By Matt Stokes, Head of Creative at Arke Agency
Before you delegate your actual creative process to the latest AI tool, consider what you’re asking it to do, and which of your skills or talents you’re attempting to replace.
AI should be used for actions like creating variants, cleaning up, complementing your work, but not replacing the core creative thinking.
After all, it is merely scraping the internet, not creating something new. Surfacing results quickly doesn’t correlate with originality.
If you’re trying to get design, motion or a creative concept that will cut through and disrupt, then AI tools won’t be the solution on their own, but instead you can use them to support your strategic thinking.
If everyone is using the same AI tools, are all the creative agencies’ pitches and tenders then not going to become homogenised?
Think back to the adoption of the internet. We learnt to understand how searching worked, with numerous search engines available, and the chosen few becoming the norm.
But what about the others that didn’t make it? Anyone remember Ask Jeeves – with everything defaulting to a question that was slightly loosely related to the question we had written. So instead of actually getting answers to the question you asked, you would get answers to a pre-defined question that was similar.
This starkly revealed Ask Jeeves’ process as completely artificial. You were trying to emulate a conversation, assuming a level of comprehension, but the program couldn’t even understand the question. The Turing test was trashed. The conversation was fake and the attempt at an exchange was completely artificial. And lets not forget that the A in AI stands for artificial. It isn’t “T for True”, “G for Genuine” or “R for Real”. The A doesn’t stand for Actual… yet.
Your AI adoption for creative processes should be all about evolution not revolution. You may be already using many of these advancements, for example, embedded in programs like Photoshop without realising that some of them were actually an AI feature. I’m talking about removing backgrounds, duplicating textures in a non-tiling way, etc.
An example of this type of advancement being adopted in the past, in animation specifically, was the introduction of Tweening in Macromedia Flash. Between two keyframes that you would define, you could get the computer to fill in the gaps, and even ease in and ease out. It took away the painstaking time-consuming work resulting in drastic efficiencies in the design process.
And thinking about today, practically in a studio: we use AI to clean up audio – it has removed a human going in and making tweaks that are not necessarily creative. Allowing the artist or designer to have more time for strategizing.
AI can be employed to help draw attention to work as well. We use video generators to add simple movement and transitions to pitch visuals, rendering in minutes what would take a Motion Designer hours sometimes, and not necessarily be the most interesting tasks going on that day, that help sell in a project.
I’m all for AI. I’m all for AI doing the legwork rather than the creative work, so that you can do more thinking, having had the manual tasks taken off your plate by a computer.
How can you employ tools that your company is already using (dare I say ‘embracing’…?)
AI doesn’t eradicate work. It just provides the opportunity to change where the human work happens – what the humans spend their time doing. We can outsource the manual and instead select and refine.
The adoption of AI tools can shorten production times, but hasn’t removed the need for human judgement. Instead, owing to the volume that comes with computers, it has made art directors even more valuable.