If you’re reading all the industry hubbub about AI coming for creative jobs but haven’t personally engaged with the tech enough to know how afraid to be, I can help you with that. Don’t be afraid. Unless you’re a creative who’s planning to ignore it and hope it goes away. Then you should be very afraid. Not of the AI itself. I don’t think AI will literally take your job anytime soon. But a creative that has embraced AI as part of their toolkit just might.
In the early days of 2023, we encouraged the creatives at 3Headed Monster to adopt a couple of the big generative AI platforms, primarily ChatGPT for copy and Midjourney for art. They’ve been flying them like test pilots at Area 51 all year, seeing what these babies can do. Here’s what we’ve learned.
At this point in its development, ChatGPT performs like a very fast copy intern. Like most copy interns, if you ask it for some email headlines it will give you a couple pages of options. The AI does it much faster than the intern would – minutes versus hours. But the quality is about the same. Some will be good, some will be bad. Most of the good ones will require a bit of editing from a seasoned writer or a few rounds of “feedback” before they are client-ready. But it’s a helpful resource that, like other forms of automation, can minimize the grunt work and let the humans focus on more interesting tasks. It also allows writers of all levels to dip their toes into Creative Direction, critically evaluating work they didn’t create and finding the insightful gems.
Midjourney is basically a digital illustrator. It’s great for comps and storyboards. It has odd quirks, though. It weirdly likes creating humans with six fingers, for instance. Sometimes you need to combine it with a little Photoshop noodling to get what you need. But it is a powerful tool that when used effectively gives you the kind of concept-specific imagery we old timers remember expecting in every storyboard frame back when we had storyboard illustrators in-house. However, the imagery is so photorealistic that the untrained eye might think you shot it.
Both AI platforms are only as good as the human prompting them. It takes some trial and error to learn their strengths and limitations and get a feel for what prompts will get the machine to kick out something useful. When it works as intended, it delivers creative content and assets faster than any human could.
I will echo here what others have been saying for years – specializing in AI prompting will very soon become a whole new career path. If you run a search on that phrase, you’ll see a bunch of online courses pop up and the job title that seems to be taking hold is, AI prompt engineer. It’s a thing. In creative departments, a basic competency with AI it will quickly become an essential skill, especially now that generative AI features are available right in Photoshop. Agencies and individual agency creatives who refuse to adopt AI as a tool won’t be able to compete with those who do.
I’ve focused on the creative uses here because it’s what I know best and because our agency has run a very deliberate test with these two specific platforms. But many other platforms are emerging and the applications go beyond art and copy. There are applications that help with audio, animation and other details of production. Our strategists are playing around with it, too, and finding it useful for research. We all know machine learning has been reshaping the media landscape for years.
But no, I did not ask AI to write this piece. I’m sure it would have given me a surprisingly good, SEO-friendly draft I could have turned into a solid article with a bit of editing. But it wouldn’t have been my actual opinion derived from personal experience. It would have been a generic essay, synthesized from thoughts scraped from the internet. And I think there is an insight there that should give us all a bit of comfort – as long as our ideas are truly original, drawn from human insights earned in a messy life full of scars and funny stories, there won’t be an app that can replace us.
Of course, all this will be moot when some beefy industrial-strength AI becomes self-aware and decides to eliminate the virus of humanity from Earth like Skynet in “The Terminator.” But until then, we have nothing to fear, fellow creatives. Except maybe another creative who’s better at using AI than we are.
By Shon Rathbone
Founder, Creative Chairman & CEO
3Headed Monster
