「R/GA」亚洲副总裁Anthony：AIGC并非取代人类，而是补充创造力 (AIGC does not replace humans, but complements creativity)

This article was first published in TopMarketing China on May 8th, 2023

In the beginning of 2023, the topic of artificial intelligence brought by ChatGPT has become the core agenda of the world, and the attention and discussion in this field remain high. In the field of advertising marketing, what kind of opportunities and threats will such a wave bring to the industry and individuals? How should we better recognize, understand and apply such an artificial intelligence revolution in our work?

TopMarketing: What is the current level of creative creation in AIGC?

Anthony Baker: AI generated content has been in development for many years. However, the rapid progress in the development of large language models, massive neural networks and AI algorithms thanks to the availability of incredibly large data sets and computing power has enabled companies like Open AI, Midjourney, Google, Runway and Stability AI (to name just a few) to create impressive AIGC tools. Open AI’s GPT4, Runway Gen-2 and Midjourney v5 are recent examples on how far these tools have gotten. ChatGPT can now help developers to co-create and fix code, Midjourney is enabling a whole new generation of digital designers and artists to imagine and create digital creations in many cases far outreaching imagination, and Runway Gen-2 is poised to disrupt the video production process.

It's no coincidence that Microsoft, Adobe and Google are rushing to integrate AIGC tools into their product suites, while a large group of tech world leaders and academics including Elon Musk (Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX), Steve Wozniak (Apple), Emad Mostaque (Skype) and Craig Peters (Getty Images) among many others published an open letter to ask AI development to pause for six months - arguably to give leaders and companies time to get their stuff in order and catch up.

The state-of-play of AIGC is undeniable. Digital designs can be created out of text prompts in seconds, working code can be written with a few loose instructions, articles can be written in different languages and styles with a few chat messages and iterations, and video is about to be no exception. To think that these tools are not here to become ubiquitous in our daily lives and work is folly. Just look at folks without any industry involvement and tech knowledge interacting with ChatGPT for everyday chores and you will easily get how this is already becoming part of our society’s fabric.

If you want any more assurance, just take a look at Hugging Face open source AI platform to see the hundreds of AI models, transformers, datasets and demos available for free to anyone out there. While most of these won’t be at the level of Open AI and Midjourney, they are not far, and they are completely open and accessible to anyone that cares to learn how to use them. Through history we have seen that anytime that both open source and closed source innovation reaches that much scale, big shifts are bound to happen.

TopMarketing: How do creatives view the opportunities and threats posed by AIGC?

Anthony Baker: It’s no surprise that such big shifts in technology and tools create a lot of different reactions. We have seen it happen over and over again throughout human history. Whenever technology innovation makes a big leap, it disrupts a lot of existing crafts, jobs, industries and processes. This is already happening, and jobs are going to be changed, destroyed and created by the AIGC developments, in a very rapid way over the next 2-3 years.

People that do creative jobs, whether that’s creative ideas, creative design, creative copywriting, creative strategy or creative coding, are passionate about their craft. People have put so much effort into mastering their disciplines that it’s normal that if a tool threatens to do the same faster, cheaper and at a larger scale, it creates fear.

What I have observed through online communities and social networks it’s quite interesting. There is a whole new wave of people that maybe didn’t have the creative job or craft to enable them to explore their full potential as artistic creators, and with AIGC tools they are now able to create things they never thought possible. There’s also the camp of creative creators that have always been at the forefront of innovation, and they embrace the exploration of AIGC tools as just another step in their pursuit of creativity and expression. And there’s the camp where they see these tools as a thread to their craft and income source. I would suspect that many in this field are worried about loss of income because of AIGC tools and the lack of time and resources (including lack of their companies commitment to training and upskilling).

However, as any other technology tool, the opportunity lies in embracing these tools as co-creation partners. Coders and Designers should not be worried about these tools being better at them at doing mundane and repetitive tasks, they should be excited about how these tools could take their craft and creativity to levels never seen before.

Think about this. Cars are faster than humans, but we still go and see people running. Music can be generated by computers (and has been for many decades) and we can stream it almost for free anytime and anywhere, but we still pay to go to a concert and see musicians play live. The same can be said for most artistic creations.

While AI-generated content can be impressive and useful in certain contexts, it is not a replacement for human creativity and expression. AI models are still limited by the data they are trained on and the algorithms they use, and they lack the emotional and intuitive capacities of human creators.

Additionally, the creative process often involves a range of human experiences and emotions that are difficult to replicate with AI. Therefore, AI-generated content should be seen as a complement to human creativity rather than a replacement for it.

TopMarketing: What are the future directions and trends of AIGC?

Anthony Baker: I believe 3D object creation and full video and CGI generation are some of the next frontiers for AIGC, as well as being able to personalise large language models based on smaller datasets of human thinking and conversations.

While a lot of the current AIGC are impressive and can create impressive content, they still lack a lot of the personalisation and nuances that humans can embed into creative content to fit a particular context, brand, audience, product, etc.

Large language models and general AIGC tools are very inefficient in how they use data. They need massive amounts of data and computer power to be trained, and are pretty inefficient to adapt to a certain behaviour of pattern based on small datasets, which makes them really inefficient in that context. That's probably going to rapidly change in the next few years, and will be fueled both by open source and closed source innovation by big and small companies alike.

Another potential trend we will see is the coordination and creation of full stack pipelines between all these tools. Companies and platforms will emerge connecting different AIGC to offer fully integrated content production solutions, where you will be able to enter a prompt and get a full CGI video out of it, in the style you want, with the meta human character you want, with the caption and language you want. Even when far from perfect and still not competing with full AAA games or Hollywood movies, it will disrupt the content and video production even further.

TopMarketing: Any other comments and analysis of future AIGC development? Especially on the agency front, how will AIGC impact agencies?

Anthony Baker: Make no mistake. This is not a fad or a marketing hype. AI has been in development for more than 70 years. The theory is fundamentally the same, but we have now all the resources needed to effectively create general AI. Social Media platforms were the first wave of AI powered platforms, and we didn’t do great on it. This second generation of AI platforms will have an even deeper and more disrupting impact in our lives.

I believe many agencies will see AIGC tools as a way to become more efficient, get better margins and push forward to overcome the last 3 years of global instability due to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, Interests hikes and inflation. It’s understandable that many companies are looking into the possibilities to leverage AIGC to make businesses more profitable.

However, I believe that it will be the companies that invest in helping their staff, partners and upcoming talent to embrace, understand and get better at exploring and leveraging AIGC tools will be the ones with more success over the long run. This field with ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Gen-2 is going to be changing very fast. Instead of thinking about what the agency is replacing with AIGC tools, the better bet is on how to nurture talent that will get deeper into these tools and learn to ride the disruption wave one tool at a time.

Creativity and emotion are intrinsic to human experience, but that doesn’t mean that creative output and process cannot change and evolve. We are only able to judge based on our current experiences and knowledge, so we need to empower people and ourselves to know and experience more with these tools and platforms so we can be creative beyond our current limits.

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「R/GA」亚洲副总裁Anthony：AIGC并非取代人类，而是补充创造力 (AIGC does not replace humans, but complements creativity)