Collaborative power of humans and AI will unleash creative potential, says Nick Law

The convergence of humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) opens up opportunities for collaborative ideation and unleashes creative potential, Nick Law, Creative Chairperson, Accenture Song, said at Cannes Lions 2023.

During the session 'Song Simplifies Talent: Technology is Creative' on day 1 of Cannes Lions 2023, Lan Guan, Senior Managing Director - Technology, Global Lead of Data and AI - Cloud First, Accenture Song and Law emphasised that today, the emergence of new technology is so accelerated that the only way to understand and leverage its potential is with a dexterous partnership between technologists and creatives. This is particularly true of the GenAI revolution that is reshaping how and what machines and humans can make.

Explaining the reason why technology is creative, Law said, “It's important to recognise that not only is technology creative, but you can't be creative without technology. It should be obvious but we sort of lose track of this because we tend to think of technology as a thing that we didn't learn. It's a new thing. We've all learned technology to become creative.”

“Since the beginning of creativity, we have had technology…The mediums have gotten very technical, which means that the beginning of these technologies have been shaped largely by technical people. In the beginning of photography, to be a photographer, you had to be a chemist. So you weren't thought of as an artist, because you had to figure out how to fix an image onto a glass plate, which is a technical feat. It took a while before creative people came in and started to create a grammar. A great example of a grammar that has been developed on top of a technology is film,” he added. 

Speaking about generative AI, Guan said that for the last couple of months, ChatGPT type of generative AI has woken up the world to a new reality. Its ability to mimic human dialogue and decision-making is something that we have not seen before. 

“As a technologist who has been in this industry for more than 20 years, I wanted to share a compelling reason why I believe this is a paradigm shift. This is the first time AI has started making sense to the general public. In the past, AI tended to be done by deep specialists, deep experts, wearing white coats, thick glasses in the laboratory environment,” Guan said. 

“The artist and creative coder, Michelle Huan, just a couple of months ago decided to train OpenAI's large language model, GPT 3.5, by using her own diary from her childhood. In the diary, there were many memories from her childhood. Just by spending a couple of hours, Michelle was able to train a young Michelle Chatbot so that she can engage in real-time conversation with the inner child of herself. What we are noticing is also global leaders in all industries have started embracing generative AI. Over the last couple of months within Accenture, my team has had 600 conversations with C-suite clients across all industries about the topic of generative AI. I can tell you this is not the situation that any industry wants to leave behind,” she added. 

The machine learning powering Chat GPT type of application is built fundamentally differently, which requires a very different partnership between technologists and creative talents. In the past, data scientists worked in silos spending a lot of time building purpose-built models and rarely talked to the creative team, Guan stated. 

Furthermore, she went on to say that when this massively powerful model was built, it enabled common tasks to be adapted for all kinds of needs, like document generation, sentiment analysis, image generation, creating Q&A type of chatbot. 

“So, this kind of partnership is very profound because this means technologists like myself and 80,000 people that I'm leading, we can focus on things that we are really good at, making this giant model better and better. At the same time, creative talents like all of you can focus on adaptation, bringing your functional knowledge, your knowledge about your craft to create what we call lightweight applications. So, with this kind of partnership, I am very hopeful that we can build many beautiful and powerful things together,” Guan added.

Over the last 20 years, people at Accenture have worked on over 2,000 AI projects. They are all real and practical projects that have been taken up with cross-industry clients. Over the last couple of months, about 100 Gen AI-specific projects were also taken up, she said. 

Law, while speaking specifically about how he sees generative AI through the eyes of the creative industry, said, “The first thing that I have is the taxonomy of thinking how we can apply generative AI in particular to creativity. The first is ‘automate’, which is basically machines without humans which are completely automated. Then there's going to be work where the AI ‘assists’, it's not going to automate but assist. There are all sorts of applications for customer service where there will be some sort of assistant helping a customer service person answer questions. And then there is going to be a stage which will be the second phase of creativity, where you can ‘innovate’. So, when do we start using this technology in a way where humans are making the technology and the output better? That is something I am going to focus on, even though the other two are definitely creative, because this is where human agency becomes even more important.”

Looking at the distribution of work across those things, a lot of it is going to be automated, much of it is going to be assisted, and maybe not so much is going to be innovated but there is going to be a growing amount over time, Law stated.

“If you look at the work from our industry right now, it's probably like a bit of a misshapen bell curve, where you have got a lot of awful work where people are completely artless, I don't know what they are doing. We have all seen that. And then most of it is average, by definition. The middle is going to be full of average and then there's amazing stuff,” Law said.

He added, “It's going to be harder to do really bad work. It's going to be just as hard to do really good work and there's going to be a lot of average work. Every new technology gives us a new creative process. There isn't a single way of being creative but the one thing that we are trying to do is get an idea out of our head and into the world. So, when I started in the late 80s and early 90s, the creative process was incredibly laborious. It was very manual and it would take me like two weeks using these manual tools to get an idea out of my head. Maybe two ideas in two weeks, something like that. Then Photoshop One came and I used it. It has no layers and undo but this thing changed my life. All of a sudden I could do three ideas in a week and the resolution of my ideas was a lot higher. So, think about that in terms of what it takes to get an idea out of your head and into the world now. It's prompt.” 

Now the idea is instantaneous. One has this moment where he/she has an idea and he/she can then in two minutes do 200 executions at a high resolution. So, the discipline will become more around curation, editing and refinement. So, the whole process is pushed towards the back and people need to think about that because hopefully, just like software, it's going to unleash a lot of creative potential, Law stated. 

“Now we have got humans and AI working together in a conversation. So, the opportunity right now is to get more people involved and not having a single person coming up with extraordinary ideas. It's more like having a team working together,” he added. 

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