AI as a ‘Creative Thought Partner’: How House 337 Balances Innovation and Human Ingenuity

JP House 337 interview

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the creative industry, and for creative agencies, it’s challenging to know how to embrace AI’s potential while honouring the creativity of staff.

FutureWeek caught up with James Poulter, Head of AI at London-based creative agency House 337, to find out how AI is being used as a ‘creative thought partner’, ensuring it supports rather than replaces human ingenuity. From developing AI frameworks to setting ethical boundaries, JP tells us how the company is approaching AI with both enthusiasm and caution.

How are you using AI at House 337?

We’re using AI in the ideation process as a ‘creative thought partner’. Right now, our clients don’t want us using it in finished products. Will it remain that way? I don’t think so. When we do move in that direction, we want to ensure alignment with client and public expectations while also respecting the talent and training of our staff.

We want to use AI to expedite the processes that we already have. We’ve established our own ‘AI ethics’ and prompting framework, which acts as a barometer for how we use AI. We’ve trained all our staff in AI usage, including back-office and HR teams.

What tools are you using?

Everyone in our team has ChatGPT Pro, and we’ve integrated APIs into platforms like Slack to automate reminders, such as for design sheets.

Our teams use Midjourney and DALL-E in the pitch stage and when we’re sketching mock ups. We have a number of projects that use LLMs within them. LLMs have the power of making a response to a brand really personalised, and can make work a lot more customised to brands.

Should agencies be going ‘all in’ with adoption?

A lot of agencies are using GPT tools as a search engine only instead of actual prompt engineering. Everyone in our organisation is being trained how to use AI, even HR and back-office teams – 80 percent of the gains we are going to see over the next decade from AI is going to come from everyday people adopting it in the same way we adopted Word and Excel. None of us sit around today having existential debates around our usage of Excel.

What is the biggest challenge for agencies implementing AI?

It might seem counterintuitive, but not paying for AI tools invites a lot of challenges. There’s a culture of ‘bring your own AI to work’ in agencies because employees are scared to tell their bosses or make it seem like AI is doing their work for them. But that’s the most dangerous way of doing it – this could cause issues down the line with copyright and GDPR.

It’s made more challenging when tools are coming out and smaller tech companies might not have the same level of robustness and security as Google or Anthropic. What we really need is for agencies, businesses, and brands to adopt agreed frameworks and vet what tools they’re using.

How do you build AI frameworks in your company?

We have a set of guiding principles when using AI called Open Voice Trustmark created by the Linux Foundation, who are a nonprofit. – we’ve used their frameworks as a guiding principle, particularly around privacy and transparency.

We’ve told our teams that at no point, even to mock things up, can you use the likeness of real people if we don’t have the permission to.

What about fears around AI taking creative roles?

AI hasn’t replaced humans in ideation yet, though it poses risks. However, I don’t feel a strong moral pressure to preserve jobs that didn’t exist 25 years ago – I don’t know how sad we should be about TikTok editors not having a job if the market changes.

But we are the last generation to have worked in a professional setting without this level of automation. Everyone after us will only ever know what it is like to dictate their emails or submit their expense report aloud. Our generation is lucky to see this transition, but have the responsibility of suggesting there is value in letting humans do certain tasks, particularly in the creative industry.

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