How AI is Disrupting Creative Content Creation

The pace of progress in AI is accelerating rapidly. In the past month alone, these are just a few of the news items I’ve seen:

• Canva Partners With Runway to Create Generative AI Videos
• How Nvidia is deepening its partnerships with the advertising industry
• OpenAI unveils better image generator, DALL-E 3, as AI arms race deepens

Deep learning has dramatically improved in effectiveness and impact, leading to a near-human-level performance in many aspects of sight, conversational speech, and problem-solving. As a result, the creative industry is amid a major transformation rivaling the introduction of social media, don't fall into the common trap of saying it's not very good and it's just a fad because AI is still in its infancy it's only just learned to crawl.

Overall, AI is already upending the world of content creation, with substantial impacts on marketing, software, design, entertainment, and interpersonal communications. This is not yet Skynet or the Hal-9000 that humans have long dreamed of and perhaps feared, but it certainly has started to look that way to some casual observers.

Generative AI can already do a lot. It’s able to produce text and images, professional communications, program code, and create poetry, and artwork. The software uses complex machine learning models to predict the next word based on previous word sequences, or the next image based on words describing previous images.

But thankfully for us, to use generative AI effectively, you still need human involvement at both the beginning and the end of the creative process. To start with, a human must enter a prompt into a generative model to have it create content. Creative prompts yield creative outputs. A “Prompt Engineer” is likely to become an established profession, at least until the next generation of even smarter AI emerges.

These universal content machines, for now, working alongside humans, have drastically changed the creative process within the advertising, marketing, and movie world:

Advertising Applications

?DALL-E 2 and other image-generation tools are already being used for advertising. Heinz, for example, used an image of a ketchup bottle with a label like Heinz’s to argue that “This is what ‘ketchup’ looks like to AI, thus creating their first-ever ad campaign with visuals entirely artificial intelligence.

Nestle working with the advertising firm Ogilvy Parisnbsp used an AI-enhanced version of a Vermeer painting to help sell La Laitière, one of its yogurt brands. The campaign was titled “It’s so pleasurable to take the time.

Marketing Applications

The current generative models are valuable across a number of creative endeavors, but marketing applications are perhaps the most common. According to Statista, a 2023 research study found that?73%?of U.S. marketers stated that their organizations had used generative artificial intelligence tools, including chatbots, in their line of work.

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ChatGPT and other generative AI tools enable marketing brainstorming sessions, offering suggestions and alternative perspectives. Creators can then leverage these AI-generated ideas as a starting point, thus leading to the final creative content strategies.

Jasper, for example, a marketing-focused version of GPT-3, can produce blogs, social media posts, web copy, sales emails, ads, and other types of customer-facing content. Its creators maintain that it frequently tests its outputs with A/B testing and that its content is optimized for search engine placement. Jasper also fine-tunes GPT-3 models with their customers’ best outputs, which Jasper’s executives say has led to substantial improvements.?Rosa Lear, director of product-led growth, said that Jasper helped the company ramp up their?content strategy, and the writers now have time to do better research, ideation, and strategy.

Script and movie generation

AI has been used to create stories as well as optimize the use of supporting data,?de-age actors and capture their images for future use. It’s common practice now for AI to organize and search through huge image, sound, and text archives for documentaries. And recently, ScriptBook introduced a story-awareness concept for AI-based storytelling. The generative models focus on three aspects: awareness of characters and their traits, awareness of a script’s style and theme, and awareness of a script’s structure, so the resulting script is more natural.

The AI company Metaphysic is immortalizing actors through data capture—with many cameras taking images at the same time—which allows performers to appear in future films without ever being on set.

And on December 17, 2022, 28 Squared Studios and Moon Ventures released?The?Safe Zone—the first-ever film written and directed by Open AI’s ChatGPT.? Through this project,?The?Safe Zone?team showcased the possibilities of humans working with AI in movie production. The?Safe Zone?team asked ChatGPT to come up with multiple story ideas and then selected the top five.

The team then fed these ideas back to the AI, which came up with scripts for each of them. The team needed to flesh out the details of the script they selected by creating prompts for the AI to create more details about certain parts of the story.? After the script was done, the producers again prompted ChatGPT to create a shot list for the film. Not only did ChatGPT create the list, it also determined what the cast should wear and what props to use, just like a human director. This experiment proved that if AI is used judiciously and prompted correctly, it can speed up the film production process and therefore lower production costs.

From these few examples of creative applications, it should be clear that we are now only scratching the surface of how generative AI will affect organizational processes, lower budgets, and change the roles of people within the creative industry. It may soon be standard practice, for example, for such systems to craft most or all of the written or image-based content for a project—to provide first drafts of articles, blog posts, presentations, videos, and so forth. If these AI models continue to progress as they have in the short time they have existed, one can hardly imagine all the opportunities and implications that they may engender.

Soon AI will be adopted much more widely as a tool or collaborative assistant for creativity, supporting acquisition, production, post-production, delivery, and interactivity. Worried about how this AI adoption will affect you? ?My next article will focus on the real-world workplace and workforce ramifications of AI adaptation. But fear not—the likelihood of AI (or its developers) winning awards for creative works in competition with human creatives is still somewhere in the future along with Hal-9000

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Next week's article: AI’s workplace and workforce ramifications.

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