Human Creativity vs. AI: Why Do We Remember Ads from 20 Years Ago but Not Yesterday’s?
- Arjan Shahani
- Apr 14
- 5 min read
The more AI-generated content there is, the higher the value of human creativity.
If I sound like a broken record, it’s because I keep seeing people who, without understanding the deeper context, have given in to temptation. They’ve delegated purely human creativity processes to tools that are being misused, and the results are laughable.
Yes, AI can generate text, images, videos, and campaigns.
It’s also very useful for helping you plan a vacation—even when it recommends hotels that don’t exist or gives bad advice on immigration requirements (we’ve all seen the videos of people whose trips were ruined because they trusted ChatGPT when it told them they didn't need a visa).
It’s indisputable that tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, and Meta AI have democratized and amplified anyone's ability to generate more content than ever. But paradoxically, this reality of exponential volume is exactly what makes human creativity an incredibly valuable asset. I’ll prove it to you:
Table of Contents:
AI produces content through imitation; Humans produce ideas that inspire.
Big Data serves many purposes... so far, inspiring great creatives isn’t one of them.
The exponential volume of generic "slop" makes human ideas worth much more.
Doing what has worked before vs. risking it all to amaze the world.
The Future of Marketing: Human Creativity vs. AI as a tool, not a replacement.
AI produces content through imitative and predictive processes. Creativity produces ideas and inspires others to ideate.
I get it, there are moments when it seems like ChatGPT just handed you a brilliant idea, fresh copy, or a great graphic. But it’s vital to understand what is actually happening behind the scenes.
The reality is that the copy feels "novel" to you simply because you personally haven't been exposed to it yet… but the AI we have access to today does not create ideas.
LLM models simply regurgitate and combine information based on predictive exercises and grammatical pattern recognition. To put it bluntly, AI doesn’t know if what it’s saying makes sense or not… it has no real capacity to value it, contrast it with your intentions and expectations, or define what is true. It cannot, and does not try to, defend its proposals or stances because it has zero commitment to them.
Big Data serves many purposes… so far, inspiring the world's greatest creatives isn’t one of them.
We’ve already seen several agencies develop advertising campaigns by surrendering the creative process to AI… and I bet you don’t remember a single one of them. Do you know why? Because, at best, the result was just "meh..." as my kids would say.
The ones you do remember are the instances where "naively bold" agencies (and I truly recognize their audacity, because not everyone has the guts to do it) asked AI to manufacture their art, only for the resulting "AI slop" to cause total backlash and public embarrassment.
On our podcast, Cierre de Semana, we’ve mentioned several of these catastrophic examples, including a McDonald’s Christmas spot and content from the recent Winter Olympics that couldn't even get the colors of the Olympic rings right.
Think about the advertising campaigns you still remember today, even though they aired years ago. What prompt could have possibly generated those? Can you even imagine one?
It is undeniable that the most memorable campaigns have relied on elements of:
Intuition
Opportunistic cultural observation
An understanding of human emotions
The exacerbation of social contradictions
Personal experiences
Or the use of the absurd.
A creative has the capacity to observe something mundane and find the inspiration to create magic, build powerful ideas, and leave their mark on the world with a level of care and dedication that no algorithm could ever aspire to achieve (if algorithms even had the capacity to aspire to something, which they don’t). That's why human creativity vs AI will always win.
The exponential volume of generic trash makes human ideas worth much more.
Without getting into too much detail, since I wrote an in-depth piece on the subject here, the more the internet fills up with AI Slop, the more valuable human creation becomes.
There is no better proof of this than the fact that the sites recognized by the search algorithms themselves are the ones that consistently achieve the best SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) results, because they are the ones that best match search intent. (Visit Search Engine Land's article about this topic).
With very, very few exceptions, we perform searches because we want to know what everyone else is saying, whether because we need a standard piece of information or a general consensus. In almost every other scenario, we prefer what is original and different. For this reason, the content that truly has value and stands out is that which has a human essence behind it, as people prefer the specificity and differentiation that an algorithm simply cannot replicate.
In a world where competing via volume is useless because machines can generate practically infinite content, the new competitive advantage lies in the ability to generate UNIQUE content. It’s about having your own perspectives, truly understanding people, their psychology, and their emotions, it’s about identifying cultural tensions and changes… and telling unique, memorable stories that truly connect.
Doing what has already worked or risking it all to amaze the world.
Creative processes are daring, they throw us into the unknown. They allow us to think in terms of “what if I did…” versus “let’s do the obvious”.
AI has a predilection for the expected, what has already been done and what once worked for someone.
When someone came up with the idea of putting a gorilla playing the drums to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” to sell chocolates, it wasn't because they thought, “I’m going to do what everyone else is doing”. It was a leap of faith to try something they knew NOBODY had ever done.
The result is a TV spot that, for me, personifies the use of the absurd in the most creative way possible to achieve the highest possible recall.
The future of marketing: Human creativity vs. AI as a tool, not a substitute.
If your starting point is AI Slop and you ask for more, the result will be AI slop to the Nth power. But if you start with a human BIG IDEA, with a complete understanding of what makes that idea incredible and unique, THEN YES, you can get a lot of value out of AI to accelerate replication, variations, and extensions of that idea.
I want to be clear:
In my opinion, AI’s role should be assistive, a catalyst for human creativity, but NEVER its substitute.
Strategy, vision, and the core idea are incredible when they are born from people. They are predictable and mediocre when they come from a prompt.
At our agency, we use AI EVERY day. It has served us well for many things, including the automation of repetitive, low-value tasks. It’s also been great for processing high volumes of data to extract insights—for example, monitoring real-time traffic on our clients' social networks to analyze behavior and predict critical traffic spikes.
But I promise you, I will NEVER surrender my creative capacity or the accountability I dedicate to our clients to a bot. We want Werko to keep doing humanly incredible things… and to be remembered for them.
About the author
Arjan Shahani
Managing Partner at Werko Marketing Solutions and co-founder of Shahani Initiatives. He has over 20 years of experience in consumer and B2B marketing, as well as business consulting. His primary focus is business profitability through strategic marketing.
