FRED & FARID launches [Ai]magination, a Global AI Studio Tailor Made for CMOs, Brands, Advertising Agencies and Production Companies in 2024.

“With Aimagination, AI has found its heart.”

(Quote generated with GPT4. Curated by Jacques Seguela)

In all fairness, as a creative person, when OpenAI crashed onto our planet, it did not feel so good. It felt like a meteorite extinguishing the dinosaurs. Except this time, we were the dinosaurs.?

I remember long conversations about it with my friend and partner Farid, and nights with my 3 kids sitting on the floor experimenting with our first GPT dialogues. My inner world had just collapsed. Everything I’ve been fighting for - the singularity of human creativity, imagination, originality, emotion, subversion - seemed beaten. Clean KO. I couldn’t feel more useless, foreseeing and feeling with all my body the consequences of this alien presence in our creative community. AI was stealing the most mystical aspect of humanity: our unique ability to create.

Shock. Emptiness. Anxiety. Anger. I felt it all.

And then I got intrigued, in a ‘if you can’t fight it, embrace it’ kind of way. And I started to play. Like a kid interacting with snowflakes for the first time. I started to play with this alien intelligence… asking GPT a funny dialogue in between a Ferrari and a Tesla… asking an imaginary argument in between Tony Kaye and the studio about the edit of American History X; I shared it with Tony at that time.

And a few weeks later, with my friend Feng Huang, our partner in China, we launched two ‘Aimagination’ Art exhibitions, one in Shanghai and one in Paris, gathering dozens of talented AI artists from around the world. We started to slowly get into Generative AI. And like a wrangler facing a wild horse, I developed a mixed feeling of apprehension, but also excitement.

What if I could get onto this horse, and ride it? It would be an extraordinary feeling. So day after day I tried to tame the alien. I felt like the clumsy Jake Sully in the Avatar movie, desperately trying to wrangle his Mountain Banshee. And then, I got used to it. And maybe it got used to me? The apprehensions went away, leaving room for enthusiasm.

Like a nightmare turning into a sweet dream, I realized that I was not facing a monster; I was facing a guitar.

As our advertising mentor Sir John Hegarty recently posted: ‘Gutenberg wasn’t a brilliant writer. The Lumière brothers weren’t great cinematographers. And Leo Fender, the inventor of the electric guitar, couldn’t play the guitar. Inventors are visionaries, but they are rarely the ones to master the craft. Technology needs creativity to thrive.’

OpenAI, Bard, Dalle, Firefly, GPT-4, Midjourney, Play ht, Runway Gen2 are akin to some of the most exciting electric guitars ever invented, but they need musicians. That’s where we, as creatives, come in.

We need AI. But AI needs us.

Together with Feng, we started to build a team of humans passionate about the discovery of Gen AI. Adventurers. First Nicolas who played a major role. And Chelsea, Radouane, Jules, Eileen, Jér?me, Christophe, Véronique, Jalila, Adrien, Paul, Karen, Caroline, Charles, Alex, Tang, Xin, Yuwei, Zoy, Kerry, Karas, Karma, Andrea, Erik, Azur, Billy… and Farid of course.

Our little team worked tirelessly day and night for months, to humbly learn and explore the abyssinian potential of Gen AI, always pushing our own limits. This team was driven by a genuine spirit of collaboration, with members committed to fostering a powerful internal AI culture. A team composed of AI Strategists, Artists, Writers, Retouchers, Editors, Producers, Publicists, IT Technicians, Legal experts, all eager to learn and share. The spirit of knowledge sharing and collaboration was vital as Gen AI continues to evolve at such a quick pace, and to date, there is no formal school for it. It's all about experimenting, sharing knowledge, and learning together.

Efficient creative AI is all about creating a culture.

It cannot be isolated talents. It has to be a community with a common purpose. And everyone from junior AI Artists to Top Management has to get into it. Personal experience is irreplaceable. I have generated more than 10,000 images, spending nights and weekends on my laptop, getting tips from everywhere and everyone, exploring every possibility, influencing prompts with specific URLs, tuning various styles, combining styles, and trying every flag or modifier at the end of each prompt, finessing dialogues or generating VOs, testing adaptability on video, etc. At Aimagination, all of our talents have done it.

No shortcuts. No theory. Just doing it. That’s our culture.

Some of our best talents have already generated over 50,000 images for this adventure, seamlessly combining every AI tool from text to image to sound to video. And with Feng, our Shanghai team has sourced 100+ AI artists around the world to grow a community of talents around us, talents we can potentially work with for our projects.

We are clumsily riding the dragon, but at least we are on the dragon instead of watching it fly away. And we intend to humbly climb our way, inch by inch, to the dragon’s head.

In other terms, a tsunami has hit our creative industry, but instead of running away, we decided to grab the surfboard, run towards the wave, and try to surf it. Stupid maybe. For our website, our team has quietly finalized over 500+ series, encompassing the widest possible variety of styles. And we have meticulously curated 200+ series, after intense internal competition. Coming from an advertising background, we ensured that each series had a distinct concept and met high standards of meaning and craftsmanship. We have also produced 50+ video capsules and curated the 20+ most funny or interesting. We ended up with a selection of 4000+ uploads on our website. 100% AI generated. Zero shooting.

Of course, nothing is perfect yet, especially the videos, as the current development of AI video tools shows its limits. But it’s overall extremely promising for the future.

During this process, we had our ups and downs, moments of excitement and frustrations. AI technology is evolving so fast. Too fast. These months seemed like years!

“Shit, MidJourney has just released a new version, better, but it just killed 20 series I had done. I feel obsolete again / I'll fix it on PS beta / --w for 'weird'? / Sure you checked the fingers? / Discord is down... ah no it's back! / What is Upscale vs Vary? / Is that true you can create a persona on GPT4? / What is U1 vs V1? / Can you really combine the styles on a tuner? How many together? / I can’t put this flag into my tuner, can I?/? Shall I Vary (Subtle) or Vary (Strong) for this? / Shit I’m on V6, no tuner!? Can’t find the styles anymore! Can we still use 5.2 for some series? V6 is killer, but I miss 5.2 / Please share your modifiers, cause I’m lost here / Can you turn off your notification sound please? It’s annoying / Oh, ‘pinky dreamy’ series again, you really love clichés, don’t you? / The V6’s prompt is a whole new language; hate MidJourney for that, I mean, love it but hate it. I’m a junior, again / Please slow down in Silicon Valley. It’s hard to catch up! / I love it, but will it work on Gen2? I doubt it, the face will be weird / You can’t use ‘/describe’ like that on everything, it’s too easy! Imagine your own prompts! / Why is it on Discord and not directly in an App?”

........this was our soundtrack for months.

Following Gen AI's fast pace feels like being stuck in Groundhog Day, having to learn everything all over again every day.

But the process of generating these hundreds of thousands images was reassuring in a way, as we discovered that our individual productions were clearly revealing the richness and variety of our unique human personalities and styles. The machine hasn’t leveled us. The AI almost acted like an old ‘photographic developer bath’ of our souls. Ask someone to generate 50 AI series, and you will see who this person deeply is, better than with any psychological test. It’s reassuring in a way that the machine doesn’t take over our humanity. On the contrary, it reveals it.

Our purpose is to be relevant to CMOs and brands in 2024.

While there are numerous talented AI artists and numerous advertising talents out there, few will successfully manage to merge these two cultures in a way that is efficient for brands. Aimagination strives to be among the best AI studios to guide brands on this exciting journey. Our goal is to merge the best of our conceptual creative advertising culture with the forefront of Gen AI culture. Reading the latest LinkedIn post by leading CMO Antonio Lucio, which states, 'I am inspired by the challenges and possibilities of our changing world, the transformative dynamics of Gen AI applications to Marketing and Comms,' gives us hope about the potential opportunities for Aimagination to work with major brands in 2024.

But for Aimagination to have a chance to become one of the leading AI studios in our industry, we know how important it is to be open to collaborating with any agency or advertising group. It’s something we welcome and openly embrace. We’ll be happy to work with brands, advertising agencies, production companies and artists. Feng, Farid and I are approaching this new venture in a humble, open and collaborative spirit with everyone.

Yes, we will produce in very efficient ways, but it would be sad to limit the experience to these aspects alone.?

Gen AI is about much more than just ‘cost and speed’. It’s probably the most ambiguously frightening and inspiring creative experience since the magical paintings on the walls of prehistoric caves. It’s about an extraordinary encounter, an interaction with a superior alien brain; it’s about merging intelligences to create life. It's a dance. The extremely powerful artificial intelligence of the machine dancing with the fallible, emotional, poetic, spiritual, and conscious human intelligence. This syncretism makes everything possible.

Nitro dances with glycerin.

The scary part; until now, we creatives have been evolving surrounded by constraints - constraints some could complain about, but constraints that were in fact reassuring; constraints were like floor, ceiling, and walls. They’re gone now. It’s all about our intention - is it original, relevant, meaningful and ambitious enough? - and our curation - is it sharp and tasteful enough? The thing in the middle disappeared.

Our imagination is lost in space with no gravity.

A famous French astronaut, Thomas Pesquet, described the awful feeling of going in space, alone out of the spaceship for the first time: apparently the brain instantly loses all its bearings, and sends the message to the whole body that ‘you are dying’... which generates instant anxiety, vertigo, heart acceleration, sweat… and the astronaut can’t do anything about it. He just has to get used to it, and ultimately get over it. And that’s a bit how your imagination feels facing your first prompts. Vertiginous, because it’s all about your own capacity to push the boundaries of your own imagination. It’s like driving a F1; it will always go faster than what you can handle as a pilot. With Gen AI, you can generate anything. Gen AI has no limit in expression. You do.

Your only limit is your imagination.

Well, thank you for reading this text until the end! We hope you will enjoy strolling through our little website. It is far from being perfect. Videos are still a challenge for sure. Generative AI is still a WIP. And we as a team are still a WIP. But we hope you will enjoy at least a few series or videos we’ve created.

Anyway, this is us. This is who we are. Unperfect, but heartful.

We have put all our heart into cooking this, and we hope you will feel it. If not, we’ll work harder next time. Fred & Farid never give up. ‘Si un jour on baisse les bras, coupez-nous la tête.’?

Generative AI is not just about developing imaginaries. It is an invitation to reimagine our own imagination.

[Ai]magination

Imagination Reimagined.

aimagination.com