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CANNES, France—Ad veteran David Droga is one of the few people with the keys to OpenAI’s text-to-video tool Sora, and it’s already reshaping how he thinks about creativity.
“Not all creativity is worth saving,” said the CEO of Accenture Song in conversation at the Cannes Lions Festival with OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati.
“The majority of advertising is not creative. It’s written by something far more dangerous than AI: research,” he continued, observing how tools like Sora could eradicate the “messy middle,” of the creative process without displacing jobs at the top.
Droga’s session offered the industry a glimpse at how Sora could be used to create and test ads in the future, opening with a film-noir-style video of Cannes showing vignettes of people walking up and down the Croisette.
The twist? The VT wasn’t archive footage but a video made by Droga and his team. He also debuted a surreal music video created with help from Accenture Song creative technologist Howard Boland for artist 2Ton.
On the ground at Cannes Lions, the festival has been dominated by conversations around how gen AI will transform content creation and data practices, however, questions linger about trust, ethics and safety.
Murati said OpenAI is working with creatives, policymakers and educators to understand how its tech will impact society, and put guardrails in place to mitigate misuse.
Man v machine
Droga suggested that ad execs in the audience were likely caught between “excitement, enthusiasm, and terror,” about gen AI’s ability to devour creativity.
“The way that we design it, develop it and bring it into the world really matters,” said Murati. “It’s not a predetermined outcome. When we think about job displacement or how it will elevate certain skills, roles, that’s quite dependent on how we shape the technology, and the way that we shape it will then shape our society.”
While every client Droga works with is excited by the opportunities AI presents to outdo competitors, move at speed, and find efficiencies, “they are also paranoid that the competition is going to wipe them out because of that,” he said.
