The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the creative industries has generated a lot of debate in recent years, especially in recent months with the launch of increasingly powerful and comprehensive tools. While some people think AI can replace creative professionals, others see these tools as an opportunity to generate and explore new ideas in more efficient and creative ways. At Contra Studio, we believe that artificial intelligence can become a valuable tool to improve and optimize our creative processes, as long as it is used in the right way.
Fears of artificial intelligence replacing creative professionals.
Although artificial intelligence is capable of generating a large number of ideas from inputs that are increasingly easier to generate, we believe that in our industry the role of people who create a coherent narrative between brands, industries, users and all touch points will always remain very important. Moreover, the fact that AI can help us optimize some processes does not mean that it will replace creative professionals. On the contrary, we believe that these tools can free professionals from repetitive tasks and allow them to focus on more challenging and meaningful tasks. For example, at Contra Studio, we have constantly used ChatGPT in the last months to review the texts we publish on our website, social networks, or presentations for clients (tasks that took us a lot of time before and that we considered very repetitive), besides being a very useful tool to generate summaries and structure some texts we use in the websites we make, however, the task of thinking the whole narrative in these projects, besides structuring something coherent and that is useful for our clients is something very difficult to automate and that needs a lot of input from a professional.
How do we integrate artificial intelligence tools into our processes?
In the divergent process of a design project, where many ideas need to be generated and then evaluated and synthesized, AI can be a very useful tool that generates a lot of expectations. Some tools like Runway have allowed us to edit videos in a much more optimal way, erase backgrounds and replace elements in photos, clean up errors in the audiovisual material, among others. For us, Runway is one of the most innovative companies in the area of Artificial Intelligence, creating tools that will help professionals in creative industries in ways that are still difficult to imagine (for example, creating video clips or color palettes from a very simple prompt). On the other hand, Copilot, a programming assistant created by GitHub, has allowed us to develop projects in shorter times without sacrificing development quality, by suggesting code and complete functions in real time. In this case, artificial intelligence plays the role of an "assistant" to developers, saving them time on repetitive tasks. Other tools such as Midjourney and Dalle2 have helped us to generate quick sketches and visually recreate concepts we are exploring. We believe that these tools can be allies in the creative process, as long as they are used strategically and taking into account the big picture of the projects and in which specific parts of them can be useful to us.
Our view on the future of artificial intelligence in the creative industries
Although the use of AI in the creative industries is a very controversial topic, we believe it is a giant creative opportunity for designers and developers, as well as many other professionals. However, we do believe it is a threat to industries and sectors where many repetitive tasks are performed, or where processes have a step-by-step nature that an artificial intelligence can easily replicate. In our studio, we are trying to keep updated and up to date with these technologies, although we know that it is a difficult task due to the amount of new products, releases and services that are constantly emerging. This week we start the course "Artificial Intelligence for Creative Projects" from Shifta, which we hope will shed new light on the challenges, opportunities and threats that will have the use of these tools in the processes we perform.
In summary, it is important to keep in mind that artificial intelligence will be increasingly integrated into the tools we use on a daily basis, but that its results will always depend on creativity and human thinking to get the most out of it. In this sense, we believe that the future of AI in the creative industries will depend on how it is used and how it is integrated into work processes. If it is used strategically and its limitations are taken into account, we can expect to see a lot of innovative and creative solutions that can improve our work processes and allow us to explore new ideas more efficiently. However, being an area where we see new advances daily, there are more questions about its scope and opportunities than certainties, so it is essential to try to keep up with the advances that are presented, for this we recommend being informed of people who daily share relevant information on this topic, such as this newsletter from Ben's Bites that we discovered recently or Futurepedia, a repository of artificial intelligence projects that is constantly updated.