With great AI power comes great responsibility — and creativity

In every comic book origin story, there's a memorable moment when the hero first discovers their powers: the first time Superman leaps into the air and takes flight. Or that game-changing moment when Spider-Man, a normal guy bitten by a radioactive spider, sticks to a wall.

Similarly, we all remember our first experience with AI; that moment when we first started to grasp the powers this awesome new tech could unlock for us. But as AI becomes more entrenched in marketing, the industry must learn what Peter Parker was taught — that with great power comes great responsibility. And, as Peter also discovered, learning to use superpowers effectively takes considerable thought, practice, and creativity.

Superhuman power

If an LLM were a superhero, it would be Superman. Like Superman, AI is not human, and it has power far beyond that of any individual person. But like AI, Clark Kent — the being that would become Superman — had to be taught to use his power before he could really help humanity. And it wasn’t always easy. Kent, like AI, was often perceived as being a little simple. Predictable. His lack of humanity may have come with amazing capabilities, but little in the way of creativity, originality, or personality. Until, that is, he learned to harness his awesome power.

One way we mere mortal marketers can directly leverage Superman’s — er, that is AI’s — power for good is by teaching the construct what it means to be human. Take a recent campaign to support a new show written and performed by the San Francisco Ballet, which used the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box as an analogy for the advent of artificial intelligence. My colleagues on the creative team at The Shipyard tasked ChatGPT with reviewing the ballet as if it had been a critic, to demonstrate the performance’s power to emotionally impact anyone — even AI itself.

ChatGPT itself initially discouraged this approach, commenting that “I don't have feelings or emotions, so I don't experience​ any emotional responses to things like ballet”. But the time and thought put into writing hundreds of prompts to enable the superpowered and supra-human entity to understand and comment insightfully — if ironically — on the ballet paid off with pull quotes that perfectly fit the ethos of the performance being marketed. An example of the type of content it generated: “Amusing to witness humans grappling with their impending irrelevance.”

The superpowered human

Of course, many superheroes are humans, but ones who have been bestowed extraordinary powers. Young Peter Parker was a just regular person, studying to be a scientist while making ends meet as a freelance photojournalist. Even after he got bitten in his lab by that irradiated arachnid and started fighting crime, he still had rent to pay.

Yum Brands, the owner of fast-food super brands Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, found itself with a challenge Peter could relate to in his role as photographer at the Daily Bugle: the need to continuously publish engaging content. And, as with all media, little tweaks to the way the content is presented generate significant improvements in interaction rates.

As Yum Brands CEO Joe Park recently shared with the Wall Street Journal, empowering his email team with AI has led to double-digit increases in consumer interaction rates. Starting with prewritten content, AI makes on the fly decisions about what content to serve up at any given moment to any given user based on their unique demographics and demonstrated behaviors. Emails are further customized based on external factors, like the weather, time of day, or major events happening in the area, leading to results that would make even Peter’s boss at the Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson, stop shouting and smile.

The agency as the new super team

Of course, the greatest lift comes from combining superpowers. Superman was amazing on his own, but with the Justice League, no evil on Earth could prevail against him. Spider-Man didn’t need assistance to take down the Green Goblin, but to defeat an alien invasion, he needed the full might of the Avengers.

And the same is true for us as marketers: the full panoply of our superpowers is unlocked not through a single tool, but by leveraging the entire suite of systems we have available. LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini help us find new ways of expressing ideas in writing. DALL-E, MidJourney, and Runway unleash new capabilities when it comes to visual exploration of ideas. And there’s a suite of additional tools for media, analytics, productivity, or other tasks we engage in.

The secret, then, is learning how to claim our own superpowers, and then learning how to combine them with the powers of others. Doing so reaffirms the role of the agency, even in the world of AI, as the real-life super team.

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.