35%: the slice for Creativity in AI world (for now)

美国哈佛商学院 published an outstanding research titled "How People Are Really Using GenAI?" authored by Marc Zao-Sanders (I highly recommend reading it this article!) where it analyzed use cases of significant impact utilizing AI and Gen AI.

After grouping the data into about 100 different themes, the research resulted in a top 6 themes with use cases provably relevant with Generative AI:

1. Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%)
2. Content Creation & Editing (22%)
3. Personal & Professional Support (17%)
4. Learning & Education (15%)
5. Creativity & Recreation (13%)
6. Research, Analysis & Decision Making (10%)

From the perspective of Communication and Creativity, we can easily say that 35% of all Gen AI projects are directly linked to Creativity (Content Creation & Editing - 22% plus Creativity & Recreation - 13%). This fills my eyes with joy and curiosity!

More and more, I believe that the symbiotic relationship between Human and AI for the exponential increase of creativity and disruption is the greatest turning point of the century! The data never lies: Augmented Creativity powered by AI is a reality and will increasingly be a protagonist in the future!

How to take advantage of this tasty slice of the creative market powered by AI?

From my point of view, we can divide two fields of play to make the most of the potential applications of AI in creativity:

?? Field 1: AI as co-pilot for hyper-efficiency, learning, and market validation.

"Content Creation & Editing" is the second most common theme in the Harvard Business School research. I confess that this is my favorite theme, as it is already part of my daily routine.

Using the strength of AI to do operational work can result in time savings of about 70% in the production of video-scripts, film editing, animation, sound design or image generation.

A quick deep dive into an example from my own experience to exemplify AI as a co-pilot for hyper-efficiency, Learning, and market validation:

?? Production of videos for advertising campaigns powered by AI end-to-end.

In the Pre-Production stage, automated script creation co-piloted with GPT3.5 already generates time-saving results of about 50% for first versions with an positive accuracy close to 75%.

In the Production stage, it's almost an AI playground. A mix of various AI and no-AI tools such as text-transcript from Adobe Premiere, generative fills Adobe Firefly, Canvas, Voice Overs Enhancers and others tools powered by AI, can result in a workflow time reduction of approximately 50% and the quality in animations and VFX keeps improving daily.

In the Post-Production stage, we can encompass AIs for content validation according to market trends and AI tools that identify the most viral parts of the videos for a more assertive and profitable campaign strategy. Furthermore, we can use AI as an investigator through prompt templates, to analyze the entire process and find operational gaps where we can improve and gain efficiency (I affectionately call the Sherlock Holmes AI Agent ~ sorry, nerd alert).

I want to talk a bit more about these Use Cases, what do you think? Is it worth another article?

?? Field 2: AI as a creative mindset transformer.

We are living at a time when only a few brands are truly taking advantage of the potential of AI to leverage disruptive ideas in Creative Industry. How to stand out in a market where tools abound, but the right questions are lacking?

I increasingly think that the creative cadence has changed because of AI. Today, benchmarking on Behance, Pinterest, print catalogs or countless mood boards created to validate key visuals with a group of art directors is no longer the first step for many designers in the creative world.

Instead, asking the right questions to AI tools has become an excellent kick-off in creative brainstorms. Understanding the process of how to distill your content into a concise brief, thereby transforming it into an effective prompt, is even more crucial than the outcome itself.

Finally, we are focusing more on the journey for the most effective result than the result itself. And that's great! It is necessary to enjoy the journey!

And it’s not just me saying that, Austin Kleon (one of my favorite authors) says: "The process is the product. Your journey, your work habits, the way you work and create, that’s the real product."

A quick deep dive into a simple example from my own experience to exemplify AI as a transformer of creative mindset:

The best way to exemplify this topic is to tell a short story that happened to me a few weeks ago.

??? I was challenged to create an AI Image to exemplify one technical material written by Gabriel Marostegam . I am not a specialist in Data Science, so I used GPT as a Brainstorm Converter to transform the highly technical contents into prompts for Midjourney. End of the story: the result of the process generated a Key Visual that served as a standard for the design of all materials. The approval mood board that used to be pages/slides was reduced to a single image.

Creativity for me is like a higher force that you gradually get drunk on ( Rick Rubin wrote an amazing book called "The Creative Act: a way of being" that inspired me).

Keep calm, you remain creative (I'm sure that you are an amazing creator~ by the way), AI is just your friend that helps you to unlock your creative potential. That's all!

Finally, I always like to go back to the article written by Silvio Meira , where he mentions: "We are in the Stone Age of AI, but the future arrives in 800 days". How good it is to see that Communication, Creativity, and Content are occupying the top-six of this Harvard Business School research.

Buckle up, because this number is just beginning! :)

Keep prompting and May the AI Force be with You!