The AI Enhanced Future of Creatives

Prompt for above image?: portrait of a beautiful young female designer smiling with closed eyes, who is half a human and half an artificial intelligence, with letters in various languages in the background, in the style of new yorker magazine cover illustrations

Whether you find yourself absolutely in Awe or extremely worrisome as you interact with the influx of AI-generated artwork, There is one thing that no one can deny — The nature of creative work is changing in front of our eyes.

As a creative and a facilitator I find myself moving frequently between amazement and terror, as I scroll through my feed and find myself not sure anymore, what is AI-generated and what is Human-generated while the borders become blurrier day by day (mostly thanks to the work of DALL·E 2 or Midjourney AI — what I collaborated with for the illustrations for this article).

The notion of it is indeed scary, and the big question remains — how will all of this change the creative process, the creative community, the design industry and our ability to bring ideas to life as a species?

Already now, I witness creatives of different fields, expanding their abilities into new frontiers, and being able to bring their concepts into life with relatively simple usage of prompting and image editing.

Similarly to the way that design software changed everything for creatives who don’t draw, These latest applications also make creativity much more accessible to a wider audience that was until now challenged by their lack of craft in the creative fields and is now empowered by this new tool to visualize their ideas, dreams and projects. (there are also more accessible online AI tools such as RuDall-e or CogView )

Nothing much to compare but this entire period makes me think of how it probably was to be a creator during the last major tectonic activities as cameras (first still and then film) became available to the public, and how worrisome & exciting this must have been for creatives everywhere.

Imagining the product-focused AI tools of the?future

Prompt for above image?: A billboard commercial for an app for astronauts, next to a busy highway with a city in the background, in the style of a photo-realistic 35mm film

While now the situation revolves mostly around experimentation & play (such is the case with other similar projects like the OpenAI Jukebox , google doodle bach project , or the poetry generator ) A future that seems right around the corner is that we might very soon see practical product-focused applications for these AI-creatives in the field of Branding, Marketing, digital products, industrial and fashion design.

A creative team will be able to communicate with AI and use it as a tool to create a Brand identity which will be used as a base to create an AI enhanced marketing campaign, using AI to develop all the visuals necessary, on top of which they could prompt a prototype for their website, and also realize concepts for the interior design of their company’s HQ and employer branding products.

Soon after, designs will be tested out as an AI prototype as a part of the product design process, simply by prompting the software and twitching data, as we can already see in some of the research done by Glideapps to test such a feature in combination with Data models and AI-generated visual systems.

All these processes of course still need creatives, but the nature of the work will change dramatically.

I don’t believe that our work as creatives will stop where AI comes in as creatives are such an integral part of the way we experience brands, products and our everyday lives. But to be completely honest, we will need to show quite a lot of flexibility and adapt to the situation, re-creating both the concept and practicality of what it means to be a creative professional in our times, basically giving birth together as a community to a completely new craft.

Knowing the?limits

Prompt for above image?: Picasso’s bull meeting Picasso on the subway while reading a book about art, in the style of Studio Ghibli?

A talk with a good programmer friend of mine reminded me of the limitations that AI image generation software has and will probably continue to have for a long while — and I found that a good way to understand any creative medium is by studying its limitations and using it to our advantage.

One tremendous limitation in the creation of AI-generated creative work is obviously how result-oriented the entire experience is, while in reality, as creatives we often start with an OK idea that carves itself into its WOW factor while we go through the phases and make tons of trials & mistakes.

Most of what we know today as “great design work” was born out of step-by-step experimentation, a journey that we simply cannot tap into while working with AI software... yet (we can get variations but that’s not nearly enough).

Another very important limitation becomes clear when one would try to generate conceptual art, and that is due to the fact that while AI-art focuses on objects and styles, conceptual art requires the observer to make the actual connection between the elements, connections that are so deeply based in the human emotional experience and can only be superficially imitated by an AI.

A computer knows the data of what we tag as delightful, but can’t really imitate the experience of what feeling clicks within us when we smile as we understand a reference to a personal memory or cultural identity.

There are also quite a lot of questions regarding the limitations of the data itself, that sum up to a limited or distorted perception of the objects and people being portrayed in the results.

The future of Creatives lies in communication

Prompt for above image?: an illustration of two people talking with speech bubbles, in it English and binary are forming into a new language, in the style of propaganda posters

Understanding the creative medium (together with its limitations) will enable the creative professions of the future to know how to communicate better with the Algorithm, creating something I like to call “Prompt designers” which would tighten even more the connection between creativity and technology.

As we step further away from the creative crafts, perhaps something that might differentiate a good designer from a great designer would be their understanding of the technological limitations, and therefore their usage of prompting and filtering to translate an idea for the AI to generate more accurate results.

Though I believe that there will always be a need for the creative crafts and professions, creatives will still need to develop their practice and focus on conjuring impactful ideas.

I could also imagine that studying the creative fields in the (not so far) future won’t include as much focus on the craft anymore and instead will make way for more computer science and learning to collaborate with AI tools.

A note on opportunity and curiosity

Prompt for above image?: a bird-eye photo of a team of creatives sitting around a table with an open sketchbook bursting with light, in the style of vector digital art

To conclude, AI is not naturally creative, and creativity simply cannot lose its connection with humanity. AI always requires human input to know what to generate, and those influenced by our creative work will always be people, and people appreciate the playfulness of the human mind and the skillfulness of the human hand (for reference, simply imagine the difference in the experience between enjoying a homemade meal and passing through a drive-in that serves homemade style food).

This moment serves us to reconsider many things, including the creative process, the semantics and articulation of ideas, how collaboration between people and machines might look like, and what all of this means regarding the creative copyrights, our ability to imagine and our eventual wellbeing (this does get quite addictive I must say).

A real concern I do have is that our ability to imagine would be handicapped by the same process that “googling” things brought to our remembering capacity, or how navigation apps hindered our ability to locate ourselves on a map by bloody opening our eyes and looking around us.

The opportunity that we do have right now though is deciding together on the nature of the next creative evolutionary step, and who knows what we might learn about ourselves on that journey?

Probably the best tools I can think of to take along on the ride are our innate creative collaboration, playfulness and curiosity.

But most importantly, what would you take with you on this journey?

----

Boaz (Bo) Balachsan is an award-winning design director & the founder of Borderless Studios for Creative & Consultancy.?

Interested in more of this content or want to share your thoughts?

Feel free to drop me a line at?: [email protected]