The first AI-driven creative collision has happened. Did you have your seatbelt on?
I’m not going to drone on about artificial intelligence (AI) and how good (or not) it is, isn’t, or soon will be when it comes to copywriting. Unless you’ve got your head in the sand, you know where AI is going in terms of transforming the world of the knowledge worker.
As Craig Rispin CSP will tell you (he told me at least), AI today is the worst it’s ever going to be (in terms of accuracy, ability, etc.). Of course, it could become downright evil when measured on a few other dimensions in the future, but I digress. What I’m talking about today is the intersection between the creation of generative art and the skill of writing.
It’s sort of obvious, unless you haven’t been messing about with tools like Midjourney, NightCafe, or similar. Inspiring AI-driven art has to be directed through the submission of a prompt. Essentially, a prompt is an evocative written description of a subject combined with a technical instruction on how the idea should be presented by the AI tool.
And, yes, there are AI writing tools that can suggest prompts for you to use in AI design tools. That doesn’t change much as far as I can tell (or not yet, at least).
This raises a fascinating question: what makes a great artist in the AI realm?
An artist that can’t write great prompts can’t make great art. And, a great writer that doesn’t know what makes great art can’t be a great artist.
You can see where I’m going with this. Both are critical skills and, yes, there are some multi-talented people out there, but it’s not that common.
In our agency, we’re taking a team approach; both our writing team and our design team are learning and experimenting together to work out the most effective and powerful ways to create the words and design instructions to make AI bend to our will.
Right now, it’s not easier to create AI generated images than traditional methods. It remains unpredictable as to what you get back from the AI, even when instructions seem unequivocal. However, what we’re generating when we finally crack each assignment is on brief, unique, and exciting and, once our prompt structures are right, we can create many variations quickly.
We’re not driving this out to our clients just yet, but we’re not far off showing what can be done on behalf of a commercial brand. We’re being our own guinea pigs at the moment. The AI imagery being rolled out across our own websites is a strong example of our designers and writers collaborating to create a cohesive, on-brand collection.
Underpinning our success in creating art that we’re happy with is how well we imagine and then describe our musings in written form to generate powerful prompts, and how well our gifted designers apply their knowledge of age-old aesthetics.
It’s a unique intersection of two great artistic practices, and it is going to create a very different approach to image generation than anything that has gone before.
Keep your brand at the forefront of the marketing trends by working with a team who innovates. Contact us today.
Adam Benson,
CEO
The Recognition Group
