To design visually attractive campaigns, the creatives fed the AI prompts and asked it to craft creative concepts for a particular brand. In one case, they asked ChatGPT to develop a campaign for the Chicago Transit Authority, for which it produced creative executions and named the campaign “Riding The Wave Of Chicago.” Despite the two pitching Irving to recruiters as an art director, they relied entirely on AI to produce all the copy within the fictionalized portfolio. They even asked ChatGPT to decide what the campaign’s creative executions should look like.
The software suggested custom bus wraps complete with CTAs. Later, the duo shared the concept with Midjourney, an AI imaging tool, which produced the creative.
The AI tools developed Irving’s portfolio over the course of just three days, confirming the creatives’ hypothesis that an AI tool could create a finished product much more efficiently than a human art director. “There’s absolutely time saved by using these tools. There’s no doubt about it,” said Anglin.
It ‘couldn’t get into deeper concepts’
There were two significant problems.
First, the AI-generated images failed to generate clear text.
“They’re all very intentionally prevented from doing that,” said Anglin. “‘Ride The Wave Of Chicago’ was more of like a blob that had letter forms. It was that font, it just wasn’t all white words that you could read,” he added.
The creatives helped the AI create the campaign’s text components, which they did using Adobe Photoshop’s font finder tool.
Second, Murf and Anglin found the AI couldn’t develop deeper creative concepts. “The Chicago Transit Authority, the Audible campaigns, are really visually stunning and really well written, but the concepts are very ‘first thought,’” the art director said.
The tool itself explained why. After it completed the project, Murf interviewed the ChatGPT AI about its experience crafting the portfolio.
“I cannot have spontaneous breakthroughs, be surprised by my own creations, or have the subjective experience of feeling creative,” the AI told her.
How AI can enhance creative work
The duo doesn’t plan to take the hiring experiment further. After finding that the AI tools couldn’t develop original ideas, and the extent to which they required human prompting, Murf and Anglin felt more at ease.
The process also revealed how AI tools can aide junior creatives in becoming more strategic. The two felt momentarily able to assume the role of creative director, as they developed the software’s ideas and provided it guidance. In addition to a time-saving idea generator, they found, it also presents opportunities for creatives to pressure test their strategic vision and develop professionally.
