Mira Moratti and David Droja talk about what the creative world should — and shouldn’t — worry about when it comes to artificial intelligence

When the global advertising and marketing industry gathers in the south of France this week at the Cannes Lions Festival, the most popular topic of conversation will undoubtedly be artificial intelligence.

Over the past couple of years, brands and marketers have embraced AI, both creatively and operationally. Some designs already exist. A new report from United Talent Agency, which surveyed more than 500 creative professionals in advertising and entertainment, found that 75% say they create higher-quality work using AI. But technology comes at a cost: a 2023 Forrester study And he expected Up to a third of US ad agency jobs will be lost to AI by 2030.

At Cannes, OpenAI’s CTO, Mira Moratti, will join advertising legend and Accenture Song CEO, David Droja, on stage to discuss this two-sided coin and how it will impact the overlapping industries of advertising, marketing, and media.

In the session titled “When AI Challenges and Empowers Human Creativity,” the two executives aim to show how AI is not a competitor to human creativity, but a collaborator. Before their discussion, I spoke with Moratti and Droga about why they wanted to have this conversation, what creators are getting (and getting) wrong about the impact of AI, and how advertising fits into the future of AI products.

This interview has been condensed and edited for space.

People often frame AI as binary when it comes to creativity, whether good or bad. From that perspective, it’s interesting that you’re on stage together discussing such a hot-button issue. Why did you want to have this conversation together?

David Droga: I think it’s important to hit it head-on. It’s funny, as someone who is creative all the way, pretending to be a CEO, people want my perspective on this. I feel like people like to pit us – technology and creativity – against each other, and this is quite the opposite.

I know anxiety or nervousness in the creative industries. I want them to understand our views, and how much we believe in the power of what Mira and her crew are building, researching and developing. It’s great for creative people who are open to the way things are. Success is not nostalgia.

Every time there has been a technical revolution in creativity, there has always been an argument that this will eat up everything, the storytelling, the narratives, the creative jobs, but in reality, things are evolving. There were always new opportunities and I saw creativity go to new places and allow us to do things we couldn’t do before. . . . [but] We won’t pretend that there will be jobs that won’t disappear.

What do creative audiences get right and wrong about the imminent impact of AI on their jobs? 

Droga: I think it’s pretty much everyone’s judgment at the first stage [thinking about] Roles that AI will make redundant. The role of copywriter, the role of art director, illustrator. They are quite functional or literal reactions at this point. . . . In the early days, I think a lot of brands and customers see efficiencies, and I understand that. There are a lot of efficiencies to be made. I’ve said this before, but it’s not all creativity. . . Worth preserving.

Let’s do a better job of it and raise the bar. There is still a necessity for originality, there is still a necessity for innovation – those things that never go out of fashion, along with taste and nuances of understanding and empathy. There are all these wonderful aspects of creativity that can’t be outsourced. But if you have tools that allow you to think faster, see things differently, get things out, create things and shape things, I think that’s great. The natural resource of human imagination and taste is still there. I think a lot of people are still very protective of what it is now.

I just want the people in the room to understand that. educate yourself; Don’t wait downstream to understand what’s happening. Get involved and understand what you can do; You can help create some precedents. That’s why I want the industry to be more optimistic.

Mira Moratti: And I agree with what David said in terms of the framework for collaboration between AI and humans and kind of seeing them as collaborative tools. The question of humans amplifying some kind of innate ability is a really old one. We have always pushed the limits of our knowledge, and this is what has pushed the entire civilization forward. Now we’re starting to catch a glimpse of what it means to expand your thinking and creativity. . . We’re learning how that will work.

This is an iterative process. Our approach to this is to basically work with stakeholders very early on, to find out: Where is technology helping them? Where do you move the needle? How do you turn technology into a product that is useful, useful, and compatible with what they are trying to do?

This is the process we followed with DALL-E. When we built DALL-E it was just technology. Iterations were only possible by partnering very closely with people from different fields — creatives, artists, storytellers — understanding their feedback, and then incorporating it into how we shape the technology. I don’t think we alone in AI labs can figure out in a vacuum how to best shape technology and deploy it in a way that benefits people the most.

Tell me how you both think about the ethical considerations and safety measures that guide AI development — and how that applies to commercial creative work in particular. 

Moratti: Maybe not specific to Sora because that’s being discovered, so we don’t have all the answers there. But for technology in general, we focus on issues of bias, misuse, hallucinations, and enabling people to understand whether content is generated by AI or not.

For DALL-E 3, we implemented metadata that tracks online content, and you can track the AI [that’s] I was born. This is obviously very important, especially in this year – a year of huge global elections. Deepfakes are clearly unacceptable, so we’re developing technologies to help people understand when content is generated by artificial intelligence.

We’re also working on classifiers that we’re currently red teaming for DALL-E images, so you can detect when an image is valuable. We also researched and worked on watermarking the text, so that we can have techniques to deal with misinformation, understand the content, source, etc.

But again, these types of issues are social and technological. You need both to deal with issues of abuse, misinformation, and disinformation in a robust way. Therefore, we approach it from both sides.

Droga: From Accenture’s perspective, I mean, it’s known that we’re going to spend $3 billion over the next two years on our AI. And I think that while we talk a lot about studios and training and hiring and how to deploy that, the biggest amount of money we actually spend is on responsible AI; Putting guardrails in place to ensure we’re starting from the right place, rather than down the right path and reverse engineering. Trying to make sure they understand not only the impact of technology, but what gets credit and how to get credit for it. Not only are we here to educate our clients and provide opportunities, we are also here to point out the risks.

Mira, what do you think about the role that advertising will play in AI platforms, and more specifically in OpenAI products?

Moratti:We don’t have any plans to do this at the moment. My personal opinion is that we should prioritize the product being useful and consistent with the user’s intent and behavior, whether explicit or implicit. Fundamentally, aligning technology with industry (and) societal intentions is key.

Right now, (advertising) is not our business model. We do not have advertising in our products. Our subscriptions are free to use. We do not create user profiles. We don’t do recommendations. It’s not our business model. So, yes, there is currently no plan to integrate ads into the product.

David, as an ad guy, do you look at OpenAI tools and think about the advertising potential there?

Droga: I’m a bit of a contradiction that way. Just because something gets a lot of traffic and attention doesn’t mean there should be advertising. That’s why most people hate advertising, because we crowd everything as a tax on everywhere you want to be.

I think the whole focus on making sure it’s democratic, useful and safe, is the key. With monetization, she will find her own way.