AI Is Rapidly Changing the Creative Landscape
Artificial Intelligence software innovations, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, have taken center stage in the digital world due to how dramatically they are transforming how we generate content. From text to images, and now even video can now be produced in a fraction of the time it used to take, often only needing a well-crafted prompt to be created.
New uses for this software intelligence are coming to light every day, each more amazing than the last. These new tools for improving creative and marketing workflows can be intimidating, given the re-training that is needed to keep up with this rapidly changing tech front.
Many creatives are feeling threatened by this sea change in content creation. These concerns are well founded now that AI can very effectively create insightful written content, work out solutions for coding challenges, as well as develop stunning visual graphics in just minutes.
The potential to replace people with AI resources is more real than it’s ever been. However, there are also an endless number of ways to utilize AI, which will support and improve your creative teams’ output. Teams that embrace this technology will be able to enhance their workflows, increase efficiency, and expand their capabilities, giving their organizations a distinct competitive advantage. Let’s explore some of the more compelling ways that AI can enhance creative teams that are willing to explore their potential.
AI Is Already Able to Enhance Your Teams’ Output
There are numerous examples of AI applications in different creative disciplines (e.g., graphic design, writing, music, video). Additionally, many solutions are coming from team management and productivity apps.
However, regardless of the area we apply AI, it can only do so effectively with human supervision. This is because AI systems are essentially sampling from the internet to provide their answers. This means that AI can sometimes pull from incorrect or bizarre sources of information, adding an extra arm here and there, or providing an answer that is out of left field and potentially incorrect.
AI creativity is still more of a process of resampling than it is actual creative originality.
The most effective graphics, text content, and (especially) strategies still need a creative team to guide their deliverables to get the best results.
Enhancing Creative Efficiency and Productivity
Streamlining repetitive tasks with AI automation is the go-to way to leverage this tech to get the drudgery out of your creative team’s workflow. Utilizing AI-powered project management and collaboration tools will soon become the norm. In the meantime, teams that are early adopters can enjoy higher efficiencies, optimizing their workflow and reducing time constraints with the AI solutions already on the market.
Productivity tasks are getting a makeover with AI note-taking, summarizing, and transcript tools like Fireflies.ai or Read.ai are a great way to help creatives take more effective notes from their meetings without needing to even look at their notepad. Suddenly our chicken-scratch-filled notepads are empty, and yet they won’t miss a beat thanks to AI summaries. These AI tools provide searchable meeting transcripts and AI-driven summaries in seconds, which equates to more efficient and more understandable notes, allowing you to give more attention to the topic at hand.
There is also a huge array of AI chatbots available to increase marketers’ ability to speak to their stores’ visitors. Again, these need proper “training” to ask/answer the correct questions to be effective, but with the right tweaking, these can handle customers well and provide a scalable solution.
Bots like Wizybot, Kamichat, and RepAI all utilize ChatGPT to provide ecommerce support from order tracking to product recommendations. They can also provide product description writing in bulk, something that would take a writing team weeks to do is now able to be done in hours.
Add to this the concept of product photo editing in bulk to remove backgrounds or generate different ones, and suddenly you can make big branding changes that would have been too cost-prohibitive even to consider before. Here are just a few of the AI background generators for product photos out today:
Unlocking Creativity and Innovation
Improving content creation and personalization are some obvious solutions that AI software provides. However, there are a number of areas that creative teams may not consider that can also be huge time savers. Let’s say, for instance, that you don’t often need a backend developer, but occasionally your creatives need some JavaScript or an import script to modify a product database you need to migrate. This is a great case for ChatGPT to step in as your fractional backend developer to work out the Excel scripts needed. However, unless you know how to write the prompt, these solutions can be challenging to get out of the AI.
Customizing content for specific target audiences using AI algorithms is a recent innovation that is just starting to be explored by marketers. For example, AI can now modify your targeted landing page headlines to boost clicks and sales by matching your audiences’ specific keyword searches directly to the headlines of the page. This way, your visitor feels like the page is answering their specific question.
But again, if you don’t have a solid strategy, the tools cannot develop an overarching brand strategy for you. Coming up with the strategy is still on the creative team, and this is not likely to change anytime soon.
It is a bit meta, but we wanted to see what AI thinks of its role in the industry, so we asked ChatGPT how it can help creative professionals create content and how embracing generative AI benefits creative teams. This is what it had to say:
“AI, especially generative AI, benefits creative professionals by:
- Generating fresh ideas and inspiration.
- Automating repetitive tasks, saving time.
- Enhancing collaboration with creative feedback.
- Facilitating quick prototyping and testing.
- Personalizing content for targeted audiences.
- Creating content at scale efficiently.
- Augmenting human creativity, not replacing it.
- Overcoming creative blocks and fostering innovation.
- Reducing time-to-market for projects.
- Providing cost-effective content generation.”
Embracing generative AI empowers creative teams with efficiency, innovation, and audience engagement. However, human review and ethical considerations remain essential for maintaining content quality and originality.
Enhancing Visual Storytelling with AI-Generated Imagery and Video Editing
The AI-driven image & video generation tools are starting to catch up to the text content generators. With systems such as Playgroundai.com, ClipDrop.co, Runway AI, and Kaiber AI, we can now create anything imaginable and then develop videos around those ideas faster than anyone ever would have thought possible. There are large groups of AI filmmakers cropping up all over YouTube because of this newfound way to create footage and even visual effects on a budget.
One of the challenges that many AI systems have had is working with image text. It usually comes out garbled into abstract lines or strings of words that don’t make sense. Now AI seems to have worked out a model that is able to properly interpret text embedded inside the imagery and modify the messaging on the fly. This has long been the disadvantage of AI imagery tools, but AdCreative.ai has produced a dependable way to develop ads at scale. Supervision is still needed, of course, but this will impact the scale that a creative team can output without question.
Modernized Creative Editing Tools
Creative teams can now do things with imagery that were impossible just last year. Many of the following tasks would have to be done manually or would not be possible at all:
- Take a low-resolution image and upscale it to high resolution;
- Change the lighting of an image and have the AI figure out how it would look with the new shadows and highlights;
- Remove items from photos and have the AI generate the background fill with more realism than ever before;
- Remove or replace the backgrounds on a whole folder full of product images;
- “Uncrop” an image to go easily from landscape to portrait with seamlessly generated imagery filling in the gaps;
- Create an ad group and then use the same imagery to create a video from the still graphics;
- Smooth out choppy movement in your video footage;
- Dynamically add your customer into the generated graphics. With a simple upload their face/room/experience can be added to demo products in a much more personal way.
Ethical Considerations and Human-AI Collaboration
There is no way to get around addressing the concerns regarding AI’s impact on creators and the potential job displacement that all this new efficiency may have. There may be a lot of business owners who decide to be their own DIY creatives using these innovative tools.
Historically when an industry goes through a revolution like this, there is a time of retraining and retooling followed by a boost in demand. This is because the standards of output have increased, meaning that we found new tasks and deliverables that we didn’t even know we needed. So, sure, there will not be as much demand for the redundant tasks, but there will be more need for strategic creatives that can pull all the tools together to build a more compelling brand strategy.
Those that have ridden the AI wave of innovation will surely still be in high demand. One cannot overemphasize the importance of human oversight and creativity in the AI-driven process. We should be encouraging this collaboration between creative professionals and AI systems for the best output and to evolve with the tools.
The Benefits of AI for Creative Teams Far Outweigh the Concerns
The landscape for creative teams has never been as full of new ways to wow your clients and increase conversions. AI software can effectively remove the tedium from your workflow while expanding your deliverables to almost anything you can imagine, all with exceptional speed and realism. Learning how to stand out as a creative or as a marketing professional with these tools at our disposal should be a very high-priority goal.
Artificial Intelligence, like the examples included here, is the direction that our technology has been heading in for decades. We simply got an evolutionary leap with the advent of so many open AI software tools hitting the market so rapidly.
Encourage your creative professionals to embrace AI to support building better campaigns, better task management, more imaginative graphics, stronger image editing in bulk, generative video, and an overall better connection with their audience.
As we continue forward on the AI frontier, we will likely discover new and better ways to collaborate with AI, further evolving the role of AI in the creative industry. Stay tuned!
