Hi - welcome back to the /promptcollective newsletter!
(A fork in the road - Midjourney 2023
This is the summer edition as both Jes and I are on holidays. As I have had a bit of time away from social media and work, I have had some time to reflect. So this week is going to be a bit different as I won’t be sharing a creative experiment, but some thoughts on where the creative industries currently stand in regards to AI.
A fork in the road…
During the first half of 2023, I have dived into AI head first and have been enjoying it immensely. This newsletter is one of the outlets for this new passion of mine. Others are AI-centric projects that we are working on at my production company DRIVE beta and that I am extremely excited about. They will be released during the second half of this year and I am very eager to share… For all of these projects, the foundational premise is that we want to create creative work, that would not have been possible without applying AI tools. Once these projects come out you will hopefully agree, that they are truly the result of human/AI collaboration.
Focusing on creating work that is better and/or truly different than work that could have been done by humans alone is for me the central point of applying AI in the creative industries and one of two routes we as active participants in the creative industries can now take.
The other route is using AI to generate efficiencies that are not used in order to make things better or more special, but just cheaper. Using (generative) AI in creative processes from ideation to writing and editing will save time. This time saving can be used to make products cheaper. And this other route is a very tempting one to take - especially in times like these, where the economic environment is worsening and pressures to cut costs are mounting. But we have to be aware of a very very important truth:
A race to the bottom has NO winners!
It might be possible to gain an advantage over the competition for a short while by competing on price, but in the long run, we as creative industries can only win by focusing on excellent work and innovation rather than on cutting costs. Let’s together decide to rather make fewer things better instead of clinging to the amount of output while sacrificing the quality of the work!
“Why are you so emotional?”
One might ask when reading the text above. Also, you might say, that I am part of pushing the use of this new technology, so I shouldn’t be crying wolf at the same time.
But this is exactly the point for me - I am really truly fascinated by AI and its ability to fully and totally revolutionize the creative industries (as I am sure it will). And I want this revolution to happen. I just want to avoid, that the revolution will be one that leads to an overwhelming amount of very cheap and very mediocre output. I want to make sure that we remember, that the whole point of creative work is always the HUMAN. And I want to make sure, that the different participants in the industry can all profit from this tectonic shift - looking at the writers strike in the US it is very clear, that this is not a given and there will be many more conflicts coming up if we can’t all find a shared vision for how we want to use AI in creating!
What are your thoughts?
But how to do it?
I would love to tell you that I have an amazing and easy-to-apply idea that ensures achieving the big goals I have put forward in the above. Obviously, I don’t - and to be honest, I don’t think anybody has. But I do have a couple of rules, that I feel we can use at this point in time to make sure we experiment and push forward creatively while at the same time ensuring we don’t enter the other route either due to external pressures or simply by accident. These are the three simple rules for using AI that we have set at DRIVE beta.
3 rules for AI
Human in the loop - ALWAYS!
No matter for which use case (AI-generated images, texts, transcriptions, voice generation, etc), AI-generated results are ALWAYS quality checked/edited by a human.
Transparency
When we use AI tools in our work, we make this use transparent to our co-workers, managers, partners, and audiences. And we have an open dialogue about it.
Fairness
When we save resources through the use of AI, we together think about how we can apply these resources to make our products better, more interesting, and more creative.
Thanks for reading along this different version of the /promptcollective newsletter. I hope you liked it and would love to get your feedback on topics to cover in future installments. If you see the world completely different from me, I would also love to hear from you. You can reach me at hannes@promptcollective.xyz.
If you want to read a more detailed account of my thoughts on this and our work with AI at DRIVE beta you can read my interview with journalist (German language) here: https://www.journalist.de/startseite/detail/article/aufpassen-dass-nicht-nur-noch-bots-mit-bots-reden.
In two weeks the newsletter will be back with applied AI experiments. Enjoy your summer until then!
Hannes
Who are we?
The founding members of the /promptcollective are Jes Brandhøj (Denmark) and Hannes Jakobsen (Germany). But we are looking for others to join! So if you are interested in discussing all things AI in the creative industries, send us an email to join@promptcollective.xyz now.