AI Augmented Human Led Creativity

A defence of the machines

#BrandComms #AIcomms #AI #ThemApples #marketing #advertising

In my last article I warned of the danger of AI content fed to AI bots. As I mentioned in the article I am not anti-AI. I use it every day.  AI has shaved hours off my research time, helped me create visuals when I couldn’t afford an artist or a picture researcher and helped with strategy for reach and engagement. 

I am aware that right now we are at the peak of a hype cycle around AI.  It reminds me of three years ago when we were at the peak of the metaverse hype cycle. No creative deck was complete with a metaverse strategy. No conversation was up to date or relevant without namechecking Sandbox, Decentraland, Roblox or Fortnite.

The difference this time is that when the hype dies down, when the dust settles, the creative landscape will have changed forever.

On Tuesday night I was at a Creative AI event hosted by ITV Studios. The demonstration of an advertisement created entirely by Google VEO 3 was both awe inspiring and terrifying in equal measure. This was 100% AI created.

There is no doubt that brands will take advantage of this technology to cut costs and get content to market fast.  I’ve discussed the dangers of this. Now let’s look at how AI can benefit creativity without costing us our humanity.

My excitement for AI comes from examples of its use as a creative enabler rather than a creative replacement.

I am encouraged by examples of AI Augmented Human Creativity as seen in the work of director Anthony Rubinstein. Ant has an incredible following, 73K on Instagram, 9.6k on YouTube. His inventive filmmaking and informative BTS films are hugely popular.

Two years ago Ant released his behind the scenes of ‘Year of the Sea Myth” which shows us just how far AI has travelled in two years.  Laser engraving and 3D printing to enhance creature make up and set design, AI concepting and creation to bring CGI creatures into the final spot.

Fast forward two years and we get the incredible Cry Like A Guy. Ant’s BTS film shows how he blended real life filmmaking with AI Creativity. https://youtu.be/UbTQWJmAw7w?si=_2ZVuiABfF7B7PP0

The film is about human emotion, specifically men crying. It is led by a powerful central performance by Kieran Bew. This film absolutely needed real performances by real actors to connect with the audience.  But as you will see it is an incredibly ambitious film and without AI would not have been possible on Ant’s budget.

As with his Yacht Week spot Ant used AI to generate images that were used set design and a blend of live action and AI created animation. in tearful babies. With the help of Blind Pig’s newly created AI department Ant was able to animate everything from emotions to pop up storybooks.  The use of stable diffusion to regress famous people to a crying baby state was particularly impressive.

At the heart of this film is a human written spoken word piece designed to connect with a human audience that feels human emotions. AI is used as a scaffolding for scale, design, and experimentation.

I’ve been using AI to help in the development stage of my martial arts drama “Year of the Dragon.” Shaving hours and hours off research time with targeted prompts chatgpt found me films of unknown martial arts from West Africa and the Americas and Kung Fu forms even I had never heard of.

The story is still mine, but the research, that’s chatGPTs.

In pre-production AI is a powerful tool for Previsualisation and Ideation Acceleration. I’m going to summarize Alastair Crompton from his somewhat dated but still very relevant book “The Craft of Copywriting” when he tells creatives to find out everything about the product, find out everything you can about the person you want to sell it to – then start thinking. This strategy must not change. Over reliance on Ai to ideate will shrink our brains. Literally: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-leading-brain-atrophy-hidden-costs-letting-machines-hammad-abbasi-cqhdf

If it wasn't for research John Hegarty would never have seen Vorsprung durch Technik on a faded poster on a factory wall in Ingolstadt and Blur would be short a line in their hit single Parklife. It's got everything to do with your Vorsprung durch Technik, you know.

However, using AI to help with research, to find real stories that are relevant to our narrative, to create spatial tools to help with layout and blocking to help directors plan complex shots as Ant does and to generate mood boards and proof of concept imagery is gold for creatives and directors.

In this way AI can shift the power back to the creatives who otherwise couldn’t prove their ideas for lack of budget to pay for design teams, artists and picture researchers.

AI Empowering Neurodiverse Creatives

In his fascinating and deeply honest article Steve Moncrieff reveals how AI has helped him as a Neurodivergent creative to unlock his powers. As someone familiar with a jumble of competing ideas fighting for space in my brain I have often felt at a disadvantage to those who can clearly and concisely spell out their ideas in an organised linear fashion. Steve identifies how AI can handle logistics, manage tasks, declutter the creative process, turn speech into text, text into ideas, sketch into structure all while remaining true to the original burst of human creativity. Steve urges us to normalise AI as a creativity enhancer, not a “crutch” whil guarding against AI replacing human creativity or homogenising output.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unlocking-hidden-creativity-how-ai-empowers-minds-steve-moncrieff-kkkde

Experiential & Interactive Storytelling

Where AI meets the live wire of audience participation

One of the most exciting and creatively rich frontiers in AI is its role in experiential and interactive storytelling. AI has the potential to make stories feel alive, responsive, and uniquely tailored, while still rooted in a human creative vision.

AI allows characters to respond in real time to audience input, whether that’s heard from a player voice on a headset, a choice made in a branded game, or a live comment in a TikTok stream. We’re seeing this in narrative games like “As Dusk Falls”, where player decisions shape emotional outcomes, and in emerging branded experiences that blend storytelling with e-commerce, like Nike’s Airphoria on Fortnite, where interaction becomes part of the mythology.

Even more powerful is the idea of branching narratives co-authored with users. Netflix’s Bandersnatch allowed audiences to create their own narrative in the style of the 80s kids books Choose Your Own Adventure.  In the future AI can help generate paths that feel personalised, but still adhere to the creative logic and emotional arc designed by writers. Imagine a future social drama where each user’s journey reflects their mood, choices, or even scrolling habits but every version still feels authored, intentional, and emotionally resonant.

LiveOps storytelling as seen in games like Fortnite or Genshin Impact, where the story evolves over weeks or months based on audience behaviour, community memes, or cultural shifts is a fascinating area brands need to be aware of. With AI, you can monitor audience data and feed it back into adaptive storytelling engines, updating dialogue, visuals or campaign beats in near real-time  without breaking your brand tone or creative strategy.

The story itself needs to be human. Human soul, human creativity and it must resonate with other humans.  AI can enhance the storytelling by managing the variables. happens to the character at the end. That’s our job. That’s what makes it art.

Hyper-Personalisation

Tailoring stories, placements and experiences at the speed of thought

Let’s talk about one of the most commercially potent and creatively provocative  uses of AI: hyper-personalisation.

We’ve already seen the groundwork in algorithmic ad delivery. You’ll have seen ads pop up in your feeds that take you by surprise with how acurate they are. I’ve been left wondering if Instagram is listening to my conversations on more than one occasion. But AI is now stepping into the world of storytelling itself, tailoring the story, the setting, even the product placement to the individual user in real time.

Two people watch the same campaign video. One sees a Nike hoodie, the other sees North Face. The edit’s the same. The narrative’s the same. But the brands, the language, the music all subtly shifted by AI based on location, preferences, even time of day. It’s already happening. Tools like Synthesia, Runway, and Zefr are being used to auto-generate regional variations, language swaps, even tone adjustments with no need to reshoot or localise by hand.

Traditionally expensive, slow and fixed. Now? AI can retroactively insert or swap products in post. Watch a romantic comedy on Netflix and your local version might have a bottle of Château Minuty 281 in the picnic scene. In the US, it’s Miraval. The scene doesn’t change, but your experience does.

The opportunity here is massive but so is the risk. Creatives need to stay in the loop to set the parameters. Brandsa need to know where their products will be seen.

Done right, hyper-personalisation will increase the emotional impact of a story by making it feel relevant to the individual.

What do we do with our time when the machines become our hands?

AI excels at handling the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that have long weighed down the creative process. Things like rotoscoping, wire removal, background clean-up, sky replacement (how many times have I turned up on a beach to a cloudy day?!) or basic compositing. These are necessary parts of post-production, but they’re hardly where the magic lies. Now, AI tools can do in minutes what used to take days, freeing up time, budget and crucially people. So what do we do with that saved time and money? We reinvest it. We allow editors, designers, VFX artists and animators to do what they are best at  not grinding through pixels, but exploring their imagination and their human creativity. Let them experiment, invent, and elevate the work. Let them dream bigger. AI doesn’t replace the craft  it clears the path. It lets the humans do what only humans can: create bold, emotionally resonant work that moves audiences and makes brands unforgettable.

In the future we can surrender human creativity to the machines or we can collaborate with them. The real danger isn’t AI, it’s the choices we make as advertisers, as broadcasters, as streamers, as brands. It’s about forgetting what we’re here to do. We are storytellers, artists, strategists and makers. Our job is to move people. To connect. To spark emotion, insight and memory. AI can help us get there faster. It can tidy the tools, light the stage, extend the reach. But the why, the how, and the what it means, that must still come from us.

If we treat AI as a co-pilot rather than a replacement, it becomes a creative amplifier. A catalyst for bolder ideas, braver executions, deeper human truths. Used well, it shifts power back to the creative from the neurodiverse mind to the unfunded director, to the overlooked idea that just needed a bit of scaffolding to take shape.

The tools are here to stay and they will only get more powerful. Let’s use these tools to elevate the craft but please keep human lived experience and emotion at the centre of everything we do.

AI can build the bones of a campaign. But only humans can give it soul.