Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Robot Overlords.

There was a time—not long ago, though it feels like a different century—when the best ideas in advertising came from beer, pizza, and a half-dead Expo marker. You’d gather around a whiteboard with your creative partner, half hungover, over-caffeinated, and dangerously under-briefed, and you’d fight your way to something brilliant. Maybe it was a tagline. Maybe it was a headline that made the whole room go quiet. But it was yours. You earned it.

Now? We’ve got prompts.

“Write a clever brand manifesto for a compostable sock company. Make it sound like Don Draper if he were raised on TikTok.” And boom… out spits three options, all perfectly grammatical, moderately charming, and aggressively soulless. The machines don’t sweat. They don’t argue about fonts or stare blankly at the ceiling until something finally cracks loose from the cosmos. They just generate. Efficiently. Endlessly. Like a vending machine full of clever.

And I get it. I really do. AI can save you time. It can fill in the blanks. It can make bad ideas less bad. But it can’t feel the room. It can’t tell you which headline makes your client’s wife cry, or which one sounds too much like their ex-husband’s favorite slogan. (Yes, that actually happened.)

Once, our biggest creative obstacle was the client’s nephew with Photoshop. Now, it’s our client’s ability to prompt the biggest brain in the universe.

**Here is your black and white pencil sketch of a graveyard with “CREATIVITY” on the center gravestone.**
***— Gemini by Google***

And somewhere, in a smoky corner of advertising Valhalla, Ogilvy, Burnett and Bernbach are clutching their highballs and muttering, “You did what with our legacy?” Even Peggy and Don are probably chain-smoking in existential silence, watching the Creative Department get replaced by autocomplete.

Let me be clear: I’m not anti-tech. I love tools. I even love this tool. But creativity—real creativity—isn’t a shortcut. It’s a process. A beautiful, maddening, human mess. It’s mishearing something in a brainstorm and turning it into a million-dollar line. It’s writing forty bad headlines just to get to the one that makes the account manager say, “Oof, that’s good.”

That’s what we sell. That’s what “Free Thinking for Hire™” means. Not pre-thought. Not crowd-thought. Not regurgitated data slurry in Helvetica. Free. As in liberated. Inventive. A little reckless. The kind of thinking that scares you a little when you hit send.

Yeah—maybe AI can write a passable blog post in ten seconds. But can it doubt itself? Can it spiral into creative panic? Can it pour a bourbon and pace around at 2 a.m. while obsessing over whether “damp” is the right word?

Not yet.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post. It was written entirely by ChatGPT. Without my knowledge. Or approval.

– Tom Ostrom
Free thinking for hire™ (still, for now)