I’ve written previously about the way AI has become increasingly capable in creative tasks, whether it’s playing jazz or cracking jokes.  There have even been a couple of projects utilizing AI to help us develop smarter and more engaging video content.

A Japanese company are promising to take this to a new level with the development of a robot that will provide creative advice for commercials and other marketing projects.

Artificial creativity

The AI has been developed and deployed by the marketing agency McCann Japan, and will attempt to provide input on the various projects taken on by the agency.  It will mine a large database of previous creative projects to suggest possibly new creative directions for an advert.

It’s a very similar approach to that taken by the robot jazz player mentioned above, which also mined a huge back catalog of past jazz performances to suggest creative new avenues the ‘player’ could go down.

Suffice to say, both projects have the capacity to mine a huge database of past creative works, and in that sense have infinitely more capacity than human beings.  The idea is, therefore, that the robot can offer creative solutions to the problems clients face.

Perhaps more interestingly, the robot appears to have become well accepted by the humans on the McCann team, and has even been given the job title of ‘creative director’.  Heck, it even attends ceremonies to welcome new employees to the firm.

“Artificial intelligence is already being used to create a wide variety of entertainment, including music, movies, and TV drama, so we’re very enthusiastic about the potential of AI-CD ? for the future of ad creation. The whole company is 100 percent on board to support the development of our AI employee,” the company say.

It’s a sign of growing AI involvement in the way our companies manage.  I’ve written recently about a new AI tool developed to help companies with their planning.  The tool analyzes existing plans and if they carry too much risk, it then creates contingencies, before then scanning the environment to monitor for the kind of circumstances under which such a plan should be enacted.

It’s further evidence of the use of AI and big data to aid decision making in our organizations.  It’s a trend that seems to be heading in only one direction.