Why AI and creativity are not at war

There is understandably great concern in creative fields right now about the impact recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) will have on jobs and on creativity in general.

After use Half way through the journey to generate a cover image for a story about Alex Jones in The Atlantic Ocean, Charlie Warzel apologized to the art community and vowed never to use AI generation tools again. In his apology, Warzel said making the image was so easy and the result so good that he hadn’t really thought through the consequences.

While noble, the feeling of the apology only proves the concern.

Promising not to use useful and available technology doesn’t seem like a sustainable defense in the face of change, just as it wasn’t in the face of previous technological advancements such as the printing press, mechanized farm machinery, or even the original “computer.”

We’re living through a bend in the curve of AI advancement, with things long considered nearly impossible to be achieved seemingly on a weekly basis. There is a nice saying in the AI ​​world: People mistakenly think that AI is going to steal their jobs. It will not. But someone who uses it better than them will.

This will also become apparent in the advertising world.

A new wave of creative potential for generative AI

Open-source neural networks like OpenAI’s To whisper have advanced speech-to-text transcription models to the point where they are near perfect, even in the midst of thick accents, fast talking, and noisy backgrounds.

In terms of visual generative AI, DALL·E 2 has improved so much over DALL·E in just a few months that anyone can now generate stunning, original visuals from virtually any text prompt. And Midjourney built AI generation into a Discord bot, a smart UI move that instantly made AI-based creativity common, making learning how to use it easy and fun.

Perhaps most impressively, at least from a technical perspective, Stable Diffusion has figured out how to decouple the AI ​​generation from the big computer-driven server-side models of the aforementioned platforms and move the work to your local device.

None of these are perfect, but make no mistake, they will continue to evolve quickly and they are already very good.

This is not a serious warning; it is a call to rethink what is possible. There’s a long history of human-technology partnerships that I believe show us a more likely future.

For more than a century, the automobile – a truly incredible technological advancement – has been essentially useless without a human driver. And while billions of dollars have recently been invested in the development of autonomous vehicles, the complexities of creating new laws, the ethics of introducing self-driving cars to crowded streets, and the fact that many people enjoy driving prove that we still quite far from a fully autonomous reality.

Closer to home in creativity, Adobe’s suite of Creative Cloud tools have revolutionized an industry, but they’re as useless as a self-driving car without a creator to bring an idea and direction to their powerful underpinning platform of ideas.

Even with all the recent progress, this is more true today than ever. So the question for us as an industry is not, “How do we regulate AI-based technology in creativity to protect the way we used to work?” Rather, the question is, “How can we use emerging AI technology to create entirely new jobs that have a greater impact on our customers?”

The new creative genius

With this in mind, the emerging field of creative analytics is a great place to look for a more labor-positive view of the future. AI-based tools have enabled a growing number of technology platforms to instantly extract creative decisions into every frame of millions of ads and compare that creative attribute information against a series of performance signals.

This process enables well-trained machine learning (ML) models to uncover data that shows which decisions positively or negatively impact a company’s desired business outcomes. But here’s the point: the models can only tell us what the signals are. They can’t tell us why. And in that “why” lies the strategic insight that can unlock millions of dollars in value for a marketer.

A human creative analyst can parse that stream of AI-enabled “what is” and get to the “why”.

This area of ​​strategic creative analysis, or creative analysis for short, will become a major growth area in the coming years. We already see many leading marketers and agencies manning this creative role – yes, data science is one creatively role. The strategic insights coming from these (soon to be highly paid) people with that technology at their disposal will enable other people, sometimes using tools like DALL·E 2 or Midjourney, to drive the creation of intelligent creative materials that does more than just scale content, but actually improves it.

And isn’t that the point? The future is coming soon. For those who choose to embrace it, a world of opportunity lies ahead.

Alex Collmer is CEO and co-founder at VidMob.