. For Struck, this is a positive and adds value for our clients, now and in the future.
Credit: Nick Carpenter
It sounds like this is why agency work should still be valued by clients, rather than outsourcing all marketing and advertising projects to AI?
Tosh Brown | Creative Director:
It all comes back to taste and curation. Clients will have to trust that we’re better than artificial intelligence at gathering all the components to produce the best result. It’s actually very impressive how innovative something like Midjourney is when it comes to producing images that I can’t. But, in the end, my prompts are what’s needed to produce those images. My experience, perspective and creative direction are what’s different from AI, and from everyone else inputting thoughts into those platforms.
Julie Comstock | Associate Creative Director:
We’ve seen these problems over and over again. In the early 90s, desktop publishing took off and suddenly everyone thought they were a graphic designer. Then, digital cameras became affordable and everyone thought they were professional photographers. But, it takes skill, knowledge and style to create powerful copy and visuals. When clients need to stand out, they’ll value the tool that helps them do so. Currently AI is not that tool. There will be many who think AI generated work is enough, but more sophisticated businesses and brands will want something better.
Also, ChatGPT can only look to the past. It can only scrape what has already been thought, already been written, already been created. How does one get progression when only looking at what’s already been done? ChatGPT cannot create from its own experiences or from its personal perspective—it is only as good as the information it gathers.
Jess Vice | Strategy Director:
Programs like ChatGPT can lack nuance, and they lack intersectionality and thoughtfulness. They are very formulaic. There will always be a need to break through the noise.