Artificial intelligence has long been used for a variety of purposes, from automating contract reviews to personalized shopping to voice assistants, and it holds promise for much more. Lately, with the advent of consumer-friendly A.I. chatbots, image-generators, and other tools, such as ChatGPT and MidJourney, A.I. is increasingly—and more controversially—being utilized to develop and produce creative content.
Recent examples include:
- TV series. In February, Genius Brands International announced it would release an A.I.-generated animated TV show for children 4-11 called Kidaverse Fast Facts, across all of its distribution channels. A.I. is being used for the scripts, voices, images, and animation on the series, which features educational shorts in subjects including science, history, literature, and music.
- Advertising and marketing content. Levi’s announced in March that it would test the use of A.I.-generated models on its e-commerce platforms later in 2023, in partnership with Lalaland.ai, with the intent of sustainably increasing diversity. Currently, a single model is used to show most products on Levi’s e-commerce website and app, which does not reflect consumers’ varied body types, skin tones, ages, and so on. The decision received immediate blowback, with critics arguing that plenty of diverse human models were available for such tasks. Levi’s later clarified that it did not plan to replace human models and did not consider the initiative a substitute for real work on DE&I.
- Manga. Cyberpunk: Peach John, a manga written by Rootport and published by Shinchosha, is billed as Japan’s first A.I.-generated manga comic. It is a futuristic reimagining of the life of Momotaro, a heroic character from Japanese folklore. Rootport wrote the plotline and dialog in the traditional manner, but used MidJourney to create the illustrations. The full 100-page manga took six-weeks to complete; it likely would have taken over a year if drawn by hand.
- Books. Ammaar Reshi used ChatGPT, MidJourney, and other A.I. tools to create a 12-page children’s book, Alice and Sparkle. The book, which was self-published through Amazon Kindle Publishing and is sold through Amazon, is about a girl who builds an A.I. robot. The entire project, including writing and illustration, was created in just a couple of days. Reshi is a product design manager in the technology industry.
A.I. tools are imperfect—they have problems creating different facial expressions as well as hands, for example—but are likely to improve quickly. Content creators and producers note that A.I. brings significant benefits in terms of lowering the cost of production and speeding up the time to market, which will likely lead to more use not just in books, comic books, TV series, and advertising content but films, surface design and illustration, video games, and all sorts of other creative applications.
There are significant challenges when it comes to the use of A.I. for creative endeavors, however. These include, but are not limited to: copyright ownership and infringement issues; privacy concerns; lack of quality, originality, and artistic integrity compared to human-created work; and the potential for writers, illustrators, and other creatives to lose their jobs. There is also the sense that the use of A.I. is growing too fast, with little grasp of the consequences, leading to increasing calls for regulation. In fact, Italy this week became the first country to temporarily ban ChatGPT.
Creative industries are in the earliest stages of exploring the use of A.I. as a tool for content development. It will be interesting to see how the use of A.I. evolves and what the ultimate impacts—potentially huge—will be.
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