US-based AI-powered creative operations platform Air has placed an eye-catching, almost counterintuitive full-page ad in the New York Times headlined “AI would never smoke a cigarette with you” and highlight AI’s limitations for creative work.
The ad was penned by Shane Hedge, CEO and founder of Air, and reads almost like a mini-manifesto for the platform’s approach to work. It ran in the Times early this week.
While it acknowledges that creative teams will shrink as machine input becomes more commonplace, the ad says the idea that AI will replace human creative work is incorrect.
“It took longer than I’d like to admit to get it right, but the hard process of creating is kind of the whole point,” Hedge wrote on a blog post on Air’s website, adding “in the coming days, Air will launch our biggest and most important product yet. This letter explains why.”
Air bills itself as the “system of record” for creative work, drawing comparisons with HubSpot for marketers, Github for engineers and Salesforce for salespeople.
It recently raised Series B funding to help it become a database that houses all working files, feedback and final assets; a platform that connects with creative tools and wherever content is distributed and a dashboard that provides real-time understandings of the content created, where it’s being used and how it’s performing.
It’s also set to debut new AI tools are mostly focused on resizing, versioning and distributing existing assets, based on the insight that “the biggest friction in creative work happens after assets are made”.
The new product launch “marks Air’s expansion from asset storage to asset scale by turning existing creative work into repeatable, on-brand outputs across formats and channels,” the company said.
The full ad, which finished with Hedge’s real phone number (we’ve omitted that), is below:
AI would never smoke a cigarette with you.
In life we long for simple stories, and these days the headlines deliver:
“AI will replace you.”
Each week, there’s a new AI startup that claims its product will make creatives obsolete. Photographers, videographers, graphic designers, illustrators: highly specialized individuals who have spent decades turning crazy ideas into something everyone can visualize.
If anyone should be buying into this narrative, it’s me.
In 2018 my friend Tyler and I started a tech company called Air. We told investors that every company was becoming a media company. And, if true, every company would need an engine to scale their creative work.
Over the last eight years we’ve raised $70M to build this engine.
Today, nearly all of our product resources have shifted to build AI centric features. Our best engineers spend most days evaluating AI written code. But after nearly a decade working with over 250,000 creatives, I’ve built a rather rigid, shockingly unorthodox belief:
AI will never replace creative work.
Creative work starves for originality.
A person decides where the story begins, which frame feels right, or whether the work should even continue to exist. The best pieces of content require doubt and indecision.
The difference between a creative and a machine is this obsessive anxiety.
Artificial intelligence is trained to find patterns and recommend the most common answer. The machine aims for objectivity. It can generate images, resize assets, translate languages, and optimize performance.
It’s always correct, but it’s not always right.
AI would never tell you to slow down.
It would never argue that further introspection might change the work.
You won’t find AI smoking a cigarette at 9AM on Howard and Lafayette. Only a beautifully inefficient mind would believe cancerous reflection could improve its work.
Over the coming months every company you know will be reshaped into an unrecognizable form. Smaller teams. More machines.
But the organizations that survive will require human beings who are willing to take risks. These people understand that letting what they love kill them is a uniquely human trait. Their illogical texture for life is something machines can’t compute.
At Air, the value of our product is shaped by a creative’s direction.
We use AI to help them scale their work, but deciding when, where, and how to deploy this technology remains defiantly human.
The best creative work is always an argument.
I’m around if you want to share yours.
—Shane
