David Droga is unsentimental about how artificial intelligence is already reshaping the industry that made him advertising’s closest thing to a household name. Originality can’t be duplicated, he told Semafor in a recent conversation about the state of the advertising business, so the end result will be the end of a market for human mediocrity in creative fields.

“The majority of stuff done in marketing, advertising, entertainment, music, journalism, is pretty formulaic and average. So have at it. Get rid of that,” Droga, the founder of the agency Droga5 and former CEO of Accenture Song, told us on Mixed Signals. “And if I was a client, 80% of the people that I pay probably aren’t doing an exceptional, stellar job anyway.”

“But the need for distinctions, originality, strategy, context, taste, all these incredible things that set apart things that actually move us forward — AI’s not gonna do that.”

Droga’s confidence in the resilience of true creativity could be reassuring. AI can’t replicate truly original work, says the guy widely regarded as the last of advertising’s Don Draper types. (It didn’t hurt that at the peak of Droga’s career, a television show about a genius ad man with his initials ran for seven seasons to critical acclaim.)

But read another way, it’s more alarming: The vast majority of work that has made up the “mediocre” middle of creative industries is about to get washed away by AI.

The looming and increasingly real threats of AI to the industry will be the No. 1 topic of conversation this week, when the global advertising community convenes in the French Riviera for the annual Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. In part, that’s thanks to the arrival this year of a company with aspirations to bring in half of Meta’s current advertising revenue in just three years.

On Monday, OpenAI will host its first-ever Cannes Lions event a few blocks away from the Palais where the awards are given, along the boulevard where the major tech players and ad holding companies have traditionally set up shop to show off to clients. The launch of ChatGPT 3 set off the AI arms race three years ago, and jumpstarted the automation of various creative parts of the ad industry.

Now, it wants the industry’s money, too.

Since February, when OpenAI announced it was introducing ads with the goal of reaching $100 billion in ad revenue by the end of the decade, the AI giant has been busy quickly rolling out tools to allow buyers to mimic the experience of search ads. Over the last month, OpenAI rolled out a self-serve advertising platform, began testing ads in Japan, and quietly updated its Ad Tools document to say the company “may make available AI-powered Creative Tools that allow you to generate, modify, transform, optimize, localize, or translate advertising creatives using Ad Materials.”

While the company isn’t bringing A-list celebrity talent or booking massive stages and parties like its competitors, it confidently asserted its importance by scheduling a press event first thing Monday morning. OpenAI disclosed the event to a handful of select journalists just a few days ago, in a vague email, and said only that it would be “previewing its ad business.” A person familiar with the company’s Monday plan said it would feature remarks from Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, as well as an update on the company’s ad program and a creative demo of its new ad products.