Why playing with AI is the best way to gain a creative edge

I began my career in advertising as “the digital guy” at an agency.

“Go play with it,” my boss said, “and get some cool things done, and we will figure out what to do with it.” With one sentence, he took away the pressure for an impossible monetization, established some discipline around being nimble and not overspending and refrained from the impulse of trying to organize the thinking about what we haven’t yet had a chance to think about.

Playing set me free. It took the weight and pressure off my shoulders and allowed me to focus on the one thing that mattered: doing. Because only by trying real things can we understand what makes a real difference.

We didn’t wait for anyone to teach us. Didn’t count on books or tutorials. We watched the new possibilities being released and asked: What can we do with this new possibility?

An entire generation of leaders in our industry was born from those experiments. There’s another one being born right now, too. A generation daring to play with the unknown. To experiment without rules. To try to tame or surf or partner with Artificial Intelligence.

Playing is a mammal’s evolutionary strategy to learn about the world around them. It’s the strategy we’ve found to explore the unknown before there’s enough knowledge to be transferred. Playing is the strategy to grasp the new.

For the last few years, I’ve been playing with the creative applications of AI. I’ve learned to create images, to write with it, to build animations to structure stories … with no obligation to form a total understanding of the beast. And through that exploration, a few preliminary lessons are starting to take shape:

Forget the separation between ideas and execution

That’s a temporary distinction in our market. Artists usually take pride in how they actually do things. And somehow the ad world fell for the production line idea. Guess what? One of AI’s greatest impacts is shrinking the gap between the idea and its manifestation. It still takes practice, skill and technique, but none of those seem like an abyss anymore. And that’s a revolutionary opportunity. But there’s a catch: You gotta be making stuff. If you are just telling others what to do … you’re not playing yet.

AI is a new kind of computing

AI is based not on machines that follow orders, but on machines that know how to learn. As a consequence, the tools being born from it will be very different too. It’s like going from a bicycle to a horse. You now have more power, but your ride will make some decisions on its own. 

Your skills will be wasted, and that’s fine

With millions of dollars being invested in this field, progress is faster than any other technology has experienced. This means that new capabilities, interfaces and workflows are being recreated almost on a monthly basis. Don’t use this as an excuse to wait for stability, though. The real learning from this stage isn’t the skill of using a particular tool. It’s the understanding of the possibilities—present and future. A perspective being shaped as we speak, by those daring to play in the chaos.

If your hands aren’t dirty … you’re a follower

I know the current world makes us believe that leaders lead and followers do. But in the context of a generational leap like this, the rules are reversed. If you want to lead the future, you must be doing it right now. Because all the nuances will come from your frustrations, surprises and your need to improvise with a technology that is far from ready.

There are problems

Live with that. Some are technological, like AI’s current inability to draw hands (somehow there are always too many fingers!). Those will be fixed faster than we imagine. Then, there are ethical (and legal) issues the industry will need to address, too—issues around authorship, plagiarism, ownership of the content being used to train these machines. These are very important issues that need to be discussed. But it will take awhile until we land on a consensus. This makes playing an even more important strategy—it allows us to try the technology on a smaller scale, with lower stakes and understand the nuances and specificities we must consider as we try to set bigger, general rules.

All those lessons bring me back even further into my past. Not to when I got my first job in advertising, but when I got my first computer as a kid. I don’t need to program anymore. But learning how a computer thinks gave me an edge against a lot of creatives around me. Now, looking at this new stage of computing, I can see the patterns repeating. To the point that when my teenage son told me he wanted to be a film director, I gave him the best gift I could think of: I taught him how to start playing with AI.

A gift. That’s what this is. To my son, to you 

Now go play.