Dfrent.

Next time you see someone touting the creative capabilities of AI, you ought to try to remember how many thousands if not millions of people made ChatGPT avatars of themselves in the form of plastic-encased ersatz Barbie dolls.

The first one of these I saw I was mildly amused. Not amused enough to try it for myself, but I saw it as something different. At that point maybe I got up from my chair to get a glassaseltza. By the time I got back, I had seen 49,000 of these things.

Everyone of the people who posted their ChatGPT avatar thought it was special, interesting and worthy of being noticed. Instead everyone of the people who posted their ChatGPT avatar instead showed how unoriginal and uninteresting and karaoke'd their creativity is.

One of the liabilities of technology that makes it easy to be "creative" is that it gives you the tools to make something that looks like something someone else made. What the technology doesn't give you is taste, discernment, or the unrelenting drive to be original and differentiating. Replication is the opposite of creativity. Painting like Van Gogh is not the same as Van Gogh. A Beatles cover band is not the Beatles.

In 1966, Charlie Piccirillo of Doyle Dane Bernbach got a brief for "National Library Week." It was a PSA, and he was a young art director, but he got the assignment. You can read the whole story of Dave Dye's "best-in-the-world-blog," "Stuff from the Loft."

Here's the ad Piccirillo created. It's almost 60 years old. Older than 7/8ths of the people reading this post.

Here's the copy blown up so you can read it. At least if you're not tipsy.

AI is an enormously powerful tool. But it's our job as creative people to create things that capture the essence of the verbs in the headline above.

Cry. Giggle. Love. Hate. Wonder. Ponder. Understand.

Those verbs don't come from replication. They come from imagination.

The problem with those who believe in the power of computers is that they underestimate the immeasurable power of the human brain. 

The brain has six trillion synapses. It never buffers. It allows you to react to things like the heat of a frying pan at lightning speed. As far as the 26 letters above, they can be combined 4x10 to the 26th different ways. Imagining that number goes way beyond my Algebra 2 skills. But it's probably more hairs than are in trump's cranial merkin. (According to a site called Tiger Algebra that's 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.)

The point is powerful technology can do a lot of things. But not imagination.

Many years ago during my first stint at Ogilvy, the great Chris Wall asked me to script doctor some ads done by another team. The campaign featured two visitors from an alternate universe who came to earth to learn the secrets of IBM software.

I wrote a lot of funny words along the way. The last sentence in the paragraph below reads: "This makes the Crab Nebula look like small potatoes." 

Chris gave me a lot of respect after that. Because never in the 300,000 years of homo sapiens on earth had such words been put together in such a way.

That's what we're supposed to do:

Different.