AI in the creative industry

Every time Adobe pushes an ad on Facebook about the new AI features in applications like Photoshop, there’s a barrage of comments from terrified designers and creatives who fear for their livelihoods. Honestly — rightly so. AI will have a profound effect on this industry, but it isn’t all bad.

Think back to when photography first emerged; artists were horrified in exactly the same way! Creative industries have been shifting or disappearing like this for hundreds of years - Swordsmiths, basket-weavers, candlestick makers—graphic designers? Time will tell, but it’s a real possibility.

There are even people making a living now from writing excellent prompts—it’s becoming an art in itself, and while AI will certainly eliminate many tasks currently done by designers, it will also create new roles. Designers need to stop clinging to the past, or they’ll end up like the candlestick makers.

Creative production always starts out as a rare craft. Over the years, in creative production industries like graphic design, video production, SFX, VFX and so on, the demand grew, costs dropped, and we ended up with a saturated market, churning out endless content on endless channels for endless brands. This diluted the overall quality of work. Enter AI. We no longer need all these content creators to make subpar content for numerous brands on numerous channels. Eventually, most will go. People will oversee and judge AI outputs initially, but eventually, even that will go as ROI and data will become the sole focus, leaving AI to evolve the creative until it’s optimal, only adjusting when engagement drops—something designers (or whole marketing teams) can’t do as fast.

In our lifetime, we are likely to see AI create content and deliver products to consumers with no human interaction until we get to the warehouse. Say you are selling a pair of shoes, and you want to show an ad to someone on Facebook. Facebook tells the AI what the user is into, one user is into motorcycles, and then that user sees an image or video of someone riding a motorbike wearing the shoes. Another user might be into guitars so the user is shown a similar style video or image with someone (AI-generated) playing the guitar and wearing the shoes. This is where it is heading. No way can human content creators compete with that level of tailored content on the fly 24/7 to millions of people in an instant!

It won’t stop there as the AI will monitor which styles of ads are working and change the tone to the ones that are getting the most traction within the specified brand guidelines it has been trained on. It may even suggest that the company change the brand strategy to suit the customers who are actually buying the shoes instead of the ones the company planned to sell to based on the emerging data. The possibility of this is not 10 years away but less than 5, though it will take another 5 for most to catch up, but those early adopters will devour market share with this kind of advantage.

While all that might sound terrifying and all doom and gloom, it will help us learn from it. Rather than thinking about AI as a tool to help us, think of it more as a clever graduate who is great at their job helping deliver to us humans, who are still in control of the company and the brand, all kinds of insights every day that we used to only get at the end of a campaign! We can use this information to shape the company we want, to find the customers we want to make improvements to appeal to the people we want to attract and the AI will do everything it can to help us achieve that.

We can still get together and brainstorm ideas, to meet with clients and share knowledge and experience to make informed decisions as a team without the stress of having to do the graft. We can be way more “high-level” and less down in the weeds. Does that mean the creators still don’t create? Of course not but you don’t have to do it for work, you can feed your personal interests and be free to create art rather than marketing work as dictated to you by your boss or your client. All the while you can be at the same level as your peers pitching in with ideas safe in the knowledge that the AI will help figure out how to execute that. No more worrying that an idea is too big for the budget anymore as it is only as big as your imagination!

Coming back to the present and recent past, companies appeared to serve this saturated market with cheap labour, driving down the price of designers to meet the demand for digital channels like social platforms. This was the beginning of the end, and creatives despised these companies and criticised anyone who used them. One of those companies is Fiverr, which recently launched an ad as a massive “screw you” to the creative industry…

Fiverr’s Nobody Cares ad

The irony is the visuals are terrible (but intentionally so), but the idea is brilliant. They knew exactly what they were doing here. And while I don’t agree “nobody cares” that you are using AI (and cheap labour is in the undertone), many do feel this way and is what will create a huge shift in this industry.

If what you have seen of AI in creative is mostly shite, take a look at the serious stuff happening…

Sora’s AI Video

These videos blew my mind and opened my eyes when I first saw them. Images are one thing but conveying moving humans this real using only text promts is a massive game changer. See more at Open Ai’s Sora website (the company behind ChatGPT).

Runway’s AI Video & Lipsyncing

Literally the same week as I wrote this, Runway, a company I had not heard of until researching this article, released this mind-blowing AI lip-syncing software! I thought we had to wait for Sora to be released but it looks like another company took the lead instead! Since discovering this I have found there are AI film festivals and Facebook groups where people are showing off their short AI films. The same haters are on there saying it is all bullshit and crap work but they are failing to see the fact that this is as bad as AI will ever be and it isn’t that bad any more!

Wider implications

In researching this topic further the scope of this goes way beyond the creative industry, of course, but what I didn’t realise is how fast it is all happening! I’ll write another article on that separately as it is too deep to continue here. The best way to show how fast this is all happening is with this timeline of a Midjourney (the famous Image software) prompt. The same prompt has been used in each case but the technology has advanced with time and the speed of improvement is incredible.

Visual timeline showing how fast AI is improving

Prompt: high quality image of a Japanese woman smiling, backlighting, natural pale light, film camera, HDR

The above image doesn’t just show how fast Midjourney is progressing but is a visual representation of how all of AI is progressing. Currently, you can compare the Intelligence of AI to that of a high schooler right now, but by the end of the decade, it is predicted to surpass PhD-level intelligence in all cognitive industries*!

* Cognitive industries are one that doen’t require a human to physically be there - so anything remote!