Art or artificial? AI in creative work

Part 1 of our deep dive on ChatGPT and other AI tools in everyday agency life.

By definition, Artificial Intelligence is meant to mimic human abilities such as logical thinking, problem solving, planning skills and creativity. Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing enable AI to perceive, analyze and recombine existing data so that it makes "logical" sense. But is good creation really logical? After all, we create (digital) experiences that are supposed to be experienced with every human fiber.

What is good creation?

1. Ideas that are sophisticated, innovative and unique.

2. Perfection, but also with just the right amount of clarity and imperfection.

3. Authenticity, because in the best case you don't even notice that something has been created.

4. Emotion, because good creation creates goosebump moments, stays in your head, lingers and stimulates.

5. Craft, with a personal set of learned skills and artistic abilities to realize own ideas individually.

How is AI supposed to do that?

Who is the best person to ask? The hype AI ChatGPT itself, of course. After all, half the Internet attributes magical abilities to it. So, what does the super chat bot say about its own creative skills?

In the context of creative processes, ChatGPT can be used to generate ideas or suggestions for writing, art, design, or other creative endeavors. For example, you could use ChatGPT to generate prompts for writing exercises, to come up with ideas for a story or poem, or to generate design concepts for a project.

One thing to keep in mind is that ChatGPT is an AI language model, so its output will be based on the data it was trained on. This means that it is likely to generate ideas that are similar to those found in the training data, rather than entirely original concepts. However, it can still be a useful tool for generating ideas and inspiration for creative projects.*

So that means: okay as a starting point, but lacking personality, technical skill and sophistication?

From theory to practice

Let's support this thesis with a few examples. Of course, despite all doubts, it is extremely exciting to experiment with it. We have found some use cases from others and have also tried out a few ourselves. Which AIs we used for this: Midjourney AI, DALL-E, ChatGPT and neuroflash.

Use Case 1: Copy

Hey ChatGPT, write a song about Becklyn – the best digital agency in the world**.

Verse 1: We're Becklyn, from Ludwigsburg town, // Creating digital products all around. // Customer experience, engineering too, // Digital growth is what we do.

Chorus: We're a team of explorers, diverse and smart, // Designing solutions that set us apart. // Innovative tech and human touch, // Creating unique experiences, that's what we love.

Verse 2: From websites to e-commerce, // We help businesses grow, that's our promise. // Web applications and digital products, // We're here to help, that's our goal, it's no hoax.

Chorus: We're a team of explorers, diverse and smart, // Designing solutions that set us apart. // Innovative tech and human touch, // Creating unique experiences, that's what we love.

Outro: We think in solutions, and strive to explore, // The digital future is what we adore. // Becklyn, from Ludwigsburg, we're here to stay, // Helping businesses grow in every single way.

Use Case 2: Slogan

Neuroflash AI Writer, create slogans to market Becklyn.**

• We design your future. Digital products with personality.

• We combine human design with innovative technologies and digital marketing.

• We are Becklyn. We think in solutions.

• The path to the digital future goes through us

• "Becklyn - Designing Digital Experiences for a Future Beyond Imagination."

• We create wonderful digital experiences

• "Becklyn - designing for the Digital Future - We connect people and technology!"

• Thinking ahead. Finding solutions. Creating experiences.

• We are Becklyn - your agency for the digital age.

• With us into the digital age - Becklyn Digital Agency

• We are Becklyn - customer experience design, product engineering and digital growth marketing.

By the way, we like our actual claim "Exploring Digital Future. Together." much better.

Use Case 3: Campaigns with Text-to-Image

Will IKEA soon generate the best campaigns and product ideas via AI? We definitely wonder after these two mind-blowing and incredibly inspiring examples: @barsee calls himself an AI Guy and experiments with the creative possibilities of artificial intelligence. For example, "IKEA Catalog but with messy rooms. Created with ChatGPT and Midjourney AI.", seen on Twitter. Eric Gorza uses AI to mimic brand collaborations. As seen here on the example of Patagonia & IKEA, seen on LinkedIn.

And of course, we wanted to try it out for ourselves. In our own examples, we chose two brands that were as opposite as possible and experimented with Midjourney AI to see what collaborations and advertising could look like.**

Porsche x Milka

Gucci x Red Bull

Nike x Rolex

Humans are in charge

The results of AI depend very much on what information we feed it. Because the AI has to understand us in order to be able to create something new in combination with already existing data. It needs very precise specifications, certain keywords and descriptions for the prompt. And that is quite the art. Good prompts are especially important if you want to achieve a certain style – whether in visuals or tonality. If we don't specify our own style, the result is often a futuristic one-size-fits-all mess. By the way, this is the same with creative briefings for people: a bad briefing also leads to a rather dissatisfying result. The clearer and more detailed the input, the better the output.

This means: every tool is only as good as its users. Thus, the ideas and briefings for AI-generated creation come from human intelligence. In addition, humans are needed to put artificially created content into the right context. Currently, people (still) determine the output of artificial intelligence. The right skills for creating briefings for AI will determine how well we can use it for our purposes. Unless we soon rely on AI to write prompts?

Human and machine creations: a difficult comparison

Our use cases show: We're still a long way from perfection when it comes to creating with AI. But we had plenty of goosebump moments – both positive and negative. Just like with top creations made purely by human hands. So we can well imagine using some of these tools for inspiration and then developing them further with our craft. Creative work and thus the creation of something new is always the reinterpretation of something existing. And that, after all, is exactly what AI does. Humans can use AI as an intermediate step in the creative process to come up with new combinations, innovations and ideas. Because we – and ChatGPT as well – don't really believe that computers could completely take over creative jobs in the future:

It is unlikely that ChatGPT or any other artificial intelligence (AI) system will be able to fully take over creative jobs that require human-level intelligence and creativity in the near future. While AI systems like ChatGPT are able to generate text and other content based on their training data, they do not have the ability to truly understand or appreciate the nuances and complexities of human creativity.*

The future of creative work with AI

Trend reports predict that by 2023, AI will have a significant share in content creation in Fortune 500 companies***. For us, this means doing even better work, proving them wrong! Anyway, this is how the possibilities of AI have sparked something new in us. Creative ideas for experimenting with and without AI are bubbling up on all corners of the creative industry. And maybe this way we will only create greater things and grow further beyond our own creative limits and those of machines?

* Answer from ChatGPT.

** our own experiment

*** Source: DEPT® Trends Report 2023. The Zoomer, the Boomer & the Digital Consumer. www.deptagency.com