The Epica awards announces an industry first: an AI awards juror.

Every year I tirelessly attack the long list of the Epica Awards, judging everything in order to create the shortlist that we then keep judging to sort out the winners. It's a time-consuming and unpaid job, but as someone who loves advertising, it's also tons of fun.

But this year, I'll be joined by an industry first, and it's the first time in over 35 years that a non-journalist has been invited to vote on Epica Awards entries. I'm being joined by an AI. The AIJE – or AI Jury Experiment.

The Epica Awards explain:

The AI will be asked to make its judgements based on text: the summary of the creative idea that agencies are required to include alongside their entries. This means that only the idea itself can be judged, not its execution. In this initial phase, the AI will restrict its focus to categories encompassing technique and digital mediums. The AI will be tasked with assessing each idea in relation to others within its designated category. The AI's assessments, performed over multiple iterations, are then averaged, ensuring a more robust and reliable evaluation of each concept's creative value.

Don't worry though, as nifty as AI is, the results will not count towards the official prizes. But the Epica Awards will publish the results alongside its official list of winners on December 8 2023 so you can judge for yourself how the AI did.

Operations director Nicolas Huvé, who is behind the initiative, said: “AI is poised to revolutionize creativity, and as a creative award organization, we simply couldn’t turn a blind eye. After months of testing, we're confident that we now have a functional protocol, albeit for research purposes. Our experimental AI juror is not part of our main jury and we have no plans to replace our esteemed journalists. But it will be fascinating to see if the results have anything in common.”

Epica Awards editorial director Mark Tungate said: “Our press jury are keen to document topical events, and AI is the story of the moment. So it made sense for us to join the conversation. Epica has a history of innovation – we were the first creative awards show to launch a Use of AI category, for example. This experiment will be intriguing and fun. However, we believe humans are the best-placed to judge human creativity.”