Lewis Brideson, Integrated Creative, Fellowship recipient, 2022
Artificial intelligence (AI) has stepped out of sci-fi films and into creative studios.
2022 was the turning point, thanks to decades of research, funding and an unexpected pandemic that gave companies the cover to take huge strides in automation.
Machines can now generate articles, illustrations, photos, websites, songs, videos and more, seemingly from scratch, at a speed that has the marketing industry buzzing. Text and image generators like ChatGPT, Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, for example, have gained millions of users and the companies that own them are estimated to be worth billions.
As someone who loves sci-fi films and works in marketing communications, I couldn’t help but wonder if this meant, one day, I’d be replaced by a robot.
Luckily, I was awarded the Fuller Fellowship — a research program initiated by Peter Fuller — which gave me the green light to get under the hood of this dangerously fast new tech and find out.
It led me to Semi-Permanent, a creativity conference in a theatre on the edge of the world (aka St James Theatre, Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand). While global leaders in branding, advertising and user experience gave inspiring presentations and ran rewarding workshops, new AI tools were simultaneously exploding online. Inevitably, the conference about human creativity was frequently interrupted by questions about computational creativity.
When I returned to Fuller HQ, the running joke became that I could just generate my whole Fellowship project about AI, with AI.
For example: AI wrote this sentence in 0.002 seconds flat, leaving human writers in the dust.
I didn’t do that for obvious reasons. Instead, I looked at the work of groundbreaking scientists, artists and journalists, ran experiments with Fuller’s developers and creatives, and turned our findings into a different type of ‘machine user guide’ — one for people who want to work with, rather than for, AI.
This ‘machine user guide’ is purposely (and ironically) in print form and contains practical tips, regardless of whether you think generative AI is a utopian dream, apocalyptic nightmare, or you’ve never heard of it before.
It proves that, just as society did with past print, broadcast and digital media, we’re overestimating generative AI’s immediate impact and underestimating its long-term influence.
It’s just a tool. A simplifying, generalising and optimising algorithmic representation of our more complex creativity. But it’s a powerful one that will change the media landscape and our understanding of each other.
So, it’s up to us to learn about machines of mass creation and apply human imagination, empathy, intuitive and careful oversight to their use.
Hopefully, this guide will help protect your job and mine in the future — a future coming faster than we think.
Download Machines of Mass Creation here.
Or, grab a real-life copy from Fuller HQ at 37 Fullarton Road, Kent Town, Kaurna Land.
This article was written by a human, you can email him at lewis.brideson@fuller.com.au.