Why AI and creativity are not at war

There is a lot of understandable concern right now in the creative fields about the impact of recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will be about work and about creativity in general.

After using in the middle of the journey arrive create cover photo for a story about Alex Jones in Atlantic, Charlie Warzel apologized to the art community and vowed never to use AI creation tools again. In his apology, Warzel said that creating the image was so easy and the results were so good that he didn’t think through the consequences.

While noble, the sentiment of the apology only shows concern.

The commitment not to use readily available and useful technology is unlikely to be a lasting safeguard in the face of change, as it is not in the face of earlier technological advances such as computers. printing, mechanized farm equipment or even the original “computer”.

We are living through a twist in the development of artificial intelligence, with things long considered near-impossible to be accomplished on a seemingly weekly basis. There is a very good saying in the world of AI: People mistakenly believe that AI will steal their jobs. It will not. But someone uses it better than they will.

The same would be true in the world of advertising.

A new wave of creative potential for synthetic AI

Open source Neural networks like OpenAI’s Whisper features near-perfect advanced speech-to-text transcription models, even in the presence of thick voices, fast speech, and noisy backgrounds.

In image-generating AI, in just a few months DALL·E 2 So much improved from DALL·E that anyone can now create stunning, original images from any text prompt. And in the middle of the journey built AI generation into a Discord bot, an intelligent UI that instantly moves AI-based creativity into a community, thus making learning how to use it easy and fun. taste.

Perhaps most impressively, at least from a technical perspective, stable diffusion found a way to break AI generation away from the mainframe-powered, server-side models of the above platforms, and move the work to your local device.

None of these are perfect, but make no mistake, they will continue to advance rapidly and they are already very good.

This is not a serious warning; it’s a call to rethink what’s possible. I believe that there is a long history of partnerships between people and technology that shows us a more likely future.

For more than a century, the automobile – a truly amazing technological advancement – was essentially useless without a human driver. And while billions of dollars have been recently invested in developing self-driving vehicles, the complexities of creating new laws, the ethics of putting driverless cars on busy streets. people and the fact that many people enjoy driving their cars proves that we are still quite far from a fully autonomous reality.

Closer to creativity, Adobe’s Creative Cloud toolkit has revolutionized an industry, but they’re just as useless as a driverless car without a creator to bring ideas and direction. into their powerful platform to demonstrate ideas.

Even in the face of all the recent advances, this is more true today than ever. So the question for us as an industry is not, “How do we adapt AI-based technology in innovation to protect the way we used to work?” Instead, the question is: “How can we use emerging AI technology to create entirely new fields of work that add impact to our clients?”

New creative genius

With this in mind, the emerging field of creative analytics is a great place to look for a more positive outlook on future labor. Artificial intelligence-based tools have enabled more and more technology platforms to instantly unpack the creative decisions in every frame of millions of ads and compare that creative attribute information with a variety of performance signals.

This process allows for good training machine learning (ML) to display data that shows which decisions are positively or negatively impacting a company’s desired business results. But the point is: Patterns can only tell us what the signals are. They couldn’t tell us why. And in the question of “why” it is strategic insight that can unlock millions of dollars in value for a marketer.

A creative human analyst can parse that AI-powered “what” stream and figure out the “why”.

Strategic creative analytics, or simply creative analytics, will be a major growth area in the coming years. We’ve seen many top marketers and agencies hiring in this creative role — yes, data science Is one creation role. The strategic insights that come from these (soon to be well-paid) people with that technology at their disposal will allow others, sometimes using tools like DALL·E 2 or Midjourney, to leverage Smart ad creation not only scales the content, but actually improves it.

And isn’t that the problem? The future is fast approaching. For those who choose to embrace it, there is a whole world of opportunities ahead.

Alex Collmer is the CEO and Co-Founder at VidMob.