Lanna Hill: Over-reliance on AI comes at a cost to human creativity

As corporate and economic sentiment dive, Australian businesses have also seen considerable shifts in traditional marketing and advertising performance. In 2024, most of us understand the power for businesses of more obvious tactics like a consistent social media presence or search engine optimisation.

However, these more narrow definitions of the value of marketing within an organisation will only serve to hold businesses back from responding with agility and innovation to the many major social, cultural, economic, and technological challenges facing us all in the years ahead.

One of the many flow-on effects of reduced business confidence and the resulting redundancies and job uncertainty is a tendency for businesses to do things more safely.

People keep their heads down and are less likely to innovate, push boundaries and embrace creativity. Businesses also need to cut costs, and often, marketing teams can bear the brunt of this.

However, great marketers aren’t (or shouldn’t be) just focused on data or performance marketing metrics — they should also be focused on how brands, products and services go to market, how to drive differentiation and growth, and how to better engage not only with their external audiences and clients, but with their internal teams.

In tandem with these other factors is the ever-increasing rise of AI use in business, and within marketing.

In September, the Federal Government released its proposal on mandatory AI guardrails, focusing on several areas, including testing, transparency and accountability for developers and users of AI, such as ChatGPT.

As we increasingly embrace AI, social media platforms such as LinkedIn and TikTok are not only detecting content created with AI, but are automatically labelling it on their platforms.

I, for one, applaud this move. While I appreciate the benefits of AI in terms of efficiency, analysis, and content creation, transparency is critical. We need to know when the words we’re reading or the images or videos we’re viewing have not been created by a human, for a myriad of reasons.

Call me old-fashioned, but maybe we all need to consider the value of what we’re outsourcing to a computer. And maybe we need to remember the hidden cost of outsourcing these things.

We’re not learning how to do “the thing” — be it a client pitch, a heartfelt letter or a snappy headline — if we’re asking ChatGPT to do it. Creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills won’t be utilised the same way if we’re outsourcing to an algorithm.

If it all sounds a bit grim, it’s probably because, in my opinion, it is.

Now isn’t the time to cut costs by slicing our marketing teams and thinking that AI can do it all.

It also isn’t the time for marketers to focus on metrics that aren’t going to give businesses all the answers. We can’t rely on the same old formulas, and we shouldn’t.

We need the things that make us human — creativity, emotional intelligence, intuition and idea generation, to name a few — more than ever.

Lanna Hill is a strategist, speaker and founder of Leverage Media