Adam Hanft is a brand strategist, writer, and cultural critic who’s spent decades decoding how language, persuasion, and creativity actually work—from his early days writing jokes for Garry Marshall, to coining the “Flick Your Bic” campaign, to advising brands like Match.com, Microsoft, Sony, and Obama’s 2008 digital team. In this episode of The Russi Hive, he joins Alejandra to talk about what generative AI is doing to creativity, branding, and our sense of self as makers. They start with dueling on‑air definitions of creativity and use them to ask whether large language models can ever be more than dazzlingly derivative synthesizers, or if the real shift is how they rewire our expectations of speed, volume, and authorship.

Drawing on his work across advertising, consulting, and media such as Fast Company, Adam traces how AI has changed the texture of cultural production, why “no ChatGPT touched this” may someday sit alongside “GMO‑free” as a marketing label, and what gets lost when we treat process as expendable and only care about the end product. They dig into AI as collaborator versus crutch, the coming “slow creativity” backlash that may mirror slow food after fast food, and how these tools unsettle everything from branding’s supposed North Star to the authority of parents and teachers when kids can just ask a bot. Threaded through the conversation is a more personal question: how to decide what to automate and what to protect, so that the skills, limits, and inner worlds that make us human don’t get flattened into just another dataset.

Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.

Sound design: Federico Casazza.

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