The robots took to the stage last week at the Cannes Lions festival. And I’m not talking about the flashing, metallic kind, but the PR-peddling, Kool-Aid swilling, suited kind. The C-suite were out in force, trotting out carefully penned corporate protestations about the size of their robotic appendages. A festival dedicated to creativity was colonized by technology and the resulting messaging felt like it was written by accountants, lawyers or just ChatGPT for all its fawning and pandering to AI. As an avid developer of AI tools, I am clearly not a hater, but when will the creative industry put the tools back in their place? AI must be in service of creativity, not the other way around.
“The stages were half empty, but activations on the beach were buzzing" was a common refrain from attendees reporting back. This under-attendance reflected a collective yawn for the corporate posturing that doesn’t support the festival’s mission of creativity. The more varied and creative events happening outside on beaches, boats and backyards were met with far greater relish. It was like Cannes had been ‘severed,’ with ‘innies’ serving soulless, scripted and synchronized, while the ‘outies’ got to play, debate and roam free. For those who’ve been under a rock for a year, I’m stealing terms from Apple’s hit TV show Severance, where a dystopian corporation implants a chip into employees’ brains in order to ‘sever’ their work selves (‘innies’) from their home selves (‘outies’). But I believe Cannes’ Severance moment is just the tip of the iceberg. The disconnect between the bean-counting boardroom and the humans that define these once-dynamic and creative organizations is a rot that extends far beyond La Croisette.
While a warning of sorts, I also come bearing solutions for salvation. As I believe this moment is where we are able to reintegrate our 'innies' with our 'outies'. And AI will be an assistant in this.
It starts with a renewed interest in humanity. As a student of humans and one that’s spent a career thinking about thinking itself, I am uplifted to see the world’s gaze swinging inwards. With the imminent invasion by non-human entities, millions of people-watching tourists are joining us anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers on our people-peeping safari. And they’ve been moved to ask why we organic humans matter and how we might function alongside these rather snazzy fake ones.
The question of what makes us human has been implicit in art and literature since Shakespeare helped us break free from our God-sessive ‘before times.’ But with the rise of AI, it's also entering explicit forums like public debates, podcasts, and news programs. As panic around our usefulness reaches fever pitch, we are scrambling to articulate our value before the great robotic HR manager hands us the pink slip: “Thanks, but you’re surplus to our requirements.”
This question remained in the realm of art because it suited other spaces to ignore our humanity. For much of our existence, we marched in lock step with machines to guarantee our safety and progress. In history, we learned about the ‘new modern armies’ of Cromwell or Louis XIV where drill, discipline and centralized command removed agency from individuals for the good of the system. Karl Marx demonstrated how capitalism adopted similarly alienating strategies to fix humans into a larger organism that could power the industrial revolution. Obedient, synchronized humans in chattels were the machinery of most of history and it paid to keep them machine-like most of the time.
When you have an interconnected inorganic machine at your disposal, you no longer need to use humans in the same way. One of the great upheavals of our current age may not be the loss of power to the robot overlords, but how to reintegrate our ‘outies’ once our jobs don’t need us to be unthinking and unfeeling drones.
The solution starts to make itself known when you query the edges of AI’s capabilities and see how consistently it fumbles. For instance, why can’t ChatGPT write a single compellingly, creative tag line? In 100 there’s barely 1. And I’ve tried this, along with joke-telling, using the early and later versions. Yet something thwarts it from capturing true beauty or wit. While it’s been impressive in producing sheer quantities of execution at mindboggling speed, for spark-making magic, the human creator still remains undefeated.
One theory is that tangible human experience is essential for great art. And this can’t possibly be an ingredient of content made by AI. A good joke or a stomach-clenching expression of human emotion has shared history. And for that history to touch us, it must contain pain, struggle, failure or frailty. Real art grabs us from the inside, while AI is organizing the deck chairs based on probabilities that are alienated from any sort of human struggle.
Humanity’s desire for connection is fed by a desire to see and feel each other’s vulnerable inner worlds. Our best friends know and love us because of our vulnerabilities. When we hide this vulnerability, we lock away our ‘outies’ and present a toned-down version that does nothing to forge a connection with others. This is why AI’s ‘predictions’ rarely speak to us emotionally. Because AI’s so-called creativity doesn’t have an inner world to draw from.
So our job is one of reintegration. This may be a little painful at first, as it will feel counterintuitive. Not only are we living in economically turbulent times, but we’ve been conditioned to separate ourselves - euphemistically referring to our ‘innies’ as ‘being professional,’ which is a virtue of our times. We’re now being called to experience play, joy and emotion in spaces designed to expunge it for generations. That part will be tough, but there are pockets of society that never fully severed their instincts for creativity and these can be harnessed. I’ve recently collided with a few of them and they’ve inspired me. The first was a professional clown who turned out to be one of the most empathetic and tuned-in humans I’ve met for a while. The second was the improvisational comedy space. When you study improv, you realize that its skill demands an almost spiritual connection to the others in the room so that you may collectively create in real time. These are just two skill sets that we’re drawing from as we put AI back into its rightful place: as an assistant to coach us in our creative endeavors. In our case, AI prompts humans to play, to intuit, and to get into a flow state that is more susceptible to building creativity that moves humans.
I believe we are already moving into the reintegration phase. Not only do we have a renewed interest in defining humanity, but AI provides an accomplice for organizing and reintegrating humanity back into ourselves. The bombshell of OpenAI forced upon us a welcome period of introspection. We’ve debated the meaning of consciousness and the merits of humans, now we have easily available tools for physical experimentation that we can point at the solution of reanimating our instincts. We’ve moved this debate out of the intellectual into the practical, allowing us to improve our dissociative selves that have contributed to a fragmenting of society.
What we witnessed at Cannes this year was a symptom of many years of this dissociation. We separated ‘Fun Barbie’ from ‘Business Barbie.’ But in the creative industry, we will only secure business when we unleash the crazy, the emotional, the joyful and the unhinged humans that reside within us.
