AI may one day beat creativity.
The thought makes me uncomfortable.
That’s why they call it the Bitter Lesson.
Back in 2019, computer scientist Richard Sutton identified an unwanted truth about AI progress.
Breakthroughs didn’t come from adding human knowledge or expert approaches.
They came from scaled learning.
From letting machines learn through massive trial and error.
And in doing so, discover solutions no expert could design.
He called it the Bitter Lesson.
It’s bitter because it suggests that wisdom, intuition and even creativity are no match for relentless learning.
Take the game of Go.
Researchers spent decades teaching machines human strategies.
Then AlphaGo trained itself and played better than any human ever had.
Sutton’s point is simple.
The more we let go of what we think works and just test, the further we get.
Advertising creative may be approaching its own bitter lesson.
The lesson isn’t that AI will replace creativity.
It’s that scalable learning can reveal what we’d never expect.
Some agencies and advertisers are already embracing this.
Running hundreds of creative tests each week.
Not just small variations, but entirely different concepts.
Going from brief to live ads in a matter of days.
It’s a different world.
They’re finding the biggest advantage isn’t just better performance. It’s what they learn.
With every test, they understand more about what truly works.
And they move faster as a result.
That’s Sutton’s main lesson.
Over time, scalable learning outpaces expert judgement.
If that holds true in advertising, the future may not belong to those with the best ideas, but to those who learn the fastest.