Is AI the future of creativity or the end of authenticity?

The CMO Office attended the debate, hosted by Britcham, where an independent creative went toe-to-toe with the mighty Unilever🥊

It was a humid Singapore morning on the 33rd floor of the Hong Leong Building when the British Chamber of Commerce’s Marketing & Communications Committee threw down the gauntlet: Is AI the future of creativity — or the end of authenticity?

The debate, sponsored by Hawksford and hosted before a packed room of marketers, was a clash of optimism and caution. On one side, Neal Moore, independent content and communications consultant and author of the Pro-Human Substack, warned that AI risks diluting originality and authenticity. On the other, Madhurjya “Banjo” Banerjee, Senior Global Marketing Director at Unilever, countered that AI, used responsibly, is a creative multiplier rather than a replacement.

Moderated by AsiaWorks’ Andrew Clark and introduced by Andrea Ng of Canvas8, the session was part theatre, part therapy for an industry torn between excitement and unease.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Two Points of View, No Holds Barred

Neal opened the debate with his trademark humour, joking that he might have sent his AI likeness to deliver the talk — before noting that such substitution mirrors how consumers feel when “fobbed off with AI slop.”

He argued that brands risk alienating customers by outsourcing creativity to machines:

• Consumer Backlash: Surveys show that up to 80% of consumers would switch brands if communications were AI-generated.

• Cultural Shift: Gen Z, supposedly digital natives, are leading a return to “analogue” experiences — vinyl records, film cameras, and even “dumb” phones.

• Sustainability and Bias: AI systems consume vast energy, worsen climate impact, and reinforce social bias.

• Authenticity Over Automation: AI’s convenience produces inauthentic, homogenised “AI slop” that consumers recognise and reject.

Neal concluded that marketers should “let AI cure cancer and climate change and leave human creativity to the humans.”

Banjo countered that every transformative technology, from the printing press to quartz watches, was once seen as the death of artistry. Each instead expanded creative possibility:

• Liberating the Mundane: AI frees creators from repetitive tasks (“show me the toothpaste tube at 15 degrees left”) and accelerates ideation.

• Democratising Creativity: It allows ideas to scale and adapt to audiences in new, personalised ways.

• Enabling Experimentation: He cited Unilever’s use of AI to test hundreds of launch concepts for a toothpaste brand — even discarding a misguided “gorilla with a bright smile” concept before wasting budget on it.

Banjo’s thesis: AI is not replacing creativity but amplifying it — “killing the mundane, boosting imagination.”

From left to right Andrew, Neal & Banjo, all friends again after a feisty debate. Photo courtesy of Andrew Clark.

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Five Questions That Cut Through the Noise

Fired up following the debate, the audience were split into small groups to tackle one key question each and these were their answers - see what you think and if you agree:

1. How can AI can genuinely enhance creativity?

Speed seemed to be the main enhancement but whether or not that’s a good thing remained in contention. As the group’s spokesperson said, “With AI you can deliver faster… but at the same time, it’s scary because you’re not using your creative and critical thinking.” Now, that’s food for thought 🤔

2. Can AI and human creativity co-exist?

The short and unanimous answer to this questions was, “Yes!”. However, the more nuanced version delivered by the spokesperson was, “We can use it for ideas. We can use it for some processing. But before it goes out of the door it has to have that human touch in the same way there’s a human touch for the input.”

3. How should AI creativity be regulated?

This question was answered with a couple of personal experiences; one about buying a series of books from a beloved author only to find out, upon arrival, that they had been written by AI. Another about using AI to check flight times and being served completely wrong information and the ensuing chaos. The conclusion being that there is definitely a need for stronger regulation to prevent these kinds of incidents and, of course, to protect kids.

4. Is there a limit to how much we should rely on AI for creative work, and where should we draw the line?

This group took an audience-first approach and had to admit that AI ads, as of now, are not proving popular. However, they also pontificated that we are in still in the early stages of the technology and that improvements may yet change audiences minds.

“Either the technology is going to have to get better, and it probably will, or we stop using it and we just use AI for what it is pretty good at right now, which is that back end stuff like finding ways to connect pipes more efficiently, finding ways to produce reports - stuff that people don’t like doing but are needed in the marketing process.”

5. Should the use of AI be declared in creative work?

The spokesperson for this group shared that there were a lot of mixed feelings on the issue but they concluded the following:

“The creative world is probably one of the least necessary areas for (AI) to be declared. But obviously there’s nuances to that. People felt more sensitive when there would be human faces involved or some kind of human representation so, the front cover of Vogue, or if it was a school magazine and you’re generating happy children at school - you’d probably like to know if they were real or not, right?”

The consensus? AI is probably here to stay — but so is the marketer’s responsibility to make sense of it.”

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One Thing That Will Never Change

Whatever role AI plays in the future of creativity one thing will never change and that’s our need to understand what’s working, what isn’t and why.

That’s where Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) comes in. Unlike traditional attribution, which credits the last click, MMM uses econometric principles to evaluate all marketing activity — AI-assisted or not — across channels, markets, and timeframes. It separates signal from noise and shows which investments genuinely drive growth.

Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome has consistently shown that brands using MMM see clearer, faster, and more confident decision-making. It’s the difference between guessing and knowing. In a world of synthetic data and self-referential dashboards, MMM provides the ultimate “reality check” — grounding marketers in truth.

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The Real Future of Creativity (& Effectiveness)

So, was AI the end of authenticity? The room never reached consensus, but when the moderator asked if they should consult Chat GPT, which had been listening in the whole time, a chorus of ‘No’ arose from the audience!

AI will undoubtedly transform how we create and measure, but human insight will still decide what matters and why. The marketers who thrive won’t be the ones who automate fastest, but the ones who measure most honestly.

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Your Next Step

Whether your marketing is human, hybrid or fully AI-assisted, one thing remains essential: knowing what actually works. Talk to Analytic Partners’ modelling experts to see how Marketing Mix Modelling can help you find truth, and growth, in the age of AI.