Prompt for above image : portrait of a beautiful young female designer smiling with closed eyes, who is half a human and half an artificial intelligence, with letters in various languages in the background, in the style of new yorker magazine cover illustrations

Whether you find yourself absolutely in Awe or extremely worrisome as you interact with the influx of AI-generated artwork, There is one thing that no one can deny — The nature of creative work is changing in front of our eyes.

As a creative and a facilitator I find myself moving frequently between amazement and terror, as I scroll through my feed and find myself not sure anymore, what is AI-generated and what is Human-generated while the borders become blurrier by the day (mostly thanks to the work of DALL·E 2 or Midjourney AI — which I collaborated with for the illustrations for this article).

The notion of it is indeed scary, and the big question remains — how will all of this change the creative process, the creative community, the design industry and our ability to bring ideas to life as a species?

Already now, I witness creatives of different fields, expanding their abilities into new frontiers, and being able to bring their concepts into life with relatively simple usage of prompting and image editing.

Similarly to the way that design software changed everything for creatives who don’t draw, These latest applications also make creativity much more accessible to a wider audience that was until now challenged by their lack of craft in the creative fields and is now empowered by this new tool to visualize their ideas, dreams and projects. (there are also more accessible online AI tools such as RuDall-e or CogView)

Nothing much to compare but this entire period makes me think of how it probably was to be a creator during the last major tectonic activities as cameras (first still and then film) became available to the public, and how worrisome & exciting this must have been for creatives everywhere.

Imagining the product-focused AI tools of the future

Prompt for above image : A billboard commercial for an app for astronauts, next to a busy highway with a city in the background, in the style of a photo-realistic 35mm film

While now the situation revolves mostly around experimentation & play (such is the case with other similar projects like the OpenAI Jukebox, google doodle bach project, or the poetry generator) A future that seems right around the corner is that we might very soon see practical product-focused applications for these AI-creatives in the field of Branding, Marketing, digital products, industrial and fashion design.

A creative team will be able to communicate with AI and use it as a tool to create a Brand identity which will be used as a base to create an AI enhanced marketing campaign, using AI to develop all the visuals necessary, on top of which they could prompt a prototype for their website, and also realize concepts for the interior design of their company’s HQ and employer branding products.

Soon after, designs will be tested out as an AI prototype as a part of the product design process, simply by prompting the software and twitching data, as we can already see in some of the research done by Glideapps to test such a feature in combination with Data models and AI-generated visual systems.

All these processes of course still need creatives, but the nature of the work will change dramatically.

I don’t believe that our work as creatives will stop where AI comes in, as creatives are such an integral part of the way we experience brands, products and our everyday lives. But to be completely honest, we will need to show quite a lot of flexibility and adapt to the situation, re-creating both the concept and practicality of what it means to be a creative professional in our times, basically giving birth together as a community to a completely new craft.

Knowing the limits

Prompt for above image : Picasso’s bull meeting Picasso on the subway while reading a book about art, in the style of Studio Ghibli

A talk with a good programmer friend of mine reminded me of the limitations that AI image generation software has and will probably continue to have for a long while — and I found that a good way to understand any creative medium is by studying its limitations and using it to our advantage.

One tremendous limitation in the creation of AI-generated creative work is obviously how result-oriented the entire experience is, while in reality, as creatives we often start with an OK idea that carves itself into its WOW factor while we go through the phases and make tons of trials & mistakes.

Most of what we know today as “great design work” was born out of step-by-step experimentation, a journey that we simply cannot tap into while working with AI software… yet (we can get variations but that’s not nearly enough).

Another very important limitation becomes clear when one would try to generate conceptual art, and that is due to the fact that while AI-art focuses on objects and styles, conceptual art requires the observer to make the actual connection between the elements, connections that are so deeply based in the human emotional experience and can only be superficially imitated by an AI.

A computer knows the data of what we tag as delightful, but can’t really imitate the experience of what feeling clicks within us when we smile as we understand a reference to a personal memory or cultural identity.

There are also quite a lot of questions regarding the limitations of the data itself, that sum up to a limited or distorted perception of the objects and people being portrayed in the results.

The future of Creatives lies in communication

Prompt for above image : an illustration of two people talking with speech bubbles, in it English and binary are forming into a new language, in the style of propaganda posters

Understanding the creative medium (together with its limitations) will enable the creative professions of the future to know how to communicate better with the Algorithm, creating something I like to call “Prompt designers” which would tighten even more the connection between creativity and technology.

As we step further away from the creative crafts, perhaps something that might differentiate a good designer from a great designer would be their understanding of the technological limitations, and therefore their usage of prompting and filtering to translate an idea for the AI to generate more accurate results.

Though I believe that there will always be a need for the creative crafts and professions, creatives will still need to develop their practice and focus on conjuring impactful ideas.

I could also imagine that studying the creative fields in the (not so far) future won’t include as much focus on the craft anymore and instead will make way for more computer science and learning to collaborate with AI tools.

A note on opportunity and curiosity

Prompt for above image : a bird-eye photo of a team of creatives sitting around a table with an open sketchbook bursting with light, in the style of vector digital art

To conclude, AI is not naturally creative, and creativity simply cannot lose its connection with humanity. AI always requires human input to know what to generate, and those influenced by our creative work will always be people, and people appreciate the playfulness of the human mind and the skillfulness of the human hand (for reference, simply imagine the difference in the experience between enjoying a homemade meal and getting “homemade style” food in the supermarket).

This moment serves us to reconsider many things, including the creative process, the semantics and articulation of ideas, how collaboration between people and machines might look like, and what all of this means regarding the creative copyrights, our ability to imagine and our eventual wellbeing (this does get quite addictive I must say).

A real concern I do have is that our ability to imagine would be handicapped by the same process that “googling” things brought to our remembering capacity, or how navigation apps hindered our ability to locate ourselves on a map by bloody opening our eyes and looking around us.

The opportunity that we do have right now though is deciding together on the nature of the next creative evolutionary step, and who knows what we might learn about ourselves on that journey?

Probably the best tools I can think of to take along on the ride are our innate creative collaboration, playfulness and curiosity.

But most importantly, what would you take with you on this journey?

Boaz (Bo) Balachsan is an award-winning design director & the founder of Borderless Studios for Creative & Consultancy.

Interested in more of this content or want to share your thoughts?
Feel free to drop me a line at : Boaz@beborderless.co

WHAT’S OUR STORY ANYWAY?

Based on my experiences in the last years, I reckon that there is a need that we as a society will be focusing energies on building communities based on a new sense of identity.

Civilization as we know it, is currently developing extremely fast on the technological level and yet progresses with baby steps in all that has to do with social structures.

Since the world is built upon fractalized structures, culture as a whole can be compared to the life of a single human, as we at the moment stand on the brink of adulthood (if we assume for a moment that the industrial age symbolizes our entrance to adolescence, an age characterized by irresponsible accumulation and conflict, or the “first me” age) a possible regression is at hand, as can be seen in various places world-wide.

To prevent the regression into some form of re-nationalistic approach (which represents the last stage of meaningful and yet destructive cooperaton), a new idea of what “identity” entails needs to be born. As our ethical evolution developed from empathising with our family at first, then relatives in tribal society, to Geo-political groups and nations, neo-liberalism is found to not be enough to provide us with a sense of common identity. Stil, most people we pass-by are considered “foreign” or “strange” (as derived from “a stranger”), both extremely problematic terms from the view point of a holistic philosophy.

Yet it is very difficult to imagine another form of viewing ourselves, when anchored in our current economy, a system based on scarcity rather than abundance. Scarcity creates competition, and in every competition there is a need for teams, team leaders, winning and losing positions. The game played on a daily basis is rooting the idea deeply in our minds that we are simply not enough as we are, a notion greatly supported by the capitalistic lifestyle.

To be distinguished from a curiosity based process of personal development, the undervaluation of the self as complete and the underestimation of the self’s power over its surroundings, creates a constant sense of stress and dissatisfaction, which in turn creates many of the personal and social sicknesses and distress felt throughout modern history.

Disconnection from eachother is very relevant when trying to survive the game. One cannot let himself identify and empathize with “the other” since it’s eventually “either them or me”, and they would be right to do so if following the rules. The greatest pity is though, that there aren’t really any winners in this game (besides maybe those few sitting at the top of the pyramid), diabolically similar to the game of “who’s right?”, written much about by the founding father of NVC, Marshall Rosenberg.

Growing up in Israel during a time of great conflict (which seems often to be the case) I have always felt very sad when hearing about assassinations (also called “Targeted Prevention” or “retaliation attacks“ in ongoing war scenarios). Whether when Palestinian or Israeli lives were at stake, depression came over me, a depression I could not talk about or explain even to myself, because I am not practically “supposed” to empathize with the “enemy”.

In some preposterous manner, even though it is already obvious at this time that the only thing that essentially separates two nations is the story maintained (with sometimes an extremely anecdotal difference), our identity is still very much based on the random nationality that we are born into and carry with us our entire lives, even to the extent of having the responsibility of being acting as an ambassador of your nation, and sometimes we do treat eachother as such.

Once in a while, during traveling periods I would meet someone, and after revealing my origin country (the first answer commonly asked when meeting “a stranger”), I was frequently told how unfair “you guys” are acting towards the Palestinian population. To which I would usually respond with : “ I’m sorry, but I am not my nationality, and though I had often wish they would, unfortunately enough the state does not ask me before they commence with yet another military operation on its population’s behalf”, an answer that would frequently, and hopefully, lead the discussion to a more of a “same eye-level” basis.

The nation based identity was a good solution for its time and did its part in getting people to cooperate within the lines of their own borders. However what we face now is a social-political-environmental and psychological crisis that exceeds beyond any made-up borders and demands that we open our eyes to see humanity as a whole. While coming back to our fractalized structures, we see that the whole is also just a part of only something bigger, the family of living-beings, connected to each of its parts in an inseparable manner, one that binds us deeply with what we perceive as not alive as well.

In this belief system, the world is not just our home, it is what we are, what we were and we will become, as we are tied to this place by consciousness and form.

We see again and again that in many different ways, belief systems create realities. The idea of a “self realizing prophecy” is in many cases an actual phenomena since thought tends to materialize into action which in turn invites a reaction which develops quickly into a narrative that cannot be undermined and treated as “the truth”.

And as The neurologist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl suggested that what really motivates people is the meaning behind what they do, it leaves me, and I suppose many of us with an open question : What “Story” do we want to tell, that would provide the base for a new sense of Identity in a world craving for meaning and connection?