Artificial Intelligence In The Creative Industry
Friend, Not Foe
By Ari Pournaras
It feels like, in recent challenging times, while our gaze has been elsewhere, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making seemingly quick strides in its ubiquity and functional ability. While there is an understandable fear that AI poses the risk of ‘replacing’ certain professions and rendering those in the creative industry obsolete, the counter-case can also be made that AI is revolutionary in supporting the modern workplace, making it more efficient, and is a force to be embraced.
For those working in the marketing industry, in areas like copywriting and content production, AI can clearly be seen as a threat to their specialism. However, due to the fast-paced nature of the online world, it’s important that we keep up with it by leveraging efficiencies where we can. AI is 100% a route to efficiency to stay abreast of quickly-moving trends. At the end of the day, time is money for everyone, in every functioning organisation. The advantage, though, that copywriters and content makers have in their favour is that they are human – and no matter how useful and clever AI can be, the raw, lived human experience cannot be fudged.
So whilst AI software, like Jasper.ai, can definitely become a friend in helping produce screeds of more mundane text, in a time-efficient, automed way, it is so important that a breathing person goes in and edits it with their own flare and perspective and makes it a valuable, user-friendly quality. AI, for the creative industry, is undoubtedly a supportive tool, not a Terminator-style entity looking to wipe out careers from the face of the planet. Just as you would bounce ideas off of other people in a team and be inspired through this type of interactional blue sky thinking, AI can generate the initial creative idea that spawns an entire project developed all by you, in your own human way.
Particularly for client-facing work, like for financial companies, where content is being posted into a highly sensitive and regulated industry, it is vital that we do not let AI content generators have the final sign-off on what the material says. In this type of sector, where every single word that a company posits can have grave legal implications for them and their customers, it is clearly a scenario that necessitates a human pair of eyes checking it for accuracy before it is published into the public sphere. AI platforms, like ChatGPT, in these circumstances, can act as an instrument of efficiency to create drafts of content that can then be edited, updated, and approved by real financial experts.
With this nature of technology, things can seem to move along incrementally, then suddenly gain pace and you blink and it’s everywhere, all at once, overnight. But just as any type of emerging technology has its challenges and threats, rooted in uncertainty, it’s vital that we flip these positively and utilise them as exciting opportunities, not put our head in the sand in despair as creatives.
