Never give up your right to be wrong

Image Tim Haynes

“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” James Joyce.

One of the things that used to separate humans from beasts red in tooth and claw was that we fashioned tools to make up for what nature didn’t give us.

I use the past tense because it’s been clear for a while now that everything from our fellow great apes to crows and dolphins are toolmakers.

What’s more, they’ve been at it a lot longer than we have.

But there’s no denying we are unusually skilled at the craft.

I mean, when was the last time you saw a dolphin rocking a 24-carat Patek Philippe with triple date and moon phase complications?

Exactly.

Like most of the rest of the animal kingdom, they can’t afford one.

Although, I’m sure that with the right prompt, an AI could produce a photorealistic image of Flipper wearing a luxury Swiss watch and driving a McClaren F1 half full of water sideways through the streets of Monaco.

Which, admittedly, would be a fun way to waste a few minutes you’ll never get back.

But the result would be less great art than a graphic example of an old truth our species would do well to remember.

Tools are an extension of talent, not a replacement for it.

Now, for all I know, there are skunkworks in the Nevada desert or high security labs in China where scientists are already grappling with silicon intelligences that think in ways we can’t comprehend and experience emotions we will never understand.

If that’s the case, well…they’ve ceased to be tools that we use and are now intelligences that will use us as meat puppets for as long as is convenient.

But as I said, that’s still either a well-kept secret or off somewhere in a dystopian science fiction future.

By contrast, the AIs currently loose in the world are a two-sided coin; the equivalent of both the finely honed chisel of a Japanese master joiner and the Casio FX-82 calculator I used to hack my way to a ‘D’ in Year 10 maths.

Indeed, I’m proof of what any artist, artisan or my maths teacher, Mr Forster will tell you; it’s not the tool, but the hands it falls into that really matters.

As usual, Bill Bernbach said it better when he noted that an idea can turn to dust or magic depending on the talent that rubs against it.

Which is why it’s still worth investing in ten ideas that are the result of considered thought and careful curation by a human, over three hundred derivative thought starters quickly scraped from the web by a machine.

And not only because the former has, for the time being at least, a better chance of coming up with something vaguely original.

By indulging that creative friction Bernbach valued so much, you’re substantially increasing the likelihood that you’ll profit handsomely from someone else’s mistakes.

No, I don’t mean your competitors.

I’m talking about the weirdos you trust with significant chunks of your marketing budget.

Alexander Pope may have said that to err is human, but when it comes to the creative process, mistakes are the supercharged V8 that propels us forward as a species.

Stick with me on this.

Any idiot (or machine capable of large scale data mining) can identify a mistake, correct it and occasionally even learn from it.

But it takes real talent to be inspired by your fuck ups.

Back to Bernbach, that’s one of the many advantages he hit on by forcing writers and art directors to share close personal space with one another.

When deodorant is used regularly and the pairing works as it should, neither party is ever afraid to table an idea or crucially, call one out as being wrong.

Which is where things start to get interesting.

Because after calling you flat out wrong (or grossly offensive, borderline delusional or a dangerous lunatic) your partner often utters the three most important words in the creative lexicon.

“But what if..?”

And with that, you’re both sharing ethereal mental space with a guy named Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips, who coined what might as well be the human artist’s creed.

“I love it when we make stuff from mistakes that are way better than anything you could think up.”

Speaking as someone whose entire career could be described as a happy accident, there’s no more exciting use for your tools than crafting stuff like that.