How can AI help us imagine the future?

“96% of C-suite leaders say they expect the use of AI tools to increase their company’s overall productivity levels” according to Upwork. 

That’s unlikely to surprise many readers. 

But then things get really interesting. Because when Upwork asked employees, a very different picture emerged: “77% of employees say these tools have actually decreased their productivity and added to their workload.”

This is an astonishing gap. It’s also a deeply painful gap that will only lead to conflict, resentment and disillusionment. Because the reality is that, despite all the hype and experimentation – 100 million ChatGPT users in less than 5 weeks! – most people’s days haven’t been transformed by AI – less than 10% of people use ChatGPT daily (compare this with smartphones!).

There are many reasons for this. Most of which you’ve probably experienced personally. It makes stuff up. The output is often painfully generic. It is too inconsistent. 

All of that is true. But rather than trying to force generative AI to be precise (it’s not a typical computer program, like Excel), maybe we should be looking for situations where its unpredictability is a feature, not a bug?

Which brings us back to our session at MAD//Fest at the Emerging Tech & AI stage. 

We gave everyone a pen and paper and asked them to draw their dream client of 2035. We only gave them a minute, which meant rushed stick person scrawls were very much the order of the day. 

And then we turned to AI. People then took a photo of their doodle, and watched as Stable Diffusion did its thing, returning a far richer version of their quick sketch. Here’s just one example: 

The exercise was a lot of fun. But we’ve also designed it to be a powerful demonstration of a few deeper truths about AI that are relevant to every marketing leader. 

Generative AI is great at giving you skills that you don’t have. But most of us try and get it to do the things we’re already great at today. And then wonder why we’re disappointed. We use drawing as an example because most people can’t draw. Or certainly they don’t think they can! But if you’re a professional illustrator or graphic designer, you’ll be extremely disappointed with DALLE’s output. Similarly if you’re a great copywriter, Claude’s copy is unlikely to blow your mind. But if you’re dyslexic, or English isn’t your native language, it’s likely to be far more useful. Think about that when you’re considering where to use it in your teams.

Generative AI adds to human insight, rather than replacing it. The media (and many AI companies!) would have you believe that you press a button and AI magically does what you want. As we experienced at MAD//Fest, that’s far from the truth. Even with 150+ people’s images, most were fairly terrible. They certainly weren’t the finished article. But they were good enough to share and discuss. Indeed, one of the biggest and least discussed implications of gen AI on corporate culture and innovation is that it makes it far easier and faster for people to turn a creative idea into something more tangible. That’s a big deal in less ‘creative’ industries, where employees are nervous about sharing half-formed ideas. 

New outputs create new inputs. We all know that diversity is the lifeblood of creativity. AI can bring new perspectives to the creative process. Its initial output may well be biased and/or fairly generic, but asking people to draw their visions rather than write or speak about them will result in different visions being shared.

Shared experiences are better experiences. While we got a range of images, the other thing that was striking about the session was the areas of overlap. A few key themes were very obvious as we looked at everyone’s before and after sketches on the big screen. People want to work with clients with big budgets (who knew?!). They want to make their clients happy! They want to work in exciting new areas – see the space rocket above. None of these are particularly revolutionary, but it’s powerful to see visually. 

There’s a huge amount of hype around AI. Like every new technology, there are moments of magic. And a lot of missteps as we figure out where and when to use it effectively. We’re not saying this is the perfect AI product by any means. It’s not meant to be. But we heard that doing this quick exercise shifted people’s thinking around gen AI. It got them curious to experiment. To explore its capabilities further. And that’s the best way to discover where this unpredictable technology can help you. 

If you’d like to dive deeper into exactly what the MAD//Fest audience wants from their clients in 2035, then check out the results here.