AI Is A Friend to Creatives (Right Now), Not Foe (Yet)

AI is, has been, and will continue accelerating at an incredible speed. It leaves a lot of us in the creative field with questions: “Is AI going to take our jobs from us?”, “Can AI create?”, “Will AI replace what we’re doing?”

We honestly don’t think so!

As a creative agency, we’re continuously a part of conversations between our own staff, peers from other studios, and friends wondering what’s going to happen to our industry and how we feel about it. 

Before going into how we feel, it’s worth noting that we’re not experts in the field of AI and we would never claim to be. We’ve done some research on it, used it, watched and read about it, and we know only what we know. There is probably some pretty wild stuff going on behind the scenes at the places developing these models, but we will leave that to them. We’ll stick to the observations we have to date on AI’s effect on our industry.

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Language, inhibited. 

First and foremost, because the framework of the AI models available to the public are language-based, they are predictive at this point. AI is referencing its literature/knowledge base and presenting what is most likely to come next, which means that what it’s creating and sending back to you is predictable and inherently not very creative. 

Sure, humans are similar in that we are also referencing our knowledge base, but we can use self awareness to consciously break patterns—we don’t have the same rules and guidelines suggesting that things MUST be a certain way. 

As humans, we have emotional context and the ability to engage in loose-cannon style thought processes. To show what we mean, we asked chatGPT to come up with new words that have never been used before and it sent back:

1. Trinovex: (noun) The feeling of excitement and nervousness when embarking on a new adventure or journey.

2. Lumiphora: (adjective) Describing something that emits a soft, soothing glow, like a firefly's light.

3. Soliviate: (verb) To find comfort and solace in solitude or spending time alone.

4. Zephralia: (noun) A place where gentle breezes and calming winds are ever-present.

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Boring.

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Notice anything? These are just preexisting prefixes and suffixes being smashed together (like the knights from Reading Between the Lions). They’re not particularly unique. 

If I wanted to, I could come up with a word like “gilantily” or “ploomisered” and associate my own meanings to those. These words are informed by my own preconceptions of what letters can go together to produce logical sounds, but I am not bound by rules and lines of code in the same way. This is the same for the creative process, ideas, and writing. Models like ChatGPT currently won’t, and can’t, have a unique voice. So we’re all in luck. What it CAN do, though, is be a friend to lean on. 

Imagine it as your coworker to bounce ideas off of. Have them read what you have so far and see how it can be tweaked and then iterate on that. Imagine AI language models as ways to help catalyze bigger and better ideas. It might start with something basic and obvious, but then we can take that and make something more interesting.

Scrolling through Instagram or any other social channel, you can already see there are companies choosing to rely on AI models and it’s pretty easy to catch. If you start with chatGPT, ask it for an idea, and then execute on it as is without any other human thought behind it, you’ll likely get something basic and uninspired. It would be technically correct and totally “passable,” but passable is not going to cut it in a competitive agency world. Instead, creatives can use AI as a tool for iteration and then take that idea further.

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Sure, but what about this “generative AI” stuff? 

We’ve talked about language models and AI writing before. But then we’re missing a huge piece–photo and video. What about that? Aren’t these the real prime suspects when thinking about stealing jobs and opportunities? We said language models should be tools, but what about generative tools such as Midjourney, Synthesia, or even Photoshop’s new generative fill?

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Well, we’ve been trying ‘em out. 

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With the new photoshop generative fill feature (in beta) you can select areas and ask it to remove things, add things, fix things, or create totally new landscapes. It isn’t doing it on its own (yet), it’s being guided by you. In this way, these video and photo tools are your friends that have the ability to help make your interesting ideas come to life faster. 

Let’s say you’ve gone through the production process for a photography project. Everything is ready to go and you’re now in the editing booth. Maybe some details were overlooked or the weather wasn’t what you expected or the lighting is a little off and you’re up against a deadline. It would take ages to fix… right? it doesn’t actually have to. You can select areas and quickly fix them with generative fill. Something that would normally take hours just took one minute. It didn’t take your job from you, it made your job easier and gave you more time—time that can be used to dive more deeply into the creative vision, work on other client work, etc. 

For our studio we knew we wanted to do something interesting for team portraits. We had an idea and executed it well. We shot in an interesting environment to make it feel surreal, but when we brought the photos back to the studio, we realized we could take that surreal feeling further. And with generative fill, the effect could be achieved in just a few clicks,  so we went for it. 

We took our idea and blew it out in a way that originally would take a huge budget and hours that we just didn’t have. We had a photographer, we had the talent, we designed the set, we scouted the location, and we (humans) executed the whole creative vision. AI was used during post production to easily facilitate an elevated result. We have nothing but positive things to say about this kind of AI collaboration.

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*insert images*

So basically we were super gung-ho about the generative fill feature, and I think a lot of people in our industry feel the same way. That said, if you’ve used it, you know it is a fallible function. A lot of the time you aren’t getting quite what you want.
Midjourney, on the other hand, has come a bit further and is generating images that are both very believable and very good. Midjourney is a generative AI program developed by a lab with the same name. When it was first released, it would do some pretty funky stuff. People it generated often had a questionable number of fingers of various shapes and sizes. However it can do hyper-realistic hands now (along with many other advances). That said, this is a tool we feel less passionate about because it attempts to generate a whole image instead of work in tandem with the creative we’re producing.

There are definitely some uses for it as a tool, like if you’re going into pre-production and you have a set design in your mind, you can have Midjourney imagine what the set could look like until kingdom come. You could then recreate it in the real world and it can even give you a sense of lighting. In these ways, it’s a very helpful tool.
But if you feel like just typing in something, getting an image, and posting that bad Larry right away, maybe reconsider. The things that AI is creating are interesting, but they continue to lack nuances that continue to only come from the humans interfacing with them.

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What now?

AI isn’t going anywhere and we shouldn’t feel like it needs to. As a creative agency, we can say that we’ve begun to use it and we feel increasing excitement and decreasing fear. Why? Because AI has functioned as a tool that has allowed us to explore creative avenues more quickly without exhibiting any creative competency that remotely rivals our own.

AI developers should be held accountable and systems should be put in place to ensure these tools do not rip off the creativity of those who do it for a living. We should NOT hide and pretend it’s not here and we should NOT leave the creative roles we’re passionate about to protect ourselves. Instead, We should continue to be aware of AI and stay on top of its enhancements. Bake it into your human-led processes and always trust the creativity of your human minds above all else. We are still our most impressive resource for truly innovative concepts.

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