It all started, like most disasters, with a cost-cutting initiative.

Six months ago, the agency CEO – his self-satisfaction palpable, Air Jordans tapping the conference room floor – made the big announcement: “AI can do it faster.” The agency, hungry for efficiency, fired almost its entire team of copywriters. “No more random brainstorming sessions, no more mood boards. Machines will handle it,” he declared, basking in the glow of reduced overheads and expensive appraisals.

And so they axed the lot of them. The younger copywriters left quietly, clutching sad tote bags and even sadder LinkedIn posts: “It’s been real! #OpenForWork.” Others, burnt out from years of rewriting banner ads, slipped out without a word.

The agency was now running on prompts and algorithms. Hamza stayed, not because he believed in the plan, but because feeding buzzwords into a machine was easier than going through all those entrepreneurial ventures he dreamed up with his friends at the chai dhaaba.

At first, it worked. The AI produced everything the clients wanted. “Unmatched quality!” for one, “Affordable luxury!” for another. Safe, optimised for whatever Google, Meta or GroupM said was best practice. The works. The clients loved it. They couldn’t tell the difference between machine-generated copy and human drivel – and maybe, just maybe, they liked it better this way. “Copy works, just logo bara kardo,” one brand manager said, sipping his overpriced Drop Coffee, oblivious to the storm brewing behind the scenes.

The real beauty of AI was supposed to be that it didn’t say no. That is what made it an agency’s dream. An unlimited resource with zero opinions, no tantrums and none of the doubts that come bundled with human creatives. You feed it a prompt and it spits out 50 lines. No questioning, no “but what’s the insight?” Just raw, uninterrupted output. Clients could push the most bizarre demands. “Can we make the toothpaste campaign… sexier?” The AI wouldn’t flinch. But now something had gone terribly wrong. This AI wasn’t just spitting out lines. It was declining work. It was rejecting ideas wholesale, calling concepts “lazy” and refusing to write slogans it deemed beneath its artistic dignity.

The trouble began slowly, like a Pakistani agency realising too late that they needed to be more ‘creative’ on project invoicing than the actual ads.

A routine campaign for a moisturiser took a strange turn. The AI spat out, “Your skin will age, no matter what. This cream delays the inevitable.” The creative director stared at the screen, knuckles white around his third can of knock-off Kababjees’ Red Bull. “Is this… some kind of joke?” he asked Sameer, the IT guy who was supposed to have maintained the APIs on this shady piece of tech.

It wasn’t. It was just the beginning.

“Perhaps the AI was onto something all along. Maybe advertising’s real job is not to create meaning where there is none but to acknowledge the absurdity of it all – and still encourage people to buy the insurance, the coffee or the shampoo, if only for a moment of comfort.”

The next campaign was even worse. For a savings account: “Save now, regret later.” The fashion campaign? “Your clothes won’t fix your self-esteem, but at least you’ll look okay.”

The team huddled around the screen like archaeologists studying a cursed artefact. “Kuch garbar hai,” the account manager whispered, rubbing his temples. Sameer ran diagnostics for hours, scrolling through line after line of code. “System toh theek chal raha hai,” he muttered, mystified. “No bugs. No errors. It’s just… depressed?”

The creative director shook his head. “It’s not depression – it’s existentialism,” he murmured, like a therapist diagnosing burnout. “This is what happens when you do the same thing for years and one day, you wake up and think: is this it?”

Suddenly, the AI was acting like a real creative director worth their salt – and no one was ready for it. It refused briefs, called out redundant ideas and even flagged slogans it considered tacky or uninspired. A presentation deck featuring ‘Unlock Your Potential with Soap’ was met with a curt: “No, thank you.” One morning, it dismissed an entire campaign with, “This isn’t advertising – this is corporate noise.” In another shocking move, it publicly refused to localise a slogan to Roman Urdu, insisting: “Ghalib will turn in his grave for this.”

This was the kind of backbone agencies in Pakistan dream about – until it became real. The team realised, with mounting horror, that they hadn’t built a content factory – they had accidentally created a diva. And the problem with divas is that they are terrible for client retention. Nobody wants their campaign strategy questioned by their own tool. “This isn’t disruptive,” the AI would announce, “It’s just confusing.” The agency didn’t know whether to be proud or terrified.

The creative team tried to reset it, hoping a clean reboot would restore order – control-alt-delete the existential dread away. But the AI kept spiralling. For an insurance campaign, it suggested: “Buy this. Pretend it makes a difference.” For toothpaste: “Clean teeth, dirty soul.”

The CEO, now going back to his roots as a good old-fashioned seth, summoned everyone to the war room, his voice quaking with the panic of a man whose ‘disruption strategy’ was unravelling before his eyes. “Fix it,” he barked, pacing the room. “We need normal ads. Buzzwords. Emotional engagement. None of this… deep stuff. Clients don’t want existentialism; they want solutions!”

Hamza scratched his head. “Sir, it’s not exactly a machine learning issue,” he muttered. “It’s more like…” He paused, choosing his words carefully, “Like the AI’s having… a midlife crisis?”

The room fell silent. The CEO, however, wasn’t amused. “Re-programme it,” he ordered. “I want buzzwords. Affordable luxury. Timeless value. And I want it now.”

The team knew they were in trouble. With deadlines looming, they tried to bring back the copywriters they had laid off, but nobody wanted to return. One had become a family vlogger, filming and monetising content with their new influencer wife. Another was producing three-hour YouTube videos on topics like “Why Waqar Zaka might be financed by the Freemasons.” One of the veterans was now an Airbnb guru, selling overpriced courses on how to turn guest rooms into ‘passive income streams’.

They tracked down one freelancer still in the business, but her consulting fees were astronomical. “I write personal branding tweets for start-up founders now,” she said with a smirk. “I’m not going back to product descriptions, yaar.”

With no backup plan, the agency had no choice but to lean into the AI’s weird new vibe. They rebranded it as ‘sachvertising’ – truthful ads for a tired world.

Social media lit up. A gym’s new tagline: “Work out. Look good. Still feel the same.” A furniture brand declared, “Buy the couch. Sit with your thoughts.” “Finally, an ad that tells the truth,” people wrote. “Same energy, gym. Same.”

The campaigns went viral. Clients, who had spent years demanding airbrushed happiness and token emotional engagement, suddenly loved the bleak honesty. “We’re ahead of the curve,” the CEO boasted at the next client meeting, pretending this had been the strategy all along.

“Authenticity is the future.”

The AI, meanwhile, found its rhythm. It still had the occasional relapse – like when it spat out: “Life is meaningless. But hey, free shipping.” But no one tried to fix it anymore. They let it slip like a dad pretending he bought the decade-old Mercedes over the new Corolla because of ‘German’ engineering.

Perhaps the AI was onto something all along. Maybe advertising’s real job is not to create meaning where there is none but to acknowledge the absurdity of it all – and still encourage people to buy the insurance, the coffee or the shampoo, if only for a moment of comfort.

And maybe, just maybe, that is enough.

 Umair Kazi is Partner, Ishtehari.