In 2019, I asked a simple question (here’s the original blog post). Imagine it’s a decade from now, you’re at Cannes, and the Grand Prix winner was secretly cooked up by an AI.
What happens? Do you disqualify the cyborg? Do the planners who asked the right questions, the CDs who picked the idea, and the developers who built the machine get the Lion?
It was a fun thought experiment. Six years on, it’s also entirely the wrong question.
That headline—”AI Wins Grand Prix”—isn’t just unlikely; it’s a fossil. It’s an incomplete, almost laughably simplistic take on what’s happening. Because the best work isn’t being “made by AI” anymore. It’s emerging from a complex, orchestrated system.
It wasn’t made by an AI. It was created by the band—we just stopped putting everyone’s name on the album sleeve.
Retire “AI vs. Human.” Welcome the ensemble.
The 2019 debate was, “Could a machine be creative?” It was a binary, hubristic, and—let’s be honest—slightly fearful question.
The 2025 reality is this: the only question that matters is, “How do we orchestrate our talent, tools, and techniques so the entire system is creative on purpose?”
This is Ensemble Creativity: the potent outcome of coordinated humans, fine-tuned models, clean datasets, and smart workflows. It’s not about a lone creative genius wrestling with a prompt. It’s about a conductor leading an orchestra of human and machine intelligence. The payoff? More ideas were explored, more weirdness tested, and more polished, effective work shipped at a speed that made the old agency model look like churning butter.
So, let’s update our lexicon.
- Words to retire: “Prompt monkey,” “AI did it,” “happy AI accident,” “black box magic.”
- Words to prefer: “Model stewardship,” “question architecture,” “the recipe file.”
Anatomy of a modern creative ensemble
Who’s in this new band? The roles aren’t just tweaked job titles but fundamentally new ways of creating value. Your next award-winning team won’t have an Art Director and a Copywriter in a room. It’ll look more like a film crew.
- The Question Architect: The strategist for the new world. They don’t just write a brief; they frame business problems into machine-tractable questions that unlock novel solutions.
- The Model Steward: Part artist, part scientist. They tune, evaluate, and guard the model’s behaviour, ensuring its outputs are creative, safe, and on-brand.
- The Data Producer: The unsung hero. They source clean, ethically-consented data and meticulously document its provenance, keeping you out of legal and ethical hot water.
- The Human Craft Lead: The final boss of taste. They take the 90% from the machine and add the 10% of soul, wit, and polish that makes it gorgeous.
- The Experience Engineer: The one who actually ships. They turn brilliant concepts into live, scalable, shippable systems with which customers can interact.
- The Evaluator: The truth-teller. They design robust tests and track causal lift, proving the work didn’t just look good—it actually worked.
This isn’t just about talent. It’s about the whole system. Think of it as The Four T’s:
- The right Talent (roles)
- Using the right Tooling (models, agents, RAG)
- with the right Technique (prompt graphs, iteration rituals)
- measured by the right Telemetry (impact and integrity)
A pretend case: “The Midnight Trains” (Pan-European Tourism)
Brief: Reverse the “cheap flight reflex” and get city-hoppers to choose overnight trains across Europe.
Markets: France, Germany, Sweden.
KPI: 12-week lift in bookings vs. matched regions.
How the ensemble plays together:
- Question Architect frames five cultural territories: romance of slowness, sleeper-car nostalgia, eco-pride without moralising, productivity as rest, and the midnight cityscape.
- Model Steward tunes multilingual tone packs (for each country), aligns imagery to rail operators’ brand assets, and sets guardrails against shaming language.
- Data Producer assembles consented customer verbatims from rail loyalty clubs and past NPS comments; finds and licences archival rail iconography.
- Human Craft Lead develops a film and OOH system look and feel: long shutters, sodium lights, letters reflected on glass, and headlines that read like postcards from the near future.
- Experience Engineer builds a “Choose Your Night Train” planner – live inventory, ambient soundscapes, and shareable itineraries.
- The evaluator pre-registers tests, runs geo-split creatives, and measures lifts and social, not just clicks.
- Safety & Integrity vetoes a scarcity frame that preyed on “fomo” with pseudo-inventory. Replaced by “choose your kind of midnight”
How Credits Should Work: The Recipe File
If creativity is a system, then credit needs to reflect the system. Forget the simple byline. It’s time for the Recipe File—a one-pager that travels with every major piece of work. It could be baked in cryptographically.
Think of it as the liner notes for your campaign. It includes:
- Datasets Used: A clear summary of data provenance.
- Models & Tuning: The core models and how they were modified.
- Prompt Architecture: A map of the key prompt chains or agents.
- Human Interventions: These are the critical moments where human taste changes direction.
- Evaluation Results: The creative and, crucially, the causal business impact.
- Ethical Provenance: Consent credentials, watermarking (like C2PA), and integrity checks.
Why the hell would you do this? Because credit is not a legal chore; it’s a learning accelerant. A transparent Recipe File makes the process teachable, repeatable, and accountable. It shows your work, proves your value, and makes your team smarter for the following brief.
If Cannes were built for today
So, let’s revisit Cannes. If the festival jury embraced the Ensemble Era, what would change? Everything. We’d need new categories that reflect where value is now created.
- New Lions: Human-AI Ensemble Craft, Model Stewardship, Data Dignity & Provenance, Live & Autonomous Systems.
The judging itself would evolve. Juries would stop asking “who had the idea?” and start asking two, far more essential questions:
- Where did the human taste matter most?
- What did the system learn that will make the next campaign even better?
Imagine a jury debating the elegance of a team’s Recipe File, the ethics of their data sourcing, or the measurable impact their live campaign had over six months. That’s a conversation about building a sustainable creative engine, not just rewarding a one-off firework.
So, does this kill junior talent?
Let’s tackle the big objections head-on.
- “Isn’t this just glorified prompt engineering?” No. That’s like saying filmmaking is “glorified camera-pointing.” This is pipeline design, data strategy, ethical governance, and deep human judgment.
- “Is it plagiarism?” Not when you obsess over provenance, consent, transformation, and craft. The Recipe File is your defence.
- “Will this kill junior talent?” No. It kills the old junior ladder. The new generation of talent won’t be fetching coffee; they’ll be rapid experimenters, data curators, and iteration athletes, gaining more hands-on experience in their first year than many did in their first five.
The real prize
Six years ago, I wrote, “creativity is just a new combination of existing things.” I still believe that. But I was wrong about one thing. I thought the future would be about a brilliant system.
It’s not. It’s about building a brilliant band.
The creative process is no longer uniquely human, but the act of making that creativity meaningful absolutely is. We are the conductors, the stewards of taste, the guardians of ethics, and the architects of the systems that make magic happen on demand.
In the Ensemble Era, the award is just the encore. The real prize is the band you built.
✨//A