Why AI Will Never Be an Elite Campaign Strategist or Creative Director

This article on Axios today is very consistent with what I have been saying and thinking about the impact of AI, especially in my case, on whether and how AI can help in the management and creative side of running political and public affairs campaigns.

In short, as much as I believe AI has an important role to play in our campaigns, the current models (at least) have limitations that will prevent them from replacing that creative spark which the best strategists and creative directors for campaigns bring to the table.

The Axios story reports on a study in “Nature Human Behavior” that shows human groups brainstorming without the assistance of LLMs like ChatGPT come up with a broader range of creative ideas than those using generative AIs.

Some findings:

• Ninety-four percent of ideas from those who used ChatGPT "shared overlapping concepts."

• Participants who used their own ideas with the help of web searches produced the most "unique concepts," meaning a group of one or more ideas that did not overlap with any other ideas in the set.

• Researchers used GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 and reported that while GPT-4 is creating more diverse ideas than 3.5, it still falls short ("by a lot") relative to humans.

This makes sense. Since current LLMs are, by their nature, trained on the mass of human-generated content available, it tends to revert to means. Others have shown that in many ways, AI can become “yes-man on servers” in its “desire” to please people and be non-controversial.

Some of this can be cured by better prompts into the AI models, but at the end of the day, there are limitations inherent in the models that keep AI-generated content and ideas in the middle of the bell curve.

As another Axios article on this topic wrote, human creativity comes in part from our lives’ experiences.

Or as the article said:

• An LLM has never felt sunlight on its arm or raindrops on its head, known a parent or a child, given birth or faced death.

• It doesn't feel the need to share such experiences or to shape them into works of writing, or music, or any other form.

At the risk of a brag, I know that part of what makes me a good campaign strategist is my competitiveness. I hate losing. I think long and hard about how to win every engagement in which I am involved. I have awoken at 2:30 AM countless times with a creative flash on how to win a campaign or design an ad that my subconscious has been noodling on for days.

The other burning desire an AI can’t share or mimic is that this is how I provide for my family. That drives me in ways that code can’t replicate.

That drive, which I know is shared by many colleagues in the field, is not in that fat part of the bell curve. And I don’t think it can be “learned.” Sure, AI models can be taught to get better at a task, so when we talk about AI being competitive, I am not talking about how it can be trained to be better at chess than a Grand Master. Even in that case, the AI did not “feel” the “Thrill of Victory, the Agony of Defeat, the Human Drama of Athletic Competition.” (Hope you love the throwback to ABC’s Wide World of Sports!)

That burning desire to win that is part of elite athletes and performers in all fields.

I’ve written before that AI has an important but appropriate role to play in campaigns. Generating high volume of content that does not need to be elite. Crunching data to find insights.

But I just can’t see current AI models and even the potential next generation from providing that creative spark and burning desire to win that makes the best campaign operatives what they are.