weCAN agencies are already using AI in their creative processes, but as our experts claim it still has limitations that won’t be easily overcome. It is transforming the creative industry, and it’s hard to tell what roles it will have even in the upcoming year, but one thing is for sure: it can’t replace human creative work.
AI is The Buzzword right now, especially since OpenAI launched GPT-4, the newest version of their language model system in mid-March, and tech gurus are already
signing a petition to pause the development of AI tools that are more powerful than GPT-4, because they claim we cannot fully assess the dangers they are posing. But creatives around the world have integrated AI solutions into their work, so we asked weCAN creative partner agencies how they use AI solutions at the moment, what are the limitations and advantages of such tools and how they see AI’s role in the upcoming years in agency work.
A useful team member
Hrvoje Skurla, Owner and Creative Director at Pink Moon, Croatia, Manuel Prada, Creative Director at Comtech_CAN, the Czech Republic and Vladan Anđelković, Chief Transformation Officer at New Moment, Serbia said their agencies are all using artificial intelligence in their daily work, for various tasks. They all mentioned ChatGPT and Midjourney as something they use, but they can also be employed other tools for different tasks, Manuel Prada lists how they use different software for different tasks: Stable Diffusion and DALL·E for creating storyboards or quickly editing pictures, Jasper and Copy for creating some context around ideas but sometimes and Descript for basic video editing.
Our experts all agreed that AI tools are highly useful in the creative process, but all their output needs the “human” afterwork to be used. Hrvoje Skurla says it’s helpful in the first steps of looking for insights, but it also helped them in a project when they were stuck. Vladan Anđelković summarizes it as “We are using them to speed us process of creation and as an accelerator of creative process.” Vladan says they’ve already proposed creative solutions to clients which had the involvement of AI, but never without additional work of a professional.
AI makes mistakes, too
Even though our experts listed many advantages of these AI tools such as being available 24/7 and the unmatched speed of creation, but the work with these tools also has its limitations. One inherent problem is that it lacks emotions and (human-like) understanding, also out-of-the-box thinking, but images also have weird, unintelligible details and they are also not up to par in printing quality. Legal concerns have also been voiced as AI use existing – therefore many times copyrighted images, and reshape it, sometimes leaving parts of watermarks in the generated image. It also brings about the task of education, both for the internal team as it takes time to master any new software, both for the clients, to help them accurately understand what AI can add to their agencies’ work.
Game changer
As many sectors, creatives are in the phase of exploring the capabilities of AI, they can experiment and learn to better work with it, work more efficiently and create more engaging and effective content. Hrvoje Skurla highlights the freedom AI gives: “I think we can focus on the more important aspects of advertising, such as developing creative concepts and strategies. With AI, design team can try so many different things, experiment with looks and feels, and come up with ideas that are out of this world.”
As technology evolves so rapidly, it’s hard to make predictions even for a year ahead – as our experts admitted. They all continue to use it, but not without the professional finalizing touches. As Manuel puts it: “It’s a HUMAN/AI/HUMAN process. It will always start and end with real people.” weCAN experts agree that AI is already transforming creative work, but they agree human work and its added value is simply irreplaceable. Hrvoje believes it will lead to some kind of optimization of the creative process, but the human factor is also decisive how AI develop: the habits we have created over decades will be the worst enemy to exploiting the full potential. “The idea will still be the queen and those who think differently will still have a strategic advantage.”
In Vladan’s take AI is not a replacement for human creativity and intuition, but rather a tool to enhance and support it. “AI will not replace for example copywriters. I think copywriters using AI will replace copywriters not using AI.”
