Creative people, myself included, are offended easily and often. Whether it’s a design, a strategy, a video concept or a tagline, if I present it and you don’t like it, my first thought is, “You must be an idiot.” I can’t be wrong about how amazing my creative idea is, so the client or prospect must be too dim to get it. Or I might suspect they have a friend or relative to whom they want to give my project. Paranoid? Me?

So it’s safe to say, people who consider themselves creative are not happy about the gleeful avalanche of companies promoting Artificial Intelligence as a creative cure for creating every type of marketing from social media to tv spots.

At its base, the idea of losing your job to automation scares everyone. Auto workers being replaced by robots, cashiers replaced by self-checkout systems and so on. But creatives are more deeply wounded at the thought of another entity, human or digital that can replace their rapid fire neurons coming up with solutions for clients.

But is AI capable of true creativity? I went on a three-week research binge to get some unbiased answers.

Global marketing publication The Drum allowed me to use its proprietary AI software to ask that question. Below is and a summary of the AI’s answer straight from its mouth (or port or wherever the data comes out).

Is AI capable of true creativity?

AI is seen as a tool that amplifies human creativity, allowing individuals to focus on high-value tasks and elevate their ideas.

AI is democratizing creativity, making high-level creative tools available to more people than ever before.

AI is not a replacement for human creativity, but rather a means to enhance it .

Creativity has always been enabled by technology, and AI is just another tool to inspire creativity, re-apply skills, and reinvent oneself in new spaces .

AI strives to give you an answer, but art is never about finding a conclusive answer, and the creative process is an internal or collaborative back-and-forth .

In conclusion, while AI can enhance and democratize creativity, the essence of creativity, which involves complex processes such as intuition, emotion, and empathy, remains exclusive to human ingenuity.

Therefore, while AI can assist in the creative process, it is not capable of true creativity in the way humans are.

AI is good at mimicking, but struggles with true creativity and is unable to create truly original or emotionally nuanced art. Simply put, AI is not capable of original thought — yet.

For the most part, I agree with the answers of THE DRUM’s AI, but the comment that “AI is making high-level creative tools available to more people” needs to be qualified.  When typewriters became word processors and then eventually personal computers, we heard similar comments. But as my mentor reminded me, “A better typewriter doesn’t make you a better writer.”

After I read the answers from The Drum’s AI, I asked another AI app, “AI will never catch up to human creativity, will it?”  It replied, “You must be an idiot.” #

— George Farris, CEO Farris Marketing and StrategiX Social