• by Stephen Childress , Mirko Greenwood , Yesterday

If you’ve ever worked with an intern, you know the good ones work hard to show their value and teachability, while the average ones can be disorganized and unreliable. There is a growing feeling among AI users that working with these technologies is similar to working with an ambitious and occasionally overcaffeinated intern.

When given instructions, AI agents are responsive, curious, and eager to please. These intern bots are happy to crunch our data in seconds and reduce our research time from days to minutes.

We recently used AI technologies to produce a four-part video series in two weeks, nearly giving ourselves and our clients whiplash.

In our work as creative directors, AI’s impressive benefits as a rapid prototyping and time-saving tool are enormous, and it’s undeniably a lot of fun to experiment with what these technologies can do. However, as with mentoring an actual intern, it’s our responsibility to review the work for quality and smart thinking and provide feedback to ensure continual improvement.

So we’re starting to understand another deficiency with AI, one that’s not responsive to a teachable moment.

Where AI Can’t Compete

As we’ve settled into this symbiotic relationship, the shortcomings in technology, particularly in creative and strategic work, are increasingly clear. We are witnessing firsthand how human creativity and critical thinking are prerequisites for using AI successfully, given its deficits, and particularly as it relates to our oh-so-human senses.

Every one of us has had the experience of seeing branded content that somehow misses the mark, even if we can’t quite articulate why, like that visual sense of a glossy “AI aesthetic.” It’s seemingly the awareness that you’re looking at or experiencing something executed without the expert elements of successful branding.

That Essential Human Sense: Taste

Taste is more than finding the standard proportion or trending colors. It's about the discerning curation of the delivered work and its keeping with creative intent and strategy.

Like that enthusiastic intern, AI is great at dashing around and gathering anything that fits the visual pattern, but the results are meaningless without intellectual discernment and human curation. We find too many look-alike aspects when we try to use AI for visual creative tasks. The lack of a human touch is all too apparent. 

This human strength comes partly from professional experience. Taste, though, comes from a lived experience, from moving within cultures or across them, and watching how values, interests and attention shift over time -- not just online but in the streets, in communities, in life.

And that’s where AI misses the mark regularly. Creative and strategic work built on taste provides that intangible and irresistible mix of vision, culture, values, and expertise.

Of course these technologies are impressive and add significant value to our industry. But what AI lacks is the ability to generate truly innovative strategic directions and insights. It can’t yet routinely make those wonderful and strange correlations that drive genuinely innovative ideas or insights. These necessitate human insight, critical thinking, and taste -- that elusive and visceral sense unique to us as humans.