We’ve been busy at The Frameworks. Alongside our day-to-day work of helping clients foster stronger connections with their customers, we’ve been working on two seemingly contradictory workstreams.

We’ve written a report that champions human imagination as a driver for business success, drawing on our own original quantitative and qualitative research. Meanwhile, we’re developing in-house AI tools to increase efficiency in our ways of working, as well as those of our clients.

Throughout the latter process, I’ve been wondering (worrying?) whether the things I love about my job – collaborating with colleagues, noodling on a problem and using creativity and language to solve said problem – are going to be eroded and eventually replaced by automation.

And I’m not the only one. A survey by YouGov found that – worse than work becoming joyless – 26% of workers worry that they will lose their job entirely due to the seemingly unstoppable force of AI.

Earlier this year, a number of authors, including Kazuo Ishiguro and Sarah Waters, came together to sign an open letter demanding that Meta be held accountable by the UK government for using their writing to train its AI model without their permission. This is currently an intellectual property and copyright challenge, but as AI continues to evolve, it’s fair to assume it will become a creative one. Could AI eventually put those authors out of business entirely, creating its own algorithm-led dystopian fiction?

It’s a horrifying thought. And for me, it just proves precisely why we need human imagination more than ever.

Storytelling for distinctiveness

The internet is undergoing a process that we’ve seen happen across social media platforms already: enshittification. The drivers behind this are multiple and various, and generative AI is one of them. Analysts estimate that 57% of all online content is AI-generated, 40% of which is categorised as “conversation and opinion” or “a bunch of noise that largely exists for ad revenue.” This same information is being fed back into generative AI to produce yet more sub-par content.

A cornerstone of brand strategy is to increase distinctiveness so that customers can recognise and connect with a brand – and, ideally, buy from it. How can they do that, if everything looks and sounds the same because it has been fed with the same content? Clearly, there has never been a greater need to invest in human creativity, imagination and originality.

Storytelling for resonance

Generative AI does lots of things well – search, collate, summarise and validate. But it falls short when it comes to imagination. It can mix and match, but it’s not good at making things up. (Although that doesn’t stop it from trying, when you least expect it. We call this “hallucinating”, and it’s not as fun as it sounds.)

That’s because imagination, the foundation of all good storytelling, requires us to create lateral connections between seemingly disparate ideas. The way thoughts and events link in myriad unexpected ways is what makes the human brain so remarkable.

On this, generative AI doesn’t come close. It can spot patterns – rationally – and it can regurgitate what it already knows, but it is inherently derivative and unoriginal.

Connection is not just what storytelling is built upon, but the impact it strives to create. When we communicate – as individuals and marketers – we want to connect with our audience. We tell and enjoy stories because they’re entertaining, they teach us valuable lessons, and they let us experience the world through someone else’s eyes. To tell stories that connect with our audience, we must imagine what it’s like to be them.

Storytelling for truth

In his book, Into the Woods, John Yorke references the iconic Lemon ad for Volkwagen. The ad, he explains, is an excellent example of storytelling. The headline draws in the viewer, making us ask, “Why is the car being called a lemon?” The short answer is to make a distinctive feature out of the smallness of the mini model.

The long answer is more varied. The ad creates cut-through and drives awareness with quirky messaging that reflects the car’s sense of playfulness. It encapsulates the essence of the brand, some kind of truth, which no AI could ever capture: irreverence.

The business of imagination

As we explore in our report, generative AI can aid creativity, but it can only reproduce and recombine what already exists. To create something new, we need imagination – and imagination is uniquely human. It requires empathy, curiosity and co-creation.

Imagination needs oxygen, and nothing sucks the life out of creative brain power more quickly than rote, repetitive tasks. This is where generative AI excels.

But for creativity that gets to the heart of something special, something true? Only humans will do.

To find out how to foster a culture of imagination in your business – and how this can help your bottom line – download our free report, The business of imagination.