I am not a robot. I just have to work with one.

I’ve lived my life creatively. For the last 20 years or so I’ve been paid for it. I survive by not being a robot. In the past that meant not doing what a robot would do. The easy headline (the rhymer or The. Punchy. Punctuator.). Shilling features rather than connecting to an audience. Avoiding the expected. Et cetera, et cetera.

My inspiration has always come from studying art. Literature specifically. Ideas about novelty from Wordsworth and Coleridge or defamiliarization from Shklovsky. Boiled down, the idea is that if you create work that is new, unfamiliar, unexpected, and you win every time. What makes art exciting/memorable works for advertising, too.

But the robots have caught up. Not the human bot kind who are happy collecting paychecks for ho-hum work. The real robots. They’ve caught up. And they’re gonna pass us up.

The question I’ve always asked myself– “Could a robot do this?” –has become moot. The answer is yes. Every time. Faster and error-free.

We are looking at a whole new way of working. If our skillsets are tools that we’ve used to make advertising, then whatever AI is/becomes will simply be a new tool that replaces an outdated one.

Pessimistically, or optimistically (I’m on the fence), we will become prompters and deciders. Our instincts and intuitions that made us good at our work will still be in play. As prompters, we’ll still make associations between things that seem an unlikely pair but “make sense” in surprising ways. As deciders, we’ll still be asking ourselves, “Could a robot do this?” But with a whole lot of irony. We’ll become better tacticians, too, unburdened by the time and effort consumed by the creative process.

Are these still employable skills? Will robot sentience overtake them as well? Are they even personally fulfilling? Whatever the case, it’s hard not to think about Descartes famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am” without raising an eyebrow. ?