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“The latest upheaval, brought by #ArtificialIntelligence (ai), is testing the #cockroaches as never before. #Advertising is one of the sectors most radically affected by ai so far. As such, adland offers a postcard from the future for other industries. Three lessons stand out.

The first is that the moat between human workers and chatbot rivals is narrower than most people think.

#CreativeWork is often seen as immune from #automation. Large language models (#LLM’s) are designed to predict the most likely answer, which is often the opposite of the most original one. The best ads remain too weird and wonderful for any machine to have dreamt up: consider the campaign that attached step-counters to chickens to advertise free-range eggs.

Yet this week in Cannes #TikTok, #Meta, #Google and other ad platforms showed off ai-powered features that can create passable video or rewrite ad copy at the click of a button. Their output will not win any awards. That does not matter. Most of the $1trn that is spent on ads each year goes towards workmanlike campaigns, rather than Cannes trophy-bait.

#SamAltman’s prediction that ai will one day be able to do 95% of #marketing may sound like boosterism for his firm, #OpenAI. But the inspired human-made content that people present as a counter-argument is firmly within the remaining 5%. Robots will content themselves with the rest.”

#WhiteCollar / #ZeroHourWork <https://economist.com/leaders/2025/06/19/what-the-cockroaches-of-the-ad-world-teach-about-dealing-with-ai> (paywall) / <https://archive.md/z9IuJ>by