COLLABORATION OF HUMAN AND AI IN ADVERTISING: RECONSIDERING CREATIVITY AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION IN THE POSTHUMAN ERA

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting entrenched beliefs about authorship, originality and creative control within advertising. This chapter analyses the emerging relationship between copywriters/art directors and AI systems through the lens of posthumanism. Posthumanism decentres humans as sole authors and originators of meaning and argues for distributed forms of intelligence. Coupling posthumanist thought with cutting-edge work on AI technologies in advertising and marketing communications, this chapter argues that advertising work is moving away from human-led production and toward hybrid forms of authorship, with algorithms partially assuming responsibility for idea generation, image making, personalisation, and audience segmentation. It then discusses the implications of these shifts for visual communication practices and advertising aesthetics, speculating on what we gain and lose when algorithms ‘augment’ creativity in terms of speed, style, scale, sameness, stereotyping, and skill. Finally, the chapter takes posthumanism’s focus on emotion and ethics to argue that valuable creative products produced by human-AI teams will require ongoing human stewardship of value judgements, contextual understanding and cultural fluency. The chapter closes with advice for responsibly co-producing with computational partners and considerations for advertising education, creative practice and future research.