Alexandra Jardine: AI vs humans will be the Cannes conundrum this year
You can’t escape from AI at Cannes this year. It looms over the festival in a dystopian manner; not just inside the Palais where it’s the subject of multiple panel sessions but outside, where the massive ominous sounding tagline ‘whatistruth.ai’ is emblazoned on the side of the building.
And then there was the enormous queue of delegates snaked around the Palais on Monday morning to hear Apple’s Tor Myhren, making the case for human creativity in his opening keynote. (A few years ago it was all Ryan Reynolds or Paris Hilton that got people excited.)
Myhren’s mission was to emphasise that despite being a tech brand, Apple’s success (it’s this year’s Creative Marketer of the Year) comes down to its ability to make us feel something humanly relatable. And that’s something robots can’t do – at least not yet.
“A tear, to the algorithm, is water and salt and carbon – a tear to you or I is heartbreak,” he explained. “Human touch is our superpower and the way to build long term brand love.”
Like Apple’s emotional Christmas spot that featured a real-life Dad with hearing loss, for example. It was advertising a tech innovation – AirPods as hearing aids – but the powerful feelings provoked by the real-life family were something, insists Myhren, you “just can’t fake.”
“The algorithms would not have predicted that an ad that starts with 40 seconds of muffled sound would be Apple’s most viewed holiday ad ever,” he added.
Another example he gave was Apple’s horror movie-like Privacy ad featuring surveillance cameras that turn into bats and birds. They were all made by hand, he said, and it was only human craft that could have made them seem so real.
Myhren did admit that AI will be “woven into every single aspect of what we do,” as an industry but he insists that it won’t kill advertising – although neither will it save us. “We have to save ourselves.”
Meanwhile the AI vs human debate is touching on storytelling across the entertainment world. Disney’s Palais session featured screenwriter Dan Fogelman of ‘This Is Us’ and ‘Crazy Stupid Love’ fame, who was asked on stage whether AI would ever be able to tell ‘deeply human premium stories.’
Fogelman argued that since much of his writing was based on personal experience and nostalgia, “how would a robot draw on human experience without emulating someone else’s experience?”
Buoyed by all this talk of humanity, outside the Palais, I decided to find out what whatistruth.ai means. The link takes you to Pvblic One, a company that says it delivers ‘AI Curated Intent-based Audiences.’
And therein lies the conundrum of Cannes this year; the humans fighting for attention, while AI looms over everything. Let the battle commence.
Alexandra Jardine is head of creative strategy at Persuasion Communications. She is the former creativity editor of Ad Age.
