To ourselves, for ourselves

Hi, it’s Nilesh here.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. We’re not building enough with Generative AI. And it’s not because we’re afraid of technology coming to take our jobs or whatever the latest viral fear mongering is.?

We’re not building enough with Generative AI because we’re suffering from an industry-wide identity crisis of confidence – and that’s squarely on us to fix.

When I say “we”, I mean the?entire creative business: from marketing orgs to the huge agency ecosystem, and the people in-between.

Allow me to explain my critique.

Generative AI is absolutely here. It’s not emerging so much as, well, it’s emerged. The models currently published by OpenAI, Google, and Meta are frankly astounding in their potential. And yet, much of our industry is on the sidelines, dabbling at most.

Dabbling is a start, but it isn’t enough.

It’s easy to get lost in the expanse of our own potential. Working with AI opens up so many doors, it can make your head spin. But I don’t think that’s what’s stopping us from advancing beyond dabbling.?

I think we’re waiting for someone in tech to do it for us. Perhaps we learned this behavior from allowing the Big Four or Big Six or FAANG, or however you want to group Big Tech, to dictate what the future of media technology will be.

I think Ad Tech created a false dawn over the past 20 years. Which in turn, created a philosophical divide which pitted tech?against?creativity.

It’s easy to fall into this trap, but trust me. You can believe in technology, data, and creativity all at the same time.

This divide taught the creative industry that?those tech experts over there?get to determine what the future looks like. As creatives, we’ve got to reclaim our agency over the future.?

The term "creatives" stems from the Latin "creare" which means to make, produce, bring forth, beget. Our job is literally?to make things. What’s stopping us here?

What if we took charge? And what if I told you that we could do that today?

Today, pick any large language model like Claude or ChatGPT.

You will see a blinking cursor as the tool awaits your first input.

This is a?prompt.

If you write “What’s the capital of France?” you’ll get the answer, and think to yourself, “Google would’ve told me it’s Paris, what’s the big deal?” – and decide that it’s just hype.

We’re generally not natively good at prompting. In fact, most of us start out absolutely?terrible?at prompting. Don’t let this discourage you. We’ve all got to start somewhere. The most important thing is to start. I promise your prompts?will?improve. Practice and discovery are part of the process.?

You may need a few prototypes before you find the prompt that triggers the output you want, which is not unlike having a first, second, third, and final draft of anything else you’ve ever created or put before a client.?

You should think of prompts as mini-programs that tap into the model's vast knowledge to create output for you.The brilliance of Generative AI is you don’t need coding experience to create these mini-programs. Your words are more than enough for the job.?

After decades of relying on tech to build the tools of today and tomorrow, I invite you to embrace an era where you can create valuable creative utilities using just the English language.

10-Part Pledge for Us All

• I can create things for myself which have real creative value
• I will work as fast as I can to get my first 1,000 prompts out of the way. I will not let perfection stand in the way of progress.?
• I’m going to ask for things that seem outlandish in their nature
• I will become introspective on how I arrive at creative breakthroughs
• I will articulate my thought process in great detail in a quest to create an army of on-demand creative sparring partners
• I will explore concepts, not facts
• I will invite serendipity
• I will try hard to find new and surprising behaviors
• I embrace “hallucinations” as valuable encounters with randomness
• I will obsess the prompts more than the tools

It’s our job to make generative AI creatively useful; to ourselves, for ourselves.

Nilesh Ashra

Founder & CEO of OK Tomorrow?

Supporting Articles

1. Check out Anthropic's team talking about the art of prompting

2. You can see posts about prompting and other AI use-tips on OK Tomorrow's LinkedIn page

3. Scroll through the Superhuman archive to see past Prompt of the Day

4. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

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