How will the competition between AI and creativity continue? Is AI a creativity booster or does it restrict creativity?
End or new beginning of creativity?
If you scroll through your timeline or your feed in the 'social' networks and, like me, find yourself in the filter bubble of the creative industry, you can't avoid one question: Does AI mean the unstoppable end of creativity and thus ultimately of other areas of the creative industry? Or is the complete opposite ultimately the case and AI even heralding the renaissance of creativity?
Tedious, repetitive tasks would be eliminated and a lot of manual knowledge that has required years of training would become superfluous. In future, the ever-helpful and inexhaustible AI would step in for all knowledge-based professions and especially for the creative professions. If you look into these theses and search for concrete evidence, it quickly becomes very thin on the ground and it turns out that the overly euphoric statements are often formulated in parallel with business interests. It goes without saying that the major tech platforms are not particularly critical of AI. No wonder, one would think, as they are simultaneously investing hundreds of billions in AI.
On the opposite side, it is not uncommon to find authors who are critical of technology and society in every respect, who warn against everything and everyone and who therefore, purely statistically, even land a hit from time to time. But even from this side, we hear a lot of belief, conviction and prognoses and little in the way of hard, verifiable facts.
This brief reflection could end here if the question itself were not too exciting to leave unanswered. For this reason, two completely different AI projects from the last 12 months - pars pro toto - will be examined in more detail as examples of the many AI experiments and projects from our experience at denkwerk in order to approach a viable answer via a reality check.
AI in practice I: in use for fast and effective campaigns
One of the great promises of AI-based tools is the ability to generate or prompt creative ideas, motifs and campaigns very quickly and efficiently. And great progress has been made in this area in the last almost two years thanks to generative AI.
One such example from our practice is the Israeli NGO Keren Hayesod. It is not very well known to the public in Germany, but is very present on the international stage. The reason for this is that it traditionally addresses the Jewish target group in the diaspora and there are comparatively few addressees in Germany. The aim of the campaign, which was to be launched in October 2023 on the fifth anniversary of the attack on the synagogue in Halle, was to change this and address the entire German public.
However, this campaign was never to be launched, because one day after the launch event in Halle, Israel was attacked by Hamas from Gaza on October 7, 2023.
Simply allowing the campaign against anti-Semitism in Germany to continue as if nothing had happened was not an alternative. The priority changed from one day to the next and, with a heavy heart, we had to stop the work we were doing before it could have any effect. What to do? The NGO's small budget had evaporated. No new budget was available. But large media companies in Germany had freed up advertising space free of charge in the wake of the shocking events. A new motif had to be found, and quickly.
In just a few days and with a few night shifts, an AI-generated motif was created that captures the horror of the visitors to the Nova music festival. Out of respect for the victims of this terrorist attack, it was decided not to use them as a motif. After all, they could have been people who had possibly been abducted, abused or killed.
Without the use of generative AI, an image motif of this quality would have been difficult to realize under these conditions. AI saved this campaign budget and time and opened up a new path for creativity.
AI in Practice II: Rethinking Accessibility with A11y-AI
A completely different example from the last 12 months is the tool A11y-AI, (pronounced Ally-AI). This example highlights a completely different approach to creativity in the use of generative AI. Large language models - we remember - respond to prompts with sentences that generate the next most probable word token by token. This results in word and sentence sequences that sound intelligent and often even produce really helpful answers. One “killer application” of these AI chatbots is their ability to translate. This works from one language to another, but also, for example, on the basis of a technical report full of incomprehensible technical terms in natural, generally understandable language. At denkwerk, we use this ability of AI in A11y-AI: the tool tests websites for accessibility - and does so in a smart way. It produces a technical results protocol that the AI converts into a results report from the perspective of a person with specific limitations. An impersonal test result becomes a comprehensible human concern.
It has been shown that website operators who read feedback from a person with a disability react much more empathetically than when reading a technical report. More empathy for people with disabilities can therefore be the key to more accessible websites, because according to a recent study by Aktion Mensch, 75% of the leading German web stores are not consistently accessible. This is despite the fact that from June 2025, operators of private websites and stores will also face severe penalties.
In this example, generative AI offers us a functionality that would simply not be possible without AI. So it's not just about increasing productivity and efficiency, but about taking a completely new approach to solving problems that would have been impossible without AI.
Conclusion: AI as a tool for expanding human creativity
In both specific examples, the campaign and the AI tool, we find that the creative output of the teams that worked on the projects was essentially down to their human creativity - although the AI generated results that would not have been conceivable in this form without the technological leap. The 'creatives' asked themselves the right questions and got more efficient or more qualitative answers thanks to generative AI. But without people and their excellence and experience, both projects would have been unthinkable.
So at its core, this is not about a creative competition with AI or even a human-machine antagonism. And perhaps what we are currently experiencing is not such a new phenomenon in the history of human use of technology and media. Marshall McLuhan's media theory from the seventies comes to mind again. If the hammer is the extension of the hand, the wheel the extension of the feet and television the extension of the eyes and vision, would it not be logical to regard the computer as the extension of the logical thinking brain? And would generative AI then be nothing more and nothing less than an extension of the capabilities of the creative brain? From this perspective, the artificially inflated contradiction from my “social platform filter bubble” dissolves. We humans in the creative industry have grown a new tool to expand our creative intelligence - but the excellence of the results still lies in the hands of the 'creatives' who have the ability to distinguish gold from fool's gold.
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