AI — The story is about us
Created with MidJourney and Photoshop
The AI hype machine is in full swing. And it makes sense — we're entering a rich and exciting technological era with so many more revelations on the horizon. But this new way of doing things will come with new concerns and ethical dilemmas in equal measure.
As marketing and brand specialists, we keep circling back around to these key questions:
What impact will GenAI have on our commercial endeavors — and what will our shared future even look like?
How will we preserve the integrity of neurodivergence when synthetic superintelligences are capable of such complex and efficient outputs?
Will we lose our authenticity when our own world is presented back to us through AI algorithms?
Where will human ingenuity, knowledge and experience fit?
One of the first challenges we face is from a cultural perspective.
Tristan Foster from Grand West recently wrote an article titled Global AI on a Local Scale that explored the cultural implications of using GenAI which creates content from contexts which may not reflect those of the user, or of that user's audience. Key to this is using GenAI with the knowledge and understanding that it may have inherent biases, and to be cautious with its use. One way of doing that is checking outputs carefully, another way is to ensure your prompts specifically identify the culture in question.
But how effective is that approach really? How sustainable is it? How do you balance cultural sensitivity and brand reputation while still benefitting from AI's creativity and speed?
Putting AI to the test
To test AI from a visual perspective, we used Midjourney to see what contextual lens would appear in the AI outputs based on our prompts.
Here is a subset of the 20 images we created :
Created with MidJourney by DBZ.
As you can see, they are quite realistic but also a little too perfect—something which generally occurs after too much polishing in PhotoShop, anyway. But the images do successfully depict diversity across humanity.
In this small experiment, Midjourney stood up well—it shows that GenAI is already inherently capable of representing a broad spectrum of people to a high degree with only basic prompting. It also provided a solid foundation to work from.
But it is also clear that by deploying AI-created content, an element of authenticity will be lost. We have to remind ourselves that these are not pictures of real, living and breathing people, that instead they are composites. They are images of what a machine has been trained to "think" a person looks like—and, by extension, what diversity looks like. How we navigate through a landscape where we are represented by computations based on training data, and not photographs of real people, remains to be seen.
Be mindful of your AI saturation
In the context of a commercial design studio, efficiency has always been a major factor to creative output. Even 20+ years ago when I was a young designer, the time hustle was part of every working day—as they say, time is money.
From an outsider’s perspective, it may appear that AI will speed up the output of a creative team, thus clients may amplify the demand for agencies that utilise this powerful tech. This in turn will ramp-up AI use—on every project and at every stage. The pressure to create and do more in less time would be an unfortunate scenario and yield an over-saturated AI environment.
To combat this, it's useful to be mindful of your AI workflow integration. While there is no doubt it is the exciting new toy, pencil and paper, photography and film all hold great value in preserving the authentic human story.
Creators must deeply understand this tech, by implementing it in practice and finding a balance between this sophisticated technical solutions and the tried and true methods of creating. For human beings that have always pushed the boundaries of their creativity, AI can be used to fuel more of their creative spirit. For others, it may be a means to an efficient end—it is most likely that both practices will exist. Whichever way you wish to operate, find an enriching confluence between your ingenuity and AI capabilities. Be open to exploring what this intersection reveals. The more we work with AI, the higher the chance we have to dictate how it will benefit us.
Predicting exactly how the world will look with AI all around us is tricky—humans sure do like technology with such utility and wonder, just look at the story of the smartphone. What is certain is that it will find its way onto every platform, and into all of our processes.
This is just the beginning—it's up to us to decide now what we want our future to look like.