"AI will pull away some of the reliance on creative agencies," said Fan. Once an agency creative department crafts an original concept, "they're used for all these minor tweaks in copy, images and other things. And may in fact take into account other factors to ensure it's a compelling headline or image that's automatically selected." Fan pointed to AI-driven technology such as GPT-3 (generative pre-trained transformer 3, which is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text) as key to such advancements. With GPT-3, "you can get it to respond the way you want it to. It's almost creepy how you can have AI talk to you like a human does," he added.

Last month I watched Claire Beale of Campaign interview Lorraine Candy of Elle at Magnetic's annual Spark event. Speaking "editor-in-chief to editor-in-chief", Beale asked Candy what role human editors had in an age of data and algorithms. Candy's answer was simple: "We [editors] are the walking algorithms". Her contention was well received in the room, but perhaps unsurprising given her role. AI is also becoming mainstream.