It’s no surprise to anyone that AI continues to grow and juggernaut through our everyday lives. Like most companies, we view its arrival with a mix of awe, excitement and trepidation. Whilst even a cursory investigation illustrates AI’s astounding capabilities, most of us recognise the need for a degree of caution. The benefits of AI may be immediately obvious but what about the downsides? In fact, the whole notion of AI in the creative industry seems to throw up as many questions as it does answers.
AI-Your digital creative assistant?
First off, lets get this clear. AI is a long way from taking our jobs. As impressive as it may be, at the present time there are too many limitations and legal and ethical concerns surrounding AI to make a creative industry staffed by robots a realistic proposition.
What AI is great for is getting you off the starting blocks. AI can help support creatives to work with greater speed and efficiency, allowing projects to move forward more quickly. AI allows you to push the fast forward button when it comes to developing ideas and concepts. By making it easier for us to explore new ideas, AI enables us to provide our clients with more innovative responses to creative briefs. This is a massive tick in AI’s favour. As we all know, happy clients who feel their needs are being understood and met makes for a happy creative industry.
It can also be argued that AI is leading the charge on a more inclusive creative sector. AI can break down barriers, allowing those without formal training or experience to create professional media. This opens up the sector and new, exciting innovations will surely follow as a result. And all of us welcome great new ideas, no matter what their origin.
The key effectively using AI in creative is playing to its strengths whilst recognising its limitations
When we look at the drawbacks of using AI for creativity they are complicated and numerous.
AI, at present, cannot mimic the “human touch”. Our brains make thousands of conscious and unconscious observations and choices every hour. We’ve seen nothing to suggest AI is capable of effectively interpretating this and providing the nuanced approach that really makes creative resonate.
We’ve all read AI written copy. You may not have realised it at the time but I can pretty much guarantee you didn’t find it engaging. Writing a hundred product descriptions for a catalogue? AI is probably fine. Writing a decent novel? Not a chance.
In addition, AI by its nature is fed by pre-existing content. This renders it unable make the creative leaps our brains are capable of. If cheap, AI generated content starts to undercut the authentic work produced by a human then there is a real danger that innovation will stall. After all, if human writers, creators and producers become lost in a wave of artificially generated content then where will we get our new ideas from?
There is a danger that heavy reliance on AI will lead to a sanitised version of art, devoid of any real personality. Unlike creative content produced by a human, there is no “journey” with an AI created piece. We are instantly presented with the final product, devoid of the ups and downs of the process that gives it its final character. I’m sure we have all found that sometimes it’s the most “rough and ready” creative that really engages with audiences, if we leave everything to AI we’ll simply miss this.
Beware of authentic sounding inaccuracies…
It also needs to be remembered that AI is far from infallible. Recent research conducted by the BBC found AI assistants significantly distorted information when asked to summarise news articles. This illustrates the care needed when using AI models and shows just how easy it could be for factually incorrect information to be duplicated and distributed. Well informed, knowledgeable and experienced humans are essential for keeping accuracy on track.
This is all in addition to the legal and moral copyright issues that are quite frankly a nightmare to unravel so I’ll leave that to the lawyers. Rest assured they are all over it. The outcomes absolutely will have an impact on how AI can be used in the near future.
There is no substitution for human input
As human beings we thrive and perform at our best when we collaborate with others. AI cannot smooth over a difficult client situation, it cannot effectively respond to the brief that is no more than “show me something new” and it cannot negotiate with partners to get solutions that work for everyone.
In a nutshell. Can AI produce an advertising campaign (for example)? Yes, sure. Would it be any good? Almost certainly not. As amazing as AI is, it still cannot match us humans in terms of creative thinking and negotiating the nuances that make us tick, throughout the whole process.
How will AI affect the creative industries?
What we love about AI is its ability to save time, to take on the boring bits and free us to get stuck into the bigger challenges. It won’t take our jobs but it will give us more time to focus on the more interesting parts of them.
Over time, our skillsets may change. Being able to effectively write an AI prompt is going to be important. If we are to use AI effectively we need to think about the information we feed in to it. However, it’s still a job for a person.
At the moment AI is an incredibly useful tool. By using it to perform the basics it can help us use our time more efficiently and more effectively. There will undoubtedly be companies who will use these efficiencies as an opportunity to reduce their headcount but these won’t be the companies that thrive.
Those that will do well into the future will be the ones who use this extra resource as an opportunity to innovate. To give staff extra training, to spend more time with clients and collaborators, to invest these resources in business development and find even more effective ways of doing things. We’re excited to see what the future looks like and how we can better use AI to streamline our processes and offer even better value for our clients.
If you’re happy to let a human guide your creative, find out more about our services. If you’d like to talk to a real life person about your creative requirements, get in touch, we could maybe even meet face to face if you’re feeling brave…