If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ll have noticed AI featuring heavily amongst the headlines – and the coverage has not always been positive. Professor Yoshua Bengio, one of AI’s original pioneers, confessed his concerns over AI’s application to the BBC, while experts from the Centre for AI safety released a statement calling for urgent action when it comes to “mitigating the risk of extinction” that AI poses.
More generally, we’re no longer in a position to take what we see at face value, when the visual products created by AI are becoming more convincing and photorealistic by the day. Common sense falls by the wayside when a high-quality picture of 86-year-old Pope Francis in a white puffer designer jacket, crucifix swinging in the front, circulates the web. Many of us took it for what it looked like, the Pope sporting a new bolder look on the Vatican tiles. But the ‘photo’ was an effort by AI image generator software Midjourney, and it duped many.
The pace at which this space is evolving is mind-boggling. Just over six months ago, the technology was still in its infancy, with limited applications and experimental use cases. Dall-E 2 was interesting and gave a glimpse into the future, but it was far from keeping anyone in the industry up at night. Yet, catalysed by the launch of GPT-3, the AI movement took off and is now showing us that it will change the world in general – and certainly the world of creative production.
If you’re in the creative production space, you can see this as an existential threat, or you can see it as an enormous opportunity. True creativity is likely impossible to automate. If everything else can be done for you, it allows creative people to focus on the one thing they truly thrive in: being creative.
The Storyteq platform is already plugged into generative AI
The most attention received by any generative AI lately has undoubtedly been for ChatGPT. So, this was where we first set our sights. Not long after the launch of GPT-3, we added an AI feature to generate text within our own Template Builder. It can translate copy into 29+ languages, change the copy’s tone, suggest variations to the text or perfect its length so that it fits a creative template.
See below how it works.
Where the Research & Development journey is going next with generative AI
The Storyteq Lab have been developing these AI solutions for some time now. That’s done by our Research & Development (R&D) department. Only a matter of months ago we were working with cut outs of products on different backgrounds – now some of our clients are already able to test drive our photorealistic imagery with shadows and lighting, the ability to generate or expand on backgrounds, and to upscale images without compromising quality.
We’re probably only months (or possibly even weeks) away from being able to deliver photorealistic packshots completely from scratch, given enough source content for our AI. Our Creative Automation offering stays the same, only now it is even better positioned to scale creative asset production for brands who need to create effective and high-quality content that resonates across all their audiences.
More directions Storyteq is looking into include prompt-based creative and marketing briefs, storyboarding through AI and AI-powered recognition and tagging of content.
Where else is AI happening within the Inspired Thinking Group (ITG)?
Currently, our friends over at sister company DeployTeq have also begun their own venture into the world of generative AI, within their realm of customer engagement and email marketing. They have started generating entirely personalised, AI-fuelled automated email campaigns using a direct integration with OpenAI. Using prompts from customer data stored in Deployteq, ChatGPT composes completely unique, AI-driven emails.
However, AI still lacks the human intuition necessary to build genuine relationships, which is the bottom line of customer engagement. Truly original and authentic connections, which is human-only territory, will always be at the forefront of Deployteq goals.
Wrapping up
At Storyteq, our top priority with this technology is to ensure that we’re driving AI forward and keeping our hands on the steering wheel, rather than the other way around. AI is moving at incredible speed, but Storyteq is always focussing on the long-term, rather than short-term novelties and nice-to-haves.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll share another update, and we’ll see just how far it’s moved forward in that time. Used correctly, AI can be another fantastic tool to make our lives easier – particularly in the world of marketing. It will give the brands who are able to integrate it into their model a significant competitive edge, and those who resist will likely see themselves left behind over the coming months and years.
Think your team could benefit from a Creative Automation or Content Marketing platform with AI capabilities? Talk to one of our experts to see how you can benefit from Storyteq R&D innovations.
