The five types of AI creative
And regulation, aesthetics and false memories
Explainable is hitting inboxes on Wednesday and Friday this week (don’t rely on in-flight wifi when planning your working week). Normal service resumes next week.
Since starting the Explainable newsletter a regular feature has been The Good Stuff, a dive into who is making interesting content using generative AI tools. I figured it would be an interesting and straightforward way to pull together an edition. In my Storyful years, my main job was finding and verifying interesting things found online. How hard could it be to do that specifically with AI content? It turns out, quite hard. Because the interesting AI content was pretty thin on the ground. This doesn’t mean that people are not doing interesting things with generative AI, just that people are not widely posting interesting things made with generative AI.
To explain that a little more, I broke down the five types of AI creatives.
The generative AI bros
The (not entirely unearned) caricature is of a X/Twitter blue tick who has pivoted from selling NFT monkeys. In place of artistic skill and taste, there is a focus on bombastic claims about the power of AI. It has been easy - easy and fun - to dunk on the AI artist over the past year. The AI artist is just a child of Elon Musk’s Twitter. Where bold claims supersede craft. They are the loudest voices in the AI space, but, paradoxically, are doing the most damage to the generative AI ‘brand’.
The AI artist
The AI artists sometimes get lumped in with the AI bros but they’re a standalone community. And like any artistic community, they can be creative, supportive, strident, and entirely pompous. The AI artist Claire Silver uses the following tagline: ‘With the rise of AI, for the first time, the barrier of skill is swept away. In this evolving era, taste is the new skill’. That’s not a pitch that is going to win me over, it’s unlikely to win you over, but it speaks to a lot of the AI artist community. A burgeoning community that broadly views generative AI as a tool for the democratizing of art, rather than a cheat code.
The digital artists
Separate again from the AI artists. The digital artist may use AI but does not make it the central focus of their work. Or do, but has a body of past work focused on other elements of digital art such as VFX or projections. This is where the most interesting, public-facing AI-enabled work is found, mostly on Instagram. Kids, if you’re dabbling in AI art just slap the phrase ‘digital artist’ in your bio instead of ‘AI artist’.
The professionals
The creative directors, copywriters, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, journalists, and all creative professionals who use AI in their daily work while continuing to hold very mixed feelings about the development of AI. Essentially a large portion of the Explainable readership and the interviewees in our Expert series. Those who appreciate generative AI can be good for a mock-up in a pitch meeting, and possibly useful in a more ambitious project should time and budget ever allow. But they also appreciate the world is populated with many awful executives bent on using AI to make their creative job even more difficult.
The non-creative creatives
I don’t have a sample piece of work for this cohort. But these are the people in the not obviously creative jobs who have dabbled, or outright dived in, with generative AI tools over the past year. The admin assistant who doesn’t lose hours making posters for the Christmas party, the marketing exec who has slashed creative spend after a day messing around on DALL-E (and who The Professionals, above, think is an idiot), the content agency experimenting with AI-generated text but not telling a paying client. It’s a wide spectrum!
The point though, with all these cohorts, is that generative AI is profoundly changing how people create without really changing the creative works we consume. We keep looking for end-point examples of AI use. Examples to outrage the skeptics and excite the converts. But AI is not a new form of art, it’s just a new utility (sorry AI artists).
Small bits #1: Regulators, mount up!
The above is from a must-read piece from AI ethics expert Margaret Mitchell on how we can regulate AI. The tl;dr (though do read it) is that by focusing on rights, not risks, and on goals, not constraints, governments can effectively legislate for AI without getting hammered for curtailing innovation, the main Silicon Valley pushback when fighting essential regulation.
Small bits #2: Impossible is nothing special
A Reddit post, captioned ‘Made an Adidas AI Spec Commercial during Coffee Break’ did numbers earlier in the week. You can watch the full video here. Predictably, it was shared admiringly by the AI evangelists and dismissed by many others. It also prompted some debate over the length of the uploader’s coffee breaks. But as James Vincent from The Verge noted, ‘It’s interesting how quickly the basic AI generated aesthetic has become dated’.
Small bits #3: Eternal sunshine of the spotless screen
A few months ago a leaked Google Pixel ad got Twitter/X flak for a feature altering people’s expressions into smiles. It seemed dystopian and a bad way to advertise a new photo editing feature. I thought that would be the last we saw of it, only to see the same type of feature advertised in a phone ad during the Bake Off finale. So what do I/Twitter/X know? Anyway, here’s a new product picking up Twitter/X attention today, this time trying to alter our memories through holographs. Stop messing with our memories AI companies!