AI. All Commerce. No Art.

Advertising, design, marketing, however you like to describe it, it is ,in some way, a collaborative art form. In service of commerce, but art nonetheless. The thing that makes this art distinct is collaboration. Every TV spot requires a team. Even your basic print ad has a writer and an art director. And I’m not even counting the work planners and account staff put into drawing insights from the client to frame the problem. Every person who touches it affects the end result. All in service of art. Commercial Art. 

It’s a funny term. An old-school term.  Business in the front and Art in the back. And, at least for me, AI is drawing the art right out of it. 

For years, innovation and new tools have sped up and streamlined the process of making this commercial art. Why hire a retoucher when you can knock it out yourself in Photoshop? Why hire a proofreader when you’ve got spellcheck. And AI can be seen as another tool in that context. But personally, I find it more troubling as a tool. It feels like it’s all commerce and very little art. 

By its very nature, generative AI is recycling and remixing existing words and visuals. Fine. Every writer and designer does the same thing. But AI is not a collaborator, not really. You plug in prompts and variables and it outputs a probabilistically generated response. That is the nature of an LLM. No consciousness. No expertise. Just stochastic monkeys banging away.

And for me that’s the rub. As you cut away collaborators, the art changes. It’s more banal, less humane. More generic, less authentic. All commerce, no art. And if that’s the case, it’s not really the sort of work I want to do. I like clients. I like the process and frankly the constraints of budget, timing and the like. Most of all, I like the people. I like bouncing ideas around, refining them, killing them making them as unexpected and effective as they can be.

So is there a place for AI? Almost certainly. It’s unavoidable. Budgets pretty much demand it. But at least for me, I think I‘ll be cautious about how I use it. The societal and environmental costs are too high and the quality is too low for me.