The future of advertising campaigns: The role of AI-generated images in advertising creative.

The article examines the role and impact of DALL-E 2, an AI text-to-image engine developed by OpenAI, on creative workflows within advertising agencies in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Through focus groups with advertising professionals, the study explored practitioners' perceptions of AI-generated images based on an extended Volkswagen campaign, revealing three main themes: aesthetics, creative production, and human versus machine roles. Participants acknowledged DALL-E 2's potential to enhance efficiency and ideation but expressed concerns about image quality, the loss of human creativity and emotional nuance, and the threat to traditional creative roles. While AI was viewed primarily as a tool rather than a collaborative partner, there was a consensus that computational creativity will inevitably reshape advertising production processes and professional roles in the near future.