Trusting Your Creative Instincts and Learning to Embrace AI

In a 2023 interview, legendary music producer Rick Rubin described what goes through his mind when he’s working with an artist to create a song.

“My goal is to listen in a way where I’m listening to the whole picture of what’s going on and not the individual parts. And ... feeling what’s going on in my body. Where I’m getting pulled forward, excited, curious, where I want to hear what’s coming next, surprised – those are all great ... And what’s wild about it, is you can tell sometimes in the first two notes ... the song hasn’t started yet ... and right from the start, it’s like, this is exciting.”

He concluded: “There’s an energy and you either feel it, or you don’t.”

Rubin is describing his instincts, which he’s honed over a lifetime of experience. Knowing whether something is right or wrong and deciding how to proceed. Instinct is innately human – emotional, subjective and hard to define. And, as Rubin has proven, an essential part of creativity.

If you work in a creative role in our new era of AI, then you’ve likely thought about where great creative concepts come from and how they are developed. The way the brain works to unlock an idea, chip away at it, break it apart, and rebuild it until it’s something worth fighting for (or at least showing your boss). It’s not magic, but it’s not science either.

As AI plays an increasingly important role in marketing and advertising, what will creativity look like? Who will we rely upon for the intangible, “you either feel it or you don’t” aspects of creativity? Can those be replaced by AI?

My gut – my instinct – tells me the unique role of human instinct is here to stay. Here’s why:

Instinct is tied to a lifetime of observing and interacting with the world. Great ideas require empathy. Putting yourself into someone else’s shoes and understanding how they’ll feel or react. Knowing what will make someone laugh, cry, or get angry. Great ideas require knowledge of the world that comes from living in it. The way an orange feels in your hands. The slam of a screen door on a windy day. The color of the sky just before it rains. There are emotions and memories within each of these, and it takes instinct to know how to tap into them.

Instinct is tied to trust. Great ideas require trusting that a concept or execution will work in the end. Simultaneously seeing something scribbled on a white board and picturing it in an edit room six months later. Feeling deeply that an idea is good – dangerously good – and trusting yourself to convince others to feel the way you do. Great ideas don’t just happen on their own – you need to fight for them. If you don’t trust it, or you don’t trust yourself to see it through, well, then your instinct should tell you it’s probably not a great idea.

Instinct is tied to an ability to be discerning. Don’t tell the client, but most ideas suck. Creativity is a process of throwing out the bad, then finding bits and pieces that might work – and then applying your judgment again and again until it absolutely does work. Of course you can be discerning based on data, but a lot of it comes down to emotion. (Remember: “There’s an energy and you either feel it, or you don’t.”) If you’re not feeling it, instinct will remind you to abandon the ideas that lack energy so you can focus on the rest.

Now if creative instinct is irreplaceable, that doesn’t mean AI can’t play a role in creative work. Forward-looking creatives are learning to embrace AI to enhance what we do uniquely well. Here are just three examples:

To build energy. IDEO used an LLM to build an AI-powered parrot that supplies prompts to keep your creative warm-ups fresh. Creative warm-ups get your brain going and can lead to that unlocking discussed earlier. And you don’t need a custom-built AI parrot. Just ask Chat GPT or Copilot for brainstorming exercises or creative warm-ups to get your team rolling.

To iterate. Once you’ve got that spark and you’re off to the races, make AI your collaborator. Use it to help you refine drafts, explore different tones, seek visual ideas, make things simpler, make things elaborate. This isn’t ideation, its iteration and AI can be a powerful teammate.

To personalize. AI’s ability to create at scale can be super powerful for personalization. I recently explored ways to customize content for a healthcare client. How might we talk about heart disease to a 70-year-old man, or to a 30-year-old woman, or to the parent of a 12-year-old child? LLM’s can take inputs like audience insights, demographic information, clinical facts, and your brand’s tone into account. Then, they can give you first drafts of customized content to help you meet your audiences where they are.

As AI gets better and more powerful, we’ll continue to adapt how we work. To keep what we create uniquely human and memorable, let your instinct guide you to those feelings of energy and emotion. Once you’ve found an idea that excites you, embrace AI to bring it forward.