Advertising age anxiety and bylines by AI
Top 5 links and other grains of thought
Hi! I’m Ronit Novak and welcome to the new weekly newsletter from THE GRAIN—featuring five newsworthy items about the future of creativity, the latest from my ongoing interview series, and more grains of thought about the pleasure and peril of AI. Subscribe to THE GRAIN here on Substack along with wherever else you get your podcasts, and follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok.
1. Dispatch from Cannes Lions
Not everyone agrees that the end is near. And that includes Alex Schultz, the CMO of Meta. “We believe AI will enable agencies and advertisers to focus precious time and resources on the creativity that matters. And we’re seeing agencies using AI in a way that is aligned with this vision already,” Schultz wrote on LinkedIn last month. “Advertisers, including our marketing teams at Meta, also rely on their agencies to make decisions across channels and across platforms. While we think there will ultimately be more automation in marketing, the role that agencies play is going to become ever more important through their ability to plan, execute and measure across platforms.”
Madison Avenue braces for the AI apocalypse [Hollywood Reporter]
2. An editor who prompts copy
“In our newspaper, there is no fear about AI, because our newspaper is very particular and written in a special way. We know, in a snobby way, that our skills are unique, so we are not scared. But I’m sure that a lot of newspapers could be scared, because normal articles written about the things that happened the day before, with the agency news—that kind of article, and also that kind of journalism, might be the past.”
The newspaper that hired ChatGPT [The Atlantic]
3. NYT Magazine’s new AI issue
“I think that yes, people will lose opportunities and jobs because of this technology, but I wonder if it’s going to catalyze some counterreaction. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the slow-food movement and the farm-to-table movement, both of which came up in reaction to fast food. Fast food had a lot going for it—it was cheap, it was plentiful, you could get it in a hurry. But it also opened up a market for a healthier, more artisanal way of doing things. And I wonder if something similar will happen in creative industries—a kind of creative renaissance for things that feel real and human and aren’t just outputs from some AI company’s slop machine.”
Casey Newton and Kevin Roose introduce the special edition [NYT Magazine]
4. Google alliance with Aronofsky
The short was inspired by Eliza McNitt’s “own life-threatening birth, when doctors discovered a hole in her heart” and aims to “shed light on pregnancy challenges rarely seen in storytelling, breaking through technological barriers that once made these narratives impossible to visualize.” The filmmaker “transform[ed] personal family archives into a visually stunning experience, including images of her likeness in the womb.”
5. Panic grows at the toy store
"Endowing toys with human-seeming voices that are able to engage in human-like conversations risks inflicting real damage on children," said Public Citizen co-President Robert Weissman. "It may undermine social development, interfere with children’s ability to form peer relationships, pull children away from playtime with peers, and possibly inflict long-term harm."
Now viral with 100K+ views
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For more on the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity, subscribe to THE GRAIN wherever you get your podcasts, and follow me for more on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. Questions or comments? ronit@thegrain.ai.