#IMC2026 | The good and dark side of AI and its impact on humans
Finding our way to a symbiosis between humans and machines
Cinman, who also leads the future industry team at the Association of Communications and Advertising (ACA), painted a picture for the IMC delegates of where we are on the journey toward an AI future.
He says he was trying to provoke the question: “Is this the future we want as a species and industry?”
Why? Because he explains, “We are rapidly progressing into this future, but we are not thinking hard enough about what the implications are.”
A major concern is that the stated intention of the AI companies is to replace humans. He says we have to decide if we want to be replaced or not. “Because it is happening.”
He also focused on AI and the implications for agencies and marketers.
Marketers control the agencies that go to them, and he says their money will have a big impact on how agencies work and adopt the technology.
He thinks we will see more human unemployment and people having to exit the creative industry.
Listen to what he has to say in this interview.
Use AI to augment talent
Rais sees AI like any invention.
“The knife was invented to cut meat, but its dark side is that people use it to kill. In the same way that nuclear power and the Internet also have dark sides, so does AI. However, it is up to us how we use it to make things better.”
In agencies, he says we need to use AI not to replace talent but to augment talent.
But he points out that while we are good at looking at the technological shift happening today and in AI in particular, we forget about the other side of that: the repercussions for humans.
“AI is growing and evolving, and marketers and agencies need to use more AI, but what are the repercussions for humans in the industry, and outside of it.
“We tend to look at the technological roadmap, or AI roadmap, but we don’t look at the human roadmap.”
He says we do not think enough about how humans are evolving because of technology and what brands need to do to cater for the different uncertainties, anxieties, and excitements that arise from this as well as the different ambitions that humans have.
“We use a toolkit in our agencies to help us with this, called Archetypes.”
He explains that it gives different ways to approach technological shifts married with psychological shifts, “creating the babies that come out of that”.
Listen to the interview to find out about the different archetypes.
