Ideas That Shouldn’t Exist
Every now and then, an impossible idea walks into the room. This one wore a cardigan and a gold chain.
We were pitching Visit Pittsburgh. The brief was simple enough: show how the city has evolved without losing what makes it special. But Pittsburgh isn’t just a place. It’s a mood. A contradiction. A steel-town heart with a creative pulse.
So we asked the question that made everyone in the room pause for a second:
What would it sound like if Mr. Rogers and Wiz Khalifa made a song together about their city?
It shouldn’t work. But the best ideas rarely do.
On one side, you have Mr. Rogers. Empathy, warmth, nostalgia. On the other, Wiz Khalifa. Swagger, smoke, and a modern beat. They represent two completely different versions of the same place. But together, they capture exactly what Pittsburgh feels like right now.
The challenge was simple: how do you make that duet believable when one half of it doesn’t exist anymore?
That’s where AI became useful. Not as a gimmick, but as a way to explore at a speed we couldn’t have before.
We started with ChatGPT to rough out lyrics, looking for a rhythm between Rogers’ optimism and Wiz’s flow. Some lines were cheesy, some sharp, but it kept the idea alive. Midjourney explored what a cardigan merged with a chain might look like. Kling came last, for motion and feeling rather than visuals.
The output wasn’t perfect, but that wasn’t the point. It gave form to something that had only existed in our heads a few days earlier. It made the idea real enough to pitch.
AI made the song possible. It did not write it.
What the tools removed was friction. A few years ago this would have died in a brainstorm: too ambitious, too weird, too expensive. We could show it instead of describing it.
The more I use AI, the more creativity looks like permission rather than control.
Permission to explore. To fail faster. To connect things that shouldn’t connect.
Efficiency was never what I got out of it. Curiosity was.
Sometimes the most human ideas need a machine to make them believable.