Why AI and creativity are not at war TOU

There is currently understandable great concern in the creative fields about the impact of recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will have on jobs and on creativity in general.

After using Mid Road to generate a cover image for a story about Alex Jones in Atlantic, Charlie Warzel has apologized to the art community and vowed to never use AI generation tools again. In his apology, Warzel said the creation of the image was so easy and the result so good that he hadn’t given proper thought to the ramifications.

Although noble, the feeling of an apology only proves concern.

Committing to not using useful and available technology does not seem like a lasting defense in the face of change, as it was not the case in the face of earlier technological advances like the printing press, mechanized agricultural equipment or even the original “computer”.

We’re living a curve in the AI ​​progress curve, with things long considered nigh impossible to accomplish on a seemingly weekly basis. There is a great saying in the AI ​​world: People mistakenly believe that AI will steal their jobs. This will not be the case. But someone who uses it better than them will.

This will also prove true in the world of advertising.

A new wave of creative potential for generative AI

open-source neural networks like OpenAI Whisper have advanced speech-to-text transcription models to the point where they’re nearly perfect, even amid thick accents, fast-paced speech, and loud backgrounds.

In visual generative AI, in just a few months FROM E2 so dramatically improved by DALL·E that anyone can now generate original, stunning images from any text prompt. And Mid Road built AI generation into a Discord bot, a smart UI move that instantly made AI-based creativity common, making learning to use it easy and fun.

Perhaps most impressive, at least from a technical point of view, Steady broadcast figured out how to separate AI generation from the large compute-powered server-side models of the platforms mentioned above and move the work to your local device.

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

This is not a terrible warning; it is a call to rethink what is possible. There is a long history of human-technology partnerships which I believe show us a more likely future.

For more than a century, the automobile – a truly incredible technological advance – has been essentially useless without a human driver. And while billions of dollars have recently been invested in the development of autonomous vehicles, the complexity of creating new laws, the ethics of introducing driverless cars to streets full of humans, and the fact that many many people who like to drive their car prove that we are still far from a completely autonomous reality.

Closer to home when it comes to creativity, Adobe’s suite of Creative Cloud tools have revolutionized an industry, but they’re just as useless as a driverless car without a creator to bring idea and direction to their mighty platform. – form of justification of ideas.

Even in the face of all the recent advances, this is true today more than ever. The question for us, as an industry, therefore, is not: “How do we regulate AI-based technology in creativity to protect our ways of working?” Rather, the question is, “How can we use emerging AI technology to create entirely new areas of employment that add greater impact to our customers?”

The new creative genius

With that in mind, the emerging field of creative analytics is a great place to look for a more positive view of the future. AI-powered tools have enabled a growing number of technology platforms to instantly decompress creative decisions in every frame of millions of ads and compare that creative attribute information to a series of performance signals.

This process allows well-trained people machine learning (ML) to display data showing which decisions positively or negatively impact a company’s desired business outcomes. But here’s the thing: the models can only tell us what the signals are. They can’t tell us why. And in that “why” lies the strategic insight that can unlock millions of dollars of value for a marketer.

A human creative analyst can analyze this AI-enabled flow of “what” and understand the “why”.

This area of ​​strategic creative analytics, or simply creative analytics, is going to be a major growth area in the years to come. We’re already seeing many top marketers and agencies stepping into this creative role – yes, data science is a Creative role. The strategic ideas that come from these people (soon to be well paid) with this technology at their disposal will allow other people, sometimes using tools like DALL E 2 or Midjourney, to drive the creation of smart creations that do more than just scale the content, but actually improve it.

And isn’t that the point? The future is coming fast. For those who choose to adopt it, a world of opportunities awaits them.

Alex Collmer is CEO and co-founder of VidMob.