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# Where’s AI taking us? (Part 1)
- URL: https://capitolcommunicator.com/wheres-ai-taking-us-part-1/
- Published: 2024-11-17T02:34:59.000Z
- Updated: 2024-11-21T18:35:18.000Z
- Author: Sean Carton
- Tags: Advertising, Insights, Technology, #wp-upper-left-sponsored, #Import 2026-10-08 18:54

**I was having coffee with an industry friend the other day** when she asked me the question that’s been on the minds of a lot of us in the marketing/advertising business lately: “What do you think that AI is going to do to our industry?”

I was tempted to give the industry-standard, feel good answer. “Oh, well, you know, it’ll be a little weird for a while but eventually everything will settle out and AI will be just another tool.” It’s an answer that covers all the bases without being too specific and doesn’t end on a down note. A bit of a dodge, for sure, but not an answer that’ll leave anyone feeling like the world is crashing down around them.

I wanted to give that answer, but I didn’t. As someone who’s been involved in content creation (aka writing) for nearly three decades, it might have been the answer that would have made us both — she was a copywriter — feel better, but it would have been a lie.

At the same time, I wasn’t OK with the typical gloom-and-doom answer that many of us have heard. I don’t believe that artificial intelligence is going to replace people, especially creative people. I’d never say I was an AI expert, but I’ve experimented with it enough to know that while most generative AI is good at producing stuff that’s close to or as good as anything most humans can produce, it can’t produce it on its own. AI has no “imagination.” AI has no “initiative” (luckily!). AI isn’t “creative” in the sense that it can come up with original and/or innovative ideas or approaches. For generative AI to…well…generate anything, it has to be directed or prompted by a human.

Need Intelligent AI? Get a Human!

But not all prompts are created equal. The less detail a human user provides the AI, the more leeway the AI has to generate what it’s being asked to generate. While it can be fun to give an AI its virtual head by providing vague prompts because the outputs are unpredictable, the problem is that what the AI outputs is unpredictable. Sometimes what you get is pretty cool, sometimes it’s a disaster, and most of the time what you get is mediocre at best and completely unrelated to what you were hoping for at worst.

For example, if you ask Adobe Firefly (Adobe’s AI image generator) to create a “sky,” here’s one set of images you might get:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/16/5016dd29-aeff-4565-a68b-cdbb78bc58e6/content/images/2026/10/Carton-2.png)

Yeah, they’re pretty and they might work if you want to have some sort of generic sky background image, but they’re all from different angles and one appears to be over land while the other two seem to be taken from an airplane.

On the other hand, if you ask Firefly to generate “a stormy sky over the ocean at sunset as seen from the deck of an18th century sailing ship” here’s what you might get:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/50/16/5016dd29-aeff-4565-a68b-cdbb78bc58e6/content/images/2026/10/Carton-1.png)

A lot more similar, huh? And if you were creating an ad for, say, a brand of rum created in the 18th century, a lot more useful than the generic “sky” images (with some tweaking, probably).

The point is that the more specific, useful information a generative AI is given, the better and more useful the result. There’s a huge gulf between the first set of images and the second, and that gulf was bridged by a person (me, in this case) providing specifics which directed the creative output by the AI.

While I used images here in order to make the point visually, the same principles hold true whether you’re generating text using a tool like ChatGPT or generating music using an AI tool like Suno.com. Without human input and direction AI-generated content isn’t very useful for specific applications.

So we’re all saved, right?

Well, maybe…but not everyone.

**Find out who’s in and who’s out in part 2, which will be posted shortly.**