Explore the creative possibilities

Laundry Service

Werbung/Full Service/ Integriert

Brooklyn, Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika

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Jordan Fox

CEO — Ad Results Media

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As AI tools continue to expand and advance, it's important to remember we are still in the early days of the evolution of AI ecosystems. Laundry Service's CEO, Jordan Fox, chimes in on the great debate about the use of AI in advertising.

Does your agency encourage or deter the use of AI in your work? If applicable, how does your team integrate these tools into the creative process?

We absolutely encourage our teams to experiment with various ways of utilizing AI-powered tools. We’ve provided written companywide guidelines for the use of AI in our work, which were important to establish early. Guidelines include: never to input any confidential information—including the name of any client or client product—into any AI prompt; never to utilize an AI tool in client work without transparent disclosure to and consent of our clients; etc. 

Within the framework of these core guidelines, our teams are already having a great time exploring the creative possibilities of these tools. Sometimes it’s for quick internal purposes (e.g., expanding an image beyond its original borders to accommodate specific deck slide dimensions). In other cases, we’re looking at much more elaborate implementations, in which generative AI elements are explicitly consumer-facing as part of a campaign or activation.

As these tools continue to rapidly evolve and multiply, we expect internal and client-facing use cases to expand likewise.  

How does the accessibility of these tools affect the way it is used?

That many of these tools are inexpensive (GPT-4, ElevenLabs, RunwayML) or free (GPT 3.5, Google Bard, Microsoft Bing Chat, Adobe Firefly which is included as a beta with Creative Cloud Enterprise subscriptions) has certainly been a driving factor in their rapid adoption, particularly for internal purposes. We’re very early in the evolution of the generative AI ecosystem and one of the less remarked-upon factors to watch closely as it grows will be pricing models – including any attendant IP licensing and usage rights.

As AI advances, how is the role of the creative redefined? In what ways do you see the landscape of creation changing/shifting in response to AI?

Here we enter the realm of pure speculation, as it’s far too early to make a call on where these tools will be in one year, let alone, say, five. Talking about this in the present tense isn’t that interesting - the role of the creative is generally unchanged. Mastery of prompt engineering is a new skill that is becoming increasingly relevant, but the fundamentals of client-facing work are still mainly being shouldered by humans, with AI occasionally acting as an accelerant (getting the same task done faster) or an enhancement (AI perhaps leading to a higher quality outcome than could have been achieved previously).

The more interesting domain for this question is to look forward across a 1-5 year timespan. Through this lens… who knows?!

There’s one school of thought that prompt engineering as a skill will gradually cease to be meaningful, and that AI tools’ quality and variety of output will converge around a middling level irrespective of user skill. This is, to me, the most boring and least likely scenario – that is, that AI tools will all create work that kind of looks the same, and that only humans can create the really good stuff, unassisted.

A more optimistic take is that AI will gradually reduce the amount of time that human creators spend on mundane tasks (e.g., cropping, linguistic translation, frame rate adjustments etc.). This scenario would free up creatives’ time to direct the full force of their efforts and imaginations to higher-order creative tasks, resulting in a net increase in the quality and/or volume of work.

The even more optimistic corollary would be that – in addition to sparing creatives the mundane stuff – AI will also serve as a useful co-pilot to assist humans in their creative endeavors, taking the work to previously unimaginable heights. I’m more in this camp, but it’s going to take a while.

I’ll only speak briefly to the fear-driven, nihilistic version of all this, in which AI replaces most human creators wholesale, wherein we’re all out of a job in a few years aside from a few master prompt engineers. This would mark the death of the traditional marketing industry (and the film industry, and the CGI industry, and and and)! Happily, we view this scenario as extraordinarily unlikely, and the current fearmongering around AI is part of a long tradition of well-intentioned but ultimately wrong moral panic and prognostication when new technologies arise, dating back to television, the radio, and even the printing press.

If AI furthers its capability to create and think, what is a responsible way to use these new technologies?

The answer to this question is going to change as the tools evolve. Right now, our priorities are preserving client confidentiality, transparency with our clients as to which tools we would like to use and why, and IP hygiene (i.e., ensuring that we and our clients have the legal right to commercially utilize any AI-generated works that we create).