Why this agency says AI will never replace great creative
Australian creative agency Paper Moose is turning 15 this year. The agency started as a filmmaker collective in a garage, caught the first digital video production wave, and has grown into a full-service shop. Now it’s staring down what founder and CEO Nick Hunter calls the industrial revolution for knowledge work.
Hunter’s framework for thinking about AI’s limits comes down to one word: geist. German for ghost or spirit, he uses it to describe the X-factor that animates truly original creative work. His argument is that AI can automate tasks that can be tracked via benchmarks and improved through reinforcement learning. It cannot automate geist.
The reinforcement learning problem
Hunter gets specific about why. You could theoretically train a creative model by having a world-renowned creative director evaluate a million pieces of work until the model learns to choose as they would. But even if that worked, you’ve frozen one person’s sensibility. You’ve lost the diversity of creative outlooks that makes a truly resonant idea stand out. He argues that without a fundamental shift away from LLMs to some other underlying technology, there is no path to automating that diversity.
The more immediate threat, in his view, is not AI replacing great creative work. It’s AI flooding the market with low-quality output: what he calls slop creative.
Moose Review: testing creative before you spend
Paper Moose built Moose Review to address the slop problem directly. It’s an AI creative testing tool that evaluates work against a framework drawn from marketing science research on advertising effectiveness. The framework references Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field, Orlando Wood, and Daniel Kahneman.
The tool uses synthetic focus groups, which Paper Moose calls Synths, and runs them through a set of tuned questions. According to Hunter, Synth responses mirror real human subgroups by up to 94%. The library now holds over 20,000 reviews. The reported outcome: results close to traditional focus groups, at a fraction of the cost and time.
“Moose Review gives us what creativity has never had before: a verifiable output with a quick feedback loop. It lets us kill weak ideas cheaply and confirm strong ones confidently, ensuring every dollar spent outperforms.” — Nick Hunter, Founder, CEO and ECD, Paper Moose
The internal platform bet
Beyond Moose Review, the agency has been building an internal software platform called Portal. Hunter describes it as a foundation for automating agency intelligence work, covering scheduling, documentation, financial tracking, research, and media implementation. The goal is to free up human capacity for geist-heavy thinking across client work.
Combined with in-house generative and traditional production capabilities, Paper Moose says this creates a leaner, faster operating model.
The operator angle
Hunter’s closing prediction is worth noting for anyone running a small creative operation: AI won’t replace creative agencies, but it will force them to become leaner, faster, and wilder. The next fifteen years, he says, belong to those willing to dramatically alter their business models to balance the automateable and the ineffable.
For solo operators doing content, branding, or ad creative, the same logic applies. Automate the intelligence layer. Protect the time you spend on the work that can’t be benchmarked.
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