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Young Lions submissions and winners are being separated into two distinctive categories, ones that used generic AI briefs and ones that didn't.
The Young Lions submissions of 2026 have resulted in industry judges concern surrounding the over-reliance of AI to respond to creative briefs.
Cummins&Partners national head of strategy Tim Collier told AdNews that many of the submissions used ideas directly from Chat GPT, leading to repetitive responses and submissions that completely missed the brief as a whole.
“AI is a language association algorithm. It predictively puts words in order based on the words that you've prompted it with," Collier said.
“It's an expectation machine and advertising is about unexpected things, so it almost never answers the brief.
“It will always come up with very similar outcomes, which is how I noticed that people were using AI in the Young Lions submissions.
“We need to solve clients' briefs, and AI won't do the logic progression from business problem to persuasive behaviour change that all advertising should do.”
Entrants across Media, Marketing, Digital, Film and PR responded to a brief centred on Build a Ballot, Project Planet’s online tool designed to help Australians identify their values, compare them with policy and plan their vote ahead of an election.
More than 200 industry leaders judged submissions, with juries chaired by Mim Haysom, Emma Robbins, Ant Melder, Simone Gupta and Aimee Buchanan.
Cocogun creative partner Ant Melder said that as with every event, there were some great submissions and some so-so ones.
“Overall, it was a well-organised set-up, awesome panel of judges, and a very inspiring in-person judging/announcement event,” said Melder.
“In amongst it all, there were sprinklings of AI use here and there. Mainly for the more laborious stuff like the filling in of entry forms.
“There were a few entries where AI had been used to come up with the idea, those were the most generic and expected.
"They definitely didn’t bubble to the top of the pile in terms of favourites, so there was really no need for the judges to discuss them.
“As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to interesting, surprising, fresh ideas, the human brain is still most definitely mightier than the algorithm.”
The Cannes Lions festival of Creativity in 2025 was also impacted by controversy surrounding AI usage.
Brazil’s DM9, owned by DDB, returned its Creative Data Grand Prix and 11 other lions for Whirpool’s Consul Brand ‘Efficient Way to Pay’ after admitting to using AI-altered footage, including clips from CNN Brasil.
Entries this year were required approval from both the entrant company and a senior brand marketer to verify that submissions are factually accurate and responsibly sourced.
The hybrid verification system, combining human and AI-led analysis, was introduced to fact-check claims.
At the same time, Cannes Lions announced the launch of a AI Integrity Handbook, establishing guidelines for transparency, disclosure and ethical boundaries in creative submissions.
Collier said that part of the art of advertising is making brands distinct, which is lost when relying on AI to replace human thinking.
“There are a lot of people saying that AI is going to make everything faster, and therefore either cheaper or able to be produced at a greater volume. But it puts the wrong pressure on young people,” he said.
“Up until two years ago, the conversation about creative ideas was about the quality and the originality of creative thinking that young people coming into the industry weren't being given enough context of the business realities that our clients face to be doing a good job.
“There was so little focus on selling and being a profitable model that the people were forgetting that their job was to sell things, and yet all it took was this one piece of technology to suddenly flip everything into advertising needing to be insanely fast and cheap."
Collier said that the human value of advertising comes from critical thinking, problem solving, and original, entertaining novel ideas.
“If there's eight agencies on that pitch, if you use an idea that has come from a small amount of AI, you're very likely to have another agency with the exact same idea as you," he said.
“Ad School itself is largely taught by people who are in the industry and have no qualifications as educators.
"A lot of the Ad School material is produced by people for free, because we want to improve the industry and improve the experience of young people who are coming into it.
“So just because a new tool is available doesn't mean that it's not beholden to the industry to teach young people how to use it.”
ACA CEO Tony Hale told AdNews that AI is permitted as part of both the Australian and international competitions.
"Young Lions is a brilliant initiative designed to uncover the best emerging creative talent in the advertising and marketing industry," Hale said.
“Generative AI is a hugely useful tool in the creative process, but it will never replace human creativity.
“The strongest work still comes from original ideas, human insight and creative judgement.
“We wish the Young Lions all the best in Cannes and look forward to seeing them represent Australia on the global stage.”
An anonymous source speaking to the Young Lions initiative told AdNews that while AI is a very real, very exciting and very beneficial technology that is impacting our industry as it is impacting all industries- it shouldn’t be demonised.
“But that said - there's an importance of human creativity and teaching by our younger generations and an importance of not outsourcing the thinking and the ideas to AI,” they said.
“A human will always come up with a better, more innovative idea to drive real growth for a brand.
“It’s very clear in award submissions and client responses (and elsewhere) when an idea has been purely sourced through AI - and it is very rarely the best idea to solve the brief.
“AI can and should complement and enhance the execution planning and data analysis and make our industry more productive - but creativity is the thing that defines great work and it’s not going to come from a machine.”
Collier believes that the industry is responsible for teaching young people the basics of the industry at large, including and understanding the benefits and shortcomings of AI.
“The whole industry needs to be having a conversation about how our value comes from original insightful critical thinking that problem solves and creates solutions for businesses, so that they can grow or have the outcomes that they desire through the medium of advertising,” Collier said.
“And nowhere in that should AI be mandatory.
“AI is a tool, and, like all other tools, it might make it faster; it might make it better but it also might not.
“We need to reinforce to young people that what is going to make your work good, award-winning, and also effective is going to be how well you think through the problem and understand the client, the audience and the mechanisms that will lead to the desired outcome.
“AI can help you with that thinking process, with the research, but if you're asking it to do the logic of that, then you're asking for it to think way too much across too many different fields.
“You need to guide it using your intuition, your personal experience as a human that puts you in good stead that is much more likely to end in a positive outcome.”
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