Research into AI has been ongoing since the first computers were made—the idea of a computer able to think and reason fascinated and enthralled in equal measure. Multiple attempts were made over the years with varying degrees of success. We’re seeing the fruits of that research with the rapid growth of generative and conversational AI.
The Impact of AI
AI is already disrupting many fields such as content, design, and device management. Marketing, medical sciences, pharmacology, coding, data science, sales, logistics, defense, and more are seeing the benefits of AI. Surveys across the marketing spectrum show that attitudes toward adopting AI are increasingly positive. Eighty-eight percent of marketers believe that AI and automation are necessary for organizations to stay competitive. The question arises – can AI be creative?
AI and the Creative Industries – Can They Work Together?
AI combines various disciplines and methods—collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data to create relevant content. A blend of Natural Language Models, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and other methodologies enables AIs to learn to create unique creative content with input from artists and other creatives. AI collects and analyzes information from across the web, and distills and learns from it, creating content based on specific prompts provided. It isn’t limited to words or images. It’s possible to create anything imaginable.
Generative AI has many roles in every creative field that relies on human input to learn, understand, and make correlations to generate content. Although there are concerns that the disruption caused by AI might overwhelm industries, forcing layoffs and job losses – human intervention will still be needed. Seventy-seven percent of respondents to a Forbes survey believe that the next year will see significant job losses to AI.
AI is expected to improve productivity, helping creators work faster and create more. AI applications like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and others are rapidly gaining prominence for their ease of use. They have even been used to generate assignments and work-related documents.
This comes with potential risks. Harvard Business Review theorizes three plausible scenarios: AI-assisted Innovation, AI monopolizing creativity, and human creative works commanding a premium over AI-generated content. Here are a few creative industries where AI plays a significant role.
Graphic Design
AI significantly helps streamline digital design. With specific input from graphic designers, AI can remove backgrounds, selectively blur images, and erase parts of images. This reduces the time designers spend on minute details, allowing them to focus on the overarching concept. Specific AI applications using Natural Language Processing can create completed images based on concept descriptions provided by designers, writers, and content creators. AI in graphic design speeds up creation and helps develop more assets with minimal downtime.
Copywriting
Copywriters are an integral part of any marketing effort. With AI, copywriters can speed up content creation with specific inputs, simplify long-form content creation, and deliver quality content. Information and research are also made more accessible, thanks to AI’s connection to the broader information pool of the internet. AI-assisted copywriting can also help create social posts, plan calendars, schedule posts, and more, thanks to the power of AI.
Content Creation
Content is not limited to design and copywriting. There are video creators, and influencers creating content for social media, contests, blogs, and more. AI in content creation helps reduce the workload and streamlines the process. Creators armed with a clear concept can direct AI to create content tailored to specific audiences, develop games, launch websites quickly, and make videos.
Marketing
Marketers handle many diverse tasks during any given day. They manage social media, create calendars, interact with customers, respond to queries, conduct keyword research, optimize content, and publish blogs. AI can help marketers plan their efforts, automate regular tasks, monitor results, spot trends, identify gaps in communication strategy, track ROI, keep track of leads, and make reaching out to them more accessible. AI in marketing can reduce the time taken to find results, collate, and understand large amounts of data compared to humans.
Art
Artists also benefit from AI by using it to bring their imaginations to life. AI can help plan sculptures, create paintings, digital artwork, and more. We are already seeing the use of AI to create digital art, clothing, shoes, and NFTs, to name a few.
Artists can create new designs, artwork, architecture, pottery, and kinetic art. AI-generated art is already taking the world by storm. AI Apps like MidJourney, ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, Adobe, and NVIDIA Canvas drive the art scene to new heights.
Music
Musical artists can use AI to make new beats, arrange musical scores, and write lyrics. The AI even helps find new platforms to self-publish music, reach out to audiences, and manage their career. AI in music has an everyday use too. Apps that help users identify tracks are increasingly common. Artists can sample tracks and combine them in new ways without track software. AI can also quickly solve copyright issues by identifying samples and finding the rights holders. AI-generated music is rising to new heights.
Game Development
Game development is a tedious job that requires hundreds of designers, QA testers, debuggers, storyboarders, and coders to create them. It’s a job with updates, patches, and extra content – every game at release, ships with plenty of bugs. AI can help streamline the process—identify bugs, apply fixes, write short dialogues, and shape player interactions.
Deep learning already plays a role in gaming by helping create true-to-life lighting effects, clearer accurate audio, and control framerates for an optimal gaming experience. AI in game development helps plan paths to navigating in-game worlds and create non-player characters (NPCs) that can make decisions and react to stimuli and environmental physics.
The Future of AI
AI plays many significant roles today, and continued development will lead to it taking more and more functions in the future: medical, economic, sociological, law, and more. AI developments will lead to new scientific breakthroughs and exploration.
AI will significantly impact our daily lives. It is already aiding jobs, reducing the burden on companies, and the need for extensive human resources. It has the potential to open up new job roles and alternative pursuits. It’s all speculative at this point, but AI has and will continue to have a significant role to play.
