Last week, more than 150 creative technologists gathered in Los Angeles for the 7th annual 4A’s CreateTech conference to explore A.I. through the lens of creativity and creative work. Throughout the day, industry experts shared case studies illustrating how A.I. is used in products, marketing and media today, emphasizing the importance of creating rich, dynamic experiences that connect advances in technology with evolving human behavior & emotions. 4A’s President & CEO Marla Kaplowitz welcomed attendees in a stunning setting at Deutsch/Steelhead production space & noted that agencies are in an “arms race for A.I.” and “on the quest to be cutting edge.” Tim Leake, Chief Marketing Officer at RPA and a longtime member of the 4A's Creative Technology Committee, served as the CreateTech 2017 Emcee. In their opening fireside chat, Winston Binch, Chief Digital Officer at Deutsch North America & Catharine Hays, Founding Executive Director of the Wharton Future of Advertising Program, discussed the intersection between the future of creativity & A.I. and the essential role humans always will play. Binch noted, “A.I. without personality, without humanity & charisma, is just code & numbers.” With people at the core of innovation, Binch also stated that “A.I. is going to create new job markets,” giving an opportunity for those who study humanities & ethics to be a definitive part of a new creative renaissance.

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As Ari Popper, CEO & Founder of SciFutures put it, “it’s an amazing time to be doing the sort of stuff that we’re doing. Thinking about A.I. Thinking about emotion. Thinking about where the world is going.” As technology becomes more capable, it’s learning our emotions, it’s knowing us intimately and it’s becoming our own personal agent. The affective computing market, also called emotional A.I., is going to grow from “900 million two years ago [2015] to 54 billion by 2021,” noted Popper. A panel led by Abbey Klaassen of 360i, with leaders from NPR, Amazon's Alexa Skill Kit & Edison Research, explored the importance of human considerations in designing voice-directed connected device interactions. The team at Zoic Labs & Team One explored whether A.I. can create work that moves people emotionally, by letting a machine "direct" a music video. Though today we'd say the results were inconclusive, this early foray into surfacing the necessary elements that may allow A.I. to work with emotions one day was a fascinating & important exercise.

OVERVIEW

Adding emotional intelligence through strategy & affective computing to machine-driven experiences is going to be the key to success for engineers, computer scientists, designers & the brands who will adopt their inventions. A partnership between machines & humans is best accomplished through according human emotions a prominent role. This can also ensure quicker adoption by the public & safer interactions while providing valuable continual feedback to individuals & institutions.

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The development of A.I. has come a long way. A.I. technology is extending our intelligence with such capabilities as helping us uncover concepts in massive amounts of unstructured text to allowing machines to learn to recognize consequential patterns in images & video. With these new powers, it’s crucial to imagine transformational solutions & not just optimize current processes. Steve Mapp of Tool and Chris Pierantozzi of Saatchi & Saatchi demonstrated campaigns with human-tuned automated tagline generation for a larger number of audience profiles than would be normally possible. Jenna Niven, CD at R/GA New York showed work from R/GA Chicago for The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – Rose, the Hotel Chatbot, a personal concierge who could respond to multiple guest contexts. Jeff Miller showed an array of creative possibilities available on SnapChat & Marc Gowland of Deutsch led a panel of senior agency technology leaders on their journey to bringing A.I. technology solutions to a variety of client work. Tool’s Dustin Callif & a panel including, roboticist Sabri Sansoy, digital marketer Kelly Nyland & A.I. entrepreneur Todd Terrazas, provided insight into the challenges & opportunities for agencies when describing & selling in A.I. to clients and teams.

OVERVIEW

Agencies & marketers should “think of A.I. as a tool to push the limitations of creativity,” noted RGA’s Niven. “You could sit down as a copywriter & think about every single utterance that someone could say about food…Or we can enlist the help of artificial intelligence, more specifically natural language processing.” With the support of A.I., there is an infinite amount of inputs because the technology is continuously creating more by processing the knowledge it’s given & asked. With enhanced learning, new possibilities can emerge & creative work for clients can move beyond problem solving to imagining desired outcomes.

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Megan Harris, Managing Director at SYZYGY New York suggests that before clients begin to develop & deploy A.I., “they have to educate a lot of people in their departments. Not just marketing but kind of everyone. It’s a big undertaking. You have to get everyone on board, the right people on board in order to do it well.” While people may fear being replaced by A.I., there still needs to be a collaboration between humans and data. Businesses should set out a roadmap & see where A.I. can assist with specific areas of their business. From a sci-fi perspective, A.I. seems to promise a world of magical new services & experiences but it can also be be worrying from a humanistic perspective, with many fearing how it will evolve to take over many of our occupations or even change us as a species. This is why Popper said, “it is our responsibility as storytellers is to create preferred visions of the future that are a net positive for everyone. Stories will help us rehearse for the future & play with ideas, allowing us to humanize technology and think about the implication of what we’re building.”   It’s significant that these issues surfaced at a gathering of creative technologists working in an industry dedicated to creativity. Almost every talk and panel at CreateTech touched on the need to put ethical oversight on the agenda for the development of A.I. Clearly, creativity and creative people will be essential contributors to a positive, shared future.

OVERVIEWThe hottest topic of the day was ethics & our responsibilities around A.I. What are the strategic, design & moral considerations we should investigate now. Deutsch's Binch noted that the “ethics component is going to be key,” as Natalie Prout, Strategy Director at Phenomenon asked, “as a business & a brand, what are your ethics? What do you stand for? What’s your mission? What are you trying to achieve? And then how are you using technology to get there?” It’s clear the creative community is thinking about A.I. & its impact on consumer behavior & business. Google’s Mathew Ray demonstrated tools creative technologists have made to bring advanced tech into the public domain; Karin Giefer of frog laid out many future changes & consequences of tech to empower or replace humans & how to evaluate possible societal impact. Levi Brooks of Use All Five led a panel discussion on the responsibilities we have today in managing A.I. & how clients are responding. David Fisher of ustwo, SYZYGY’s Megan Harris and Prout gave us a multi-dimensional look at advanced work in many industries.

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