This year, OpenAI claimed one of its models had cracked a piece of a 90-year-old maths problem in under four days – a feat that had eluded human mathematicians for decades. It’s a useful reminder of what AI can do at the frontier. But that is not the AI most of advertising is meeting.
The AI reshaping our industry does something far more ordinary: it has made competent creative work remarkably easy to produce. For agencies under pressure to do more with less, that looks like a gift. It may not be. AI is merely raising the floor of creative work, not the ceiling.
What happens when the industry reaches AI slop at enterprise scale? We’ll have plenty of creative outputs but perhaps less that is worth remembering. That is where an incoming flood of “good enough” creative risks becoming a growth problem.
AI is raising the floor of creative work at speed, but ultimately human judgment will determine how high the ceiling goes. We’re now spending a lot of time asking how quickly AI can produce something. But what does it give us back?
