As a young’un growing up in advertising, stock photo books were everywhere in ad agency art departments. Lurzer’s Archive was also around for those departments that could afford subscriptions. (As a strategist, I used to subscribe to Archive and keep a few in my office; when art directors visited, they’d often ask, “What are you doing with Archive?” But I digress.)
Stock photo books were an inspiration to creatives. Idea starters. And today’s stock photo book for content creators (AKA copywriters), is in many cases going to be AI.
Faris Yakob, whom I love as a strategist and bon vivant, is known for his concept “recombinant ideas.” Quoting Steve Jobs in this video, he suggests originality is nonexistent. The only originality is the mashing up of other ideas. I agree. Some of my best ideas, creative thoughts, brand brief nuggets, come from this process. My mind works this way. It generates based on some very random principles. But it’s all original recombination rather than plagerism.
If AI is used by content creators, as more than an appetizer for clean newish recombination, but to copy and paste, we will have another downward trend in creativity. Machine marketing, as it were.
Let’s not let that happen. Appetizers good. Laziness bad.
Peace.