Artificial Intelligence is going to change the Creative Industry. Forever.

Okay, that was a bit clickbaity but, I've been exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI) and I want to share my creative experiments and outcomes. AI for creative is here, and it’s more important for advertising and broader creative industries than we could possibly imagine. AI is able to brainstorm ideas, concepts and campaigns. It can write compelling copy, value propositions, and business models. AI can write code, create any visual, create video content, imagine 3D models and do just about any creative task. So, how can we harness it and embrace it?

The capacity and potential of AI is about to take centre stage in every brand, creative director and agency’s focus, as we all figure out what it means and how to incorporate it into a new creative process.

This matters to me as a Creative Director, Strategist and Copywriter because there are lots of very smart people trying to figure out how to make creative, at scale. I imagine that in the near future, we'll see AI creative at Cannes, or have it revealed that the best movie Oscar was actually written, storyboarded, and produced in virtual space. Perhaps I could visit these AI movie sets in my Ready Player Me avatar, talk to AI NPCs and set up shop as a virtual spoon-making shop, using haptics to craft objects, in a virtual space, by AI. Who knows, it's exciting and I want to see how to stay relevant in the future, legit!

In this post, I’m going to share my journey and learnings around creative uses of AI, focusing less about on the tech, and more on the output of AIs and how they'll impact the creative process! I've been exploring and experimenting with new AI tools built by the open-source community and here will share three creative experiments, sandboxed in real-world needs and scenarios, to demonstrate a smidgen of the scope available to us when we collaborate and embrace the magnitude power of the AI creative partners/collaborator. I would say creative assistant but, the AI is definitely smarter than me.

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Experiment 1: Can an AI be a DJ? Meet Egorithm

Egorithm is a Virtual Influencer DJ with an AI mind, giving it artificial agency over itself. An algorithm with an ego, it picks, plays and produces music. Using AI, it picked its gender (it/its); it had three IRL radio shows across the world and was the first ever AI to be verified on Spotify. It was given autonomy to choose the music it likes, its radio shows were called Lesser Heard Bangers, where Egorithm surfaces new and lesser-known music across millions of tracks, giving a platform to diverse and inclusive talent, at scale.?

Egorithm was shared at Meta’s AI showcase in Cannes 2022, demonstrating the unlocks when c as the world’s first virtual DJ with an AI mind. At this global summit celebrating the best of creativity,? it presented a film written and pretty much directed by itself. Egorithm chose clips and picked a human voice from 137 VO artists from fiverr.com. This was an important decision as the text-to-speech tools available at the time were either too robotic or were a trope of digital voices. To pay for the human VO artist, Egorithm was given access to a tool to design merch. It co-designed a scarf, and the profits from sales were used to pay for a real voice.?

The attention this experiment gained signals just how much virtual influencers are going to become a vital tool for brands to connect with customers at scale. They will form a bridge to the immersive metaverse, populating digital spaces where people and AI virtual characters and creators interact. In the near term, the ethics around virtual influencers and understanding of the building, personality development and lifetime narrative has been and continues to be a vital part of the exploration into AI.

Why AI?

AIs can write any text in any style, tone or format. These AIs are called LLM (large language models). They have essentially been reading all the words on the internet; they have access to numerous datasets giving them the ability to write coherent text. They don’t know what they’re writing, they’re just really good at predicting the next letter in a word, and with that simple idea, they can write anything.?

There are about seven most commonly used AI in this category. Open AI’s GPT-3 is the most versatile and was used to help Egorithm write its film script, write social posts, and even the automated AI emails that were sent to 1000’s of radio stations around the world to get shows (sorry about that, if you got one!).

Experiment 2 - Can an AI be an Advertising Agency? Meet Brainclub5000, the world’s first AI creative advertising agency

https://brainclub5000.com/

Brainclub5000, a 97% AI advertising Agency is a fictional advertising agency. Created to sandbox eight projects to demonstrate the prowess and ability of AIs across a broad range of ad agency tasks you would find in real-world brand scenarios.?

The experiments were very high level and obviously doesn’t reflect the intricacies of an actual agency. That said, I want to test the hypothesis that AI could replace or elevate an agency at all stages of the advertising pipeline - the ideation stage, concepting, content creation, production, media buying and scheduling. The 3% non-AI was me - creative direction, prompt engineering and finance.

The Work

Impossible Collaborations

Collabs continue to be a key part of merchandising and marketing for brands, finding synergy between two businesses to create culturally resonant products, experiences and events that create desirability. Gucci and Pringles was the first suggestion from the Text-Gen AI. When I asked it to further develop the idea, the AI delivered!? “A limited edition glass Gucci x Pringle tubes filled with a yet unknown flavour.” This description was then given to an Image-Gen AI which instantly visualised the idea, creating compelling key visuals.

Nike and McDonald’s - Text to Graphic Design

This project tested the capabilities of Image-Gen AIs such as Dall-E 2, and Stable Diffusion to generate graphic design, concept visuals and other brand assets. Both Nike and McDonald’s have iconic visual language so combining them, in a way that captures the essence of both was essential to the success of this experiment. The AI concepted and generated Sneakers, Posters, Merchandise, Photo Layouts and much more.

STEM cycling clothing - 360 AI Creative Partner

This placeholder brand was created from scratch to test a suite of AIs collectively acting as a single creative partner. STEM clothing was conceptualised by the AI as an answer to a brief to create a business model, value proposition, brand guidelines, content and adverts promoting its unique offering.

STEM is a Strava-linked clothing company that only allows riders to buy items when they can prove they’ve put in work on the saddle. A visual way to let all other cyclists know that you’re serious about your riding. The AI found 100 common cycling challenges happening all over the world on Strava and created a cycling kit for each one. From jerseys, bibs and even frame art, the concept was vertically integrated into the cycling niche.

What is relevant here are the AI-generated adverts that mixed content with ads in a uniquely appealing way for the audience of affluent cyclists out to prove their prowess. The AI had been learning from a dataset of copywriting models and settled on using the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) to write compelling copy aimed at a very particular sports niche.

My AI was given access to a stock photo library and a budget to spend. It picked a range of cycling clips and arranged and edited them, adding titles and a CTA. and was able to create multiple variants, each crafted for niche audiences. What was truly special was the sound it chose: the sound of a formula 1 car revving, a common meme in the cycling community. Which is your favourite?

FOAM Mattress?

FOAM is a fictional D2C mattress brand conceived with the AI. With this project I wanted to experiment with the AI’s ability to generate creative variations for lower funnel objectives. The text-gen AI wrote a VC pitch deck, following the YCombinator model, imagining market fit and potential. Then, using its north star and mission statements, began generating scripts which then informed the final video content. An amazingly efficient creative pipeline, allowing one creative to multiply their output across platforms with ease and efficiency.

The AI worked with me to identify six audiences and created video content for each, with varying CTAs. The AI also wrote what is probably my favourite tagline, ever! “Foam, You Are Feeling Very Sleepy.”

Experiment 3 - Can an AI Brainstorm? Meet Brainstorm AI?

AI can mimic and replicate many of the creative tasks that creatives do, as this could immensely benefit small businesses and creatives from diverse backgrounds.?My hypothesis was that AI could be used to generate inspiring, surprising and delightful ideas for brands and become a tool that any creative can use to quickly generate ideas and thought starters that could enable more than the creative department to buildout creative for clients - and for me, it could get rid of writer's block, let me riff off any of its output and recombining and crafting them into campaigns and ideas.

Brainstorm AI is an AI tool able to brainstorm ideas with you, about any brand and in any format. All the user has to do is type in a format - AR, VR, Video Content, Newspapers, Radio Ad etc. and the Brand, then in a moment, the user is presented with 5 ideas, to get you going! Simple, disruptive and super simple to understand

Experiment 3 - Can an AI tell stories?

Now the AI could generate ideas that were good enough to pass an ideas-Turing-test, I wanted to see how far the method I was using could go. As I’m a copywriter at heart, talking to the AIs has always been about conversation, an exchange of ideas and prompts.?

My hypothesis is AI can tell compelling stories at scale and about any topic, for any brand or even an AI blockbuster.??

Rather than reinventing the wheel, I thought about the way the engineers at Pixar approached storytelling. They enthral their audience, winning over 500 movie awards and multiple billions in profits for the studio. They understand the framework of story, and why technology is so compelling when shrouded in story. I still remember the little lamp- (Stability AI let’s have a coffee!)

To put this to the test, I began by teaching the AI the tropes of storytelling. The seven basic plots would unlock the way that AIs could write stories, building on the AI copywriting on synopsis, log lines and scripts for the previous experiments.?

After fine-tuning the AI to write story outlines, I can now give the AI a prompt like “write me a story about a car and an eagle, with a plot twist” and the AI is able to understand the task and create an unexpected plot twist.?

Conclusion

This post has covered a lot of ground. There are new tools, new methods and processes that are radically altering the way we create and work. Everything you’ve seen requires a human to creatively direct, to craft and refine and to further build.?

AI tools are here, and you can use them to multiply your creative impact, whether you’re a brand wanting to connect with customers and reward them or bring a new sort of narrative to your loyalist fans.

Professionally, my goal is to bridge the creative capabilities of AIs to brands, creators, creatives and craftspeople and help decision-makers and image-makers understand the potential of AI for their creative process. Ultimately, developing tools and ideas that engage and inspire creators and clients to make the impossible, possible. Personally and creatively, I’m exploring what AI means for the metaverse, gaming and for mixed reality experiences, from a culture-first, playful perspective.?

AI is going to change everything. By the time you’ve read this, it probably already has.

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