For most of the 20th century, the creative brief was treated as a sacred document—an architectural blueprint of intention, clarity and constraint. It was handed down from the strategists to the creatives like a set of coordinates, and the job was to navigate toward a predetermined destination. In advertising history, legends like Mary Wells Lawrence, Bill Bernbach, Dan Wieden and Lee Clow built transformative campaigns by using briefs as guiding stars—rigid enough to prevent drift, yet flexible enough for genius. The brief functioned because the work moved slowly. Production had weight. Changing direction meant burning time and money. Clarity had to come early, because exploration cost too much.

But then the world changed. And with the rise of generative AI—GPT-5, Midjourney v7, Claude 3.5, Sora, Stability Diffusion XL—exploration no longer carries a financial penalty. A concept can be visualized in minutes. A script can be prototyped before lunch. A dozen alternative art directions can be generated while a team is still debating tone. In this new environment, the traditional brief feels less like a compass and more like a locked door. When creation itself becomes instantaneous, planning stops being a prerequisite and becomes something else entirely: a conversation.

This shift is not subtle—it is seismic. And at Copy Lab, we see it as evidence of something we’ve believed for a long time: the future of creative work doesn’t belong to rigid processes or old hierarchies; it belongs to the dynamic partnership between human vision and generative intelligence. The brief is not dying, but it is evolving into a living document, shaped not by early certainty but by early exploration.

A rigid brief assumes that clarity must precede creativity. Generative AI shows us the opposite: clarity often emerges from creativity. Fei-Fei Li has said that understanding comes from seeing, not the other way around. And this is the logic GenAI brings into creative work. You don’t need to predict the final direction to begin. You simply need to know what matters—the emotional tone, the audience, the cultural context, the intention—and then let exploration reveal the possibilities.

This mirrors how great creators have always worked. Francis Ford Coppola talked openly about “finding the film in the footage.” David Bowie described songwriting as a process of generating too much and carving away. Björk once said she had to “overproduce to understand the center.” Even Steve Jobs spoke about the importance of iteration, of letting prototypes teach you what the idea wants to become. The difference is that now these practices aren’t luxuries reserved for geniuses or well-funded productions—they’re accessible to anyone with a prompt window and an instinct.

But this abundance also creates a new responsibility. When AI can generate endless directions, teams must work harder to articulate the why. Not why the execution looks a certain way, but why the work exists in the first place. When models collapse boundaries between mediums—turning text into video, sketches into worlds, ideas into systems—the brief must shift from dictating form to defining intention. It must become clearer about purpose and looser about paths.

This change doesn’t weaken strategy. It strengthens it. It shifts strategy from an early dictation to an ongoing act of interpretation. It demands judgment instead of prediction. It encourages teams to treat the brief like something James Baldwin once said about the world: “It is not fixed; it is something we must create.” A brief in the age of generative intelligence is not a command—it’s an invitation to explore meaningfully.

And this brings us to the core of Copy Lab’s philosophy: AI doesn’t replace the human role in shaping the brief—it heightens it. Because when the cost of generating is zero, the value of choosing becomes infinite. The strategist, the writer, the designer, the director—they must now read not only what the model outputs, but what the work is trying to say. They must sense when a direction feels culturally hollow, emotionally thin, or visually derivative. They must guide the exploration, critique the options, define the trajectory. The machine expands possibility, but only the human can identify purpose.

This new brief—the living brief—mirrors how ideas actually form. It recognizes that clarity deepens through comparison. That direction emerges through iteration. That creativity thrives not because constraints are fixed, but because they are meaningful. It is a brief shaped by curiosity rather than certainty. And it is the natural outcome of a world where human imagination and generative intelligence work together not as rivals, but as partners.

At Copy Lab, we don’t see this as a disruption. We see it as an evolution toward a more honest creative process—one where the brief is no longer a static command, but a shared foundation; one where teams use AI to explore broadly but rely on human judgment to navigate wisely; one where strategy is no longer a barrier to creativity, but a living catalyst that grows alongside it.

The brief isn’t disappearing.
It’s finally becoming what it should have always been:
a dynamic, co-created, human-led, AI-accelerated framework for discovering what the work wants to be.

/Carl-Axel Wahlström, Creative Director Copy Lab, 2025