No, the new ChatGPT update won’t replace advertising

When OpenAI announced earlier this week that image generation was now directly available within ChatGPT, a lot of the initial examples used advertising to show how it works.

Powered by OpenAI’s flagship multimodal model GPT-4o, the updated chatbot can now create visuals straight from its chat interface. Turbo Design founder Shane Devine posted an image of his prompt asking the platform to turn a generic office scene into a McDonald’s ad. His reaction to the results: “We’re cooked.”

We are cooked pic.twitter.com/LfWizvSEoh

— Shane Levine (@theShaneLevine) March 26, 2025

Other examples floating around in reaction hypothesized how the new tool would replace traditional photoshoots. Much like Levine’s comment, the mood appeared to be yet another sign of death at the door of traditional advertising creatives. Is it the future of all banner ads and bus shelter posters? If that McDonald’s spec ad is any indication, we’ve still got a long way to go. 

For Fast Company’s Brand New World podcast, I’ve been talking to creatives, ad agency execs, and CMOs about the impacts of, and strategies around Gen AI tools. They all focus on the utility of these tools to help humans, not replace them. 

Even for its own Super Bowl ad, OpenAI only used Sora as a concepting tool. CMO Kate Rouch told me at the time, “Because we made this on a pretty compressed timeline, it really helped the creatives prototype, experiment with camera angles, and things like that, all to speed up the process.”

Deepthi Prakash, Omnicom Advertising Group COO, says this latest update is a really valuable integration, allowing for a more conversational experience, and a more natural “sparring partner” to help identify insights and translate them to visual ideas. “The quality of the visuals isn’t at par with the best specialized technologies out there,” she says. “But it’s certainly good enough for a strategist or a business leader to help develop and communicate concepts and ideas.”

Omnicom-owned agency network TBWA announced its CollectiveAI platform last June. Integrating platforms like ChatGPT, as well as others from Google, Adobe, Microsoft, and more. Its tools are trained on the company’s past work to create social content and brand materials for clients, among other things. For Prakash, this new update simply improves their existing quiver. 

“This doesn’t really change things for us,” she says. “But hopefully, it accelerates the development of tools that are designed not just for specific tasks, but for entire workflows so that AI moves from being a set of tools to being a real partner in the creative process.” 

Omid Farhang is the founder and CEO of award-winning independent ad agency Majority. He says this new update feels like the first time he ever watched Netflix on his phone. “A moment that I knew for sure was coming yet still couldn’t help feeling utterly dazzled that it’s here,” says Farhang. 

Far from the existential dread expressed in some of the social media reactions to the new update, Farhang sees profound opportunity especially for smaller creative firms. “It feels like for the first time ever, being a small, young company is a competitive advantage,” he says. “Because we have no legacy departments and antiquated processes to undo; we can harness AI with less fear, more nimbleness. More malleability.  More playfulness. More audacity.”

Farhang advises any creative professional to embrace any and all the new AI tools. “Since the dawn of man, every generation operates under the delusion that they’ve hit the height of human potential, until an innovation emerges that reminds us we are perpetually the chrysalis, never the butterfly,” says Farhang. “All this chatter, speculation, daydreaming and resistance about AI are shrieks from the cocoon.”

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