If your feed is anything like ours, the last few months have been overflowing with posts exploring and marvelling at what the new wave of AI engines can do with a few simple words.
Whatever you might wonder could be fed into your laptop and 30 seconds later you have an answer:
What would I look like as an anime character? Let’s go Lensa.
A two thousand word essay on whether Twilight is a better movie trilogy than Blade to settle an in-studio debate? Ready to read in superhuman speed.
A weirdly specific photograph of a dog riding a skateboard into the sunset? No sweat dude.
If your curiosity is anything like ours, the latest potential AI presents is really exciting.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that AI isn’t new, it’s just gotten smarter. It already interacts with and learns from our everyday lives more than you think. Various forms of AI shape our social feeds and get us home faster at the end of the day. At work it helps write emails and generate data on where our campaign might be best placed. But it's the more recent accessibility to generative AI that's causing a stir. This is the AI that's generating imagery, art and writing that's hard to distinguish from what was made by human hands. It's ability is staggering and now open to everyone.
Maybe this is just the latest advancement that soon becomes just another tool in the toolbelt, but when you’re on the cutting edge there is bound to be blood. Like anything else, the machines need something to learn from. Something to distinguish tops from tails, hands from feet, Picasso from Pixar. AI needs examples, and the internet is full of them ready for consumption under the old ask-forgiveness-instead-of-permission method. How AI develops and learns from human creators presents an ethical and legal minefield, with many creators rightfully angered that what they’ve spent years honing is now available at the click of a button. Should you claim to have written and illustrated a book if AI did all the groundwork? Who’s work inspired the AI’s development? Or is this just a new way of making creation accessible to more minds?
AI sure seemed simpler to understand in Terminator. And as a traditional creator it’s easy to feel threatened by such a revolutionary change, both from a philosophical and practical standpoint. We already have AI generated artwork, music and even supermodels.
If we allow ourselves to think past the shiny newness and obvious potential problems this technology presents, the excitement starts to return. Like the more familiar forms of AI in our day to day lives, we wondered how this latest incarnation might benefit creative industries. And more specifically, could this latest AI revolution be helpful inside Hive’s walls? Is there a place for this in our work and process?
After a lot of thinking and some exploration, we came to the realisation the benefit of AI just might be exactly that, increased time for us to think. Could it reduce our time spent searching and give us more time to explore? In our studio, time is valuable and in a busy, agile world there isn’t much to go around. Imagine if the same way AI already trims time writing emails, it also might offer us the chance to think a little longer or deeper on a creative solution. This would have real benefit for our creatives, our work and our clients.
Another test, using a real world brief to visualise our concept. Rough, but heading up the right hill.
AI can’t dream up the ideal creative solution for a complex strategic campaign, but it could help visualise the loose idea more efficiently to a client.
AI won’t replace the expertise, knowledge and flexibility of a photographer on a shoot, but it might help inform an angle otherwise not considered before we aim the camera.
It could allow left field creative ideas previously considered too crazy, too late or too big to be explored with little risk, instead of being buried in the notebook. The potential here is very exciting and we are looking at the just tip of the iceberg.
The sky is the limit but it’s obvious the output needs to be considered. In our world of creative problem solving the combination of words, colour, imagery and tone all need to work seamlessly and be handled with care. Several news outlets and websites have proven this, and even our skateboarding dog is heading towards two sunsets. As exciting as it is, generative AI is still a tool that needs human input, guidance and review.
We should be careful what we use it for, and it is absolutely important where the inspiration comes from. But if it can allow more quality creative thought, better ideas and more time doing what matters, we’ll jump on the skateboard and head towards the double sun.
Caino (no-one at Hive calls him Michael) leads our creative team with over 17 years of communications and design experience accumulated across many different industries. From toy design to advertising and everything in between, Caino has thrived in solving varied visual and communicative problems for many leading brands and their customers.
