The computer-creative co-creation paradigm: Your people are more important than ever

Where’s the emotion?

We’ll get on to AI, but social media has been a great case study and proof-point for this theory. Daily, we see people’s lives being portrayed as the perfect blend of everything: a canvas with no faults, dozens of filters a click away to polish our faces, remove wrinkles, and make our days look brighter, better, and more enjoyable. It’s a race to false perfection. We seem to spend half our lives editing the life we live.

We’ve all come to know all this, of course. Now, we filter what we see. We know that what we’re seeing isn’t always the real image, or story, or occasion.

And then we step into the world of marketing, where our jobs are to make things, products, and brands look as beautiful as ever. And in this new chapter, we’ve been presented with technologies – like AI – that promise better, faster, more affordable output.

But the reality remains the same: the technology will always be the output average of those who’ve entered the data. We’re working with human-trained machines, but how do we best train our humans to work with the machines?

Enter computer-creative co-creation

Computer x creative co-creation can be your most empowered partnership – if you start investing in and loving your people more than ever.

To get there, all businesses need to start reframing the questions that they ask of tech, and of their people. How can we inspire our creatives to produce even more inspiring work? We know that the best results come when team members are empowered to dig deeper and bring true emotions into the work they create. When this emotion is brought into co-creation with these magnificent new tools and technologies, the stories we tell will be more meaningful and amplified than ever.

AI by itself won’t be the answer to the future. Without co-creation, AI ‘creativity’ will become a mere average, uninspired standard. We need to ask ourselves: what value do we place on our clients and the relationships we have with partners? Does the work they want deserve to be created at a mere average standard? What do we risk when we take the rose-tinted route of a machine-driven shortcut?

Don’t forget the emotion

We as corporations can invest in technology. We can adopt and leverage artificial intelligence as collaborators in our creations (and in our brand storytelling), but we need to continue loving our people, and loving them more then ever, because it’s our people who bring true emotions to the work they create – something technology can’t do.

The pain, joys, and victories of being a human create a basis for the emotion we input into our creations. Thus, those who make the best use of co-creation with machine-taught technologies will produce the most impactful (and efficient) work.

As our industries look to invest in new technologies, let’s grow our investment in co-creation development for our people. That means subsidized training programs, investing in brainstorming, and technological alignment.

We must remember that empowered creatives produce powerful work. Let’s help make our creative worlds more meaningful so that our teams can continue to weave intricate emotion into their art. Genuine emotional resonance is what audiences buy into; it’s what makes a fan cry at the sight of their favorite artist or share a viral video that is so relatable to their own everyday life experiences.

Instead of looking to computers to write our stories, let’s look to human co-creation with technology, and never forgetting to continue loving our people.