A client friend told me the other day about a conference she had recently attended, where she met several artists who were using AI to create innovative artwork they wouldn’t previously have been able to bring to life. 

We had an excited conversation about these examples of AI deployed to execute human vision and amplify beauty. This is where it’s easy to embrace the break-neck speed of the disruptions we’re seeing AI bring to our world. The energy is good.

Dominant narratives we see in our day jobs are more grounded in the mundane. 

AI can expedite processes. It can take on the grunt-work. Or save budget. It’s colourless, practical benefit stuff. There’s still a leap to the true intuited benefit – that in excising the dull tasks, there’s space freed up for the real value-adding activities, or the things that we just want to spend our time doing. But will this happen, or will we race to do more, faster – and just a bit worse?

Explicitly and implicitly too, dominant AI narratives are often about taking away tasks from the human, so less human labour is involved. It’s about substitution, basically. Again, the so-what is often missing, both in its benefit outcomes and in its risks.

We’ve not managed as a sector, I feel, to coalesce around a way of talking and thinking about AI that embraces the opportunities it can bring and at the same truly fronts up to the serious trade-offs that will come.

You may say that this is just the way things are going – it’s impossible to resist. The people who don’t embrace change will be left behind.

Frankly, I’d rather be a cautious voice than someone who unthinkingly engineers the obsolescence of my own job. Because I do actually rather like my job.

There’s not much I see that’s about encouraging us to celebrate what we really love about this industry, and to hold it tight, when AI can risk chipping away at it more and more.

I’m not a process person, so I’m simply never going to get excited about marginal gains in managing a workflow. And I might appreciate the cost savings in getting AI transcripts, but I’m just not going to embrace AI doing the analysis for me. I don’t trust its interpretation, it doesn’t structure the story in a way I find compelling, and it doesn’t join the dots in interesting ways to surface the real ‘ah-has’.  Nor can it read into what’s not said.

But also, I really love moderation, analysis and comparing data models.  Plus being given a brief that can be addressed in different ways.  I love wallowing in the content, having conversations. I even love getting thoroughly stuck in it all, because when I become unstuck the outcome feels even better.

I don’t want AI to take this away from me.  It’s too fun and enriching.  I can prepare myself for another career, but what will there be?  

At the higher-order level – beyond this sector – there’s again a complete lack of ‘so-what’ thinking, I feel, when it comes to the employment landscape. Until now, there’s been plenty of tropes trotted out around AI not stealing our jobs, but someone using AI well might do. Or the idea that yes, jobs might go, but new ones will be created. 

Ok great – which jobs, and where? Who’s taking responsibility for these jobs existing and people being supported to retrain? And where is the social safety net where it doesn’t work out? Because right now, excellent people are losing their jobs, sometimes with little forewarning. It’s happening now and there’s no reason to expect a slow-down in this trend.

This sector attracts myriad forms of brilliant talent. In the UK, we don’t have the culture of expecting people to study the thing they end up doing work-wise. This helps our sector, which is varied in itself, become particularly eclectic in the talent it attracts.

We’ve got people from history, languages, psychology, science and philosophy backgrounds, and many more. Every single person on this planet has a different brain, and in this sector there’s a concentrated selection of smart, empathetic and creative people. The blue-sky thinkers, the pattern-spotters, the data nerds, the curious investigators, the calm project leaders, the inspiring visualisers. Put two of us in a room together with a set of data or focus groups to listen to, or a category to analyse semiotically, and you’re going to get a healthy collision and fusion of interpretations.

Give me this any day over what anyone can use AI to spit out. And please give me hope we can find a future where we as a sector can retain as much as possible of this remarkable talent doing what it does best. 

Louise McLaren is managing director (London) at Lovebrands