Your particular form elation does not in any way have to be as whimsical as this gentleman’s seen here.
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How to Integrate AI Into Your Creative Practice
Guest Writer: Shauna Friedman
FreelanceMikey offers an irreplaceable human touch for your business and creative endeavors with services like idea brainstorming, coaching, and editing.
How to Integrate AI Into Your Creative Practice
Whether you’re a writer, designer, composer, or other creative, it’s time to sit up and take notice of AI, if you aren’t already. As you likely know, AI is increasingly being incorporated into work processes because it saves so much time and effort, and offers several AI-specific benefits (like big data analysis). This includes creative processes – everything from digital design and content development to music-making and film.
The HBR sums it up nicely: AI won’t replace humans – but humans with AI will replace humans without AI. Incorporating AI into your creative practice can help you offer a better quality of service and reduce your workload.
Below, FreelanceMikey Creative Consulting offers a mini-guide on how to integrate AI into your existing creative endeavors.
Understanding the collaborative role of AI
AI works by analyzing vast data sets, identifying patterns, and then outputting results. AI can’t replace human creativity, imagination, and emotions – but it can inspire, augment, and enhance all three. It can give you a boilerplate to build from, refine, and add to, and it can collaborate with you to make your work easier.
Building a collaborative workflow
To make full use of an AI tool in your creative practice, you can build a collaborative workflow that integrates an AI app or tool. Creatives can find specific AI apps for their niche (such as image generation software if they’re a designer). Or you can use a general-purpose AI tool like ChatGPT.
Here’s a working example of how to integrate an AI app into your workflow:
Initial human manual prompt: First, you provide the AI with a clear set of guidelines, parameters, or examples of works related to your desired output. If you’re designing a webpage, you can input a theme (type of website), some style guidelines, and script interactivity.
Human screening of AI output: The AI will generate some output for you, which you should screen for quality and accuracy. You can ask the AI to make changes to the output or use the output as a new prompt to generate a different (related) output.
Manual human refinement: If you like the output, you can make changes to it manually, based on your unique experience, skills, and talents.
Final human-AI combined result: Once you iterate your work enough, you have the final result, which is a mix of AI and human-generated work. Ideally, you want an output that optimally leverages human and AI strengths (and covers each others’ weaknesses).
The quality of the results you receive will depend on your initial prompt and the AI tool in question. Many AI tools also learn as they go (machine learning), offering better results the more you work with them.
Which creatives can use AI?
Almost all creatives that work with computers or use computer-related apps and tools for their work can use AI. This includes writers, designers, poets, game developers, architects, photographers, music composers, and more. You can check AI trends for your unique niche if you’re curious.
Can you fully automate creative processes?
The answer is yes, although with some caveats. The work produced isn’t always high-quality or original – AI doesn’t have a human identity, emotions, perspectives, and experiences. These things can only be simulated to a degree. It’s not real enough, essentially, and a trained eye can spot the difference.
AI does excel at automating recurring processes, however – if you have to do the same thing over and over again, an AI tool can do it perfectly every time. This has more applications in the business world, which involves a lot of recurring processes like accounting, as opposed to the creative world, which has much more nuance and originality.
You have to add a human quality to creative AI work
Ai can’t generate high-quality creative work by itself – it needs your creative training and input. You need to know what quality work looks like to be able to produce original quality work yourself (with AI assistance). If you’re in the content development niche (marketing, writing, or similar), you can learn about quality content through online resources.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that AI is still a work in progress and has several limitations, especially when it comes to creative work. While it can make your creative practice easier and automate some recurring tasks, it doesn’t always produce quality work, and you’ll still need a trained human eye to get the most out of it.
Image via Unsplash
Set Off on the Path of Freelance Success
by Courtney Rosenfeld, gigspark.biz
Though once considered the fringe of employment, 16.5 million people work in the gig economy in the United States, a figure that’s set to grow as more and more companies outsource projects and professionals discover the freedom and flexibility of being their own boss, setting their own hours and often working from home.
This could be a golden opportunity for you, whether you’re tired of trudging to the office every day or looking for an extra source of income in retirement. Opportunity abounds in a number of specialties, from writing to designing to pet care to housecleaning. However, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the responsibility of running your own show and finding enough contracts to pay the bills, so here are some tips to keep things on track.
Set Goals
You need goals to stay motivated, move forward and be successful, says an entrepreneur writing for the Balance Small Business, who provides a list of resources that help you set realistic targets for your enterprise, whether they’re financial or related to finding new clients. Remember to divide them up into long-term and short-term goals so you have something to aim for every day when you start work. There’s no point in just saying, “I want to be a millionaire.” If that’s the dream, you have to make a plan for it.
Create a Cozy Home Office
You’ll be spending a lot of time in your office, so make sure you’re well equipped in a space that’s dedicated to work and nothing else. It will serve you well if you have a spare room you can devote to your enterprise, but setting aside a quiet corner in the basement or attic would also suffice. A natural source of light does wonders to keep up your spirits, especially when the sun is shining, while an ergonomic chair provides the comfort you need for long hours at the computer. If your home is lacking space, you could convert part of your garage into an office. If you don’t have a garage on your property, consider building a prefab steel garage and using it as office space. Steel structures are inexpensive and easy to maintain.
Stay Organized
According to a startup expert with Forbes, successful entrepreneurs all “batch” their tasks. This refers to grouping everything you need to do into categories, then doing one of those all at once. For example, set aside one morning for writing emails and the afternoon for developing a business plan, but keeping in mind priorities that need to get done that day, of course. This technique helps you avoid floundering in a jumble of random activities.
Manage Your Finances
One of the cardinal rules of running your own business is separating your business from your personal life, and the easiest way is by setting up separate bank accounts. Once that’s done, create a budget for expenses based on an average of what you make from month to month, as that varies. Remember that you are one of those expenses, so pay yourself on a regular basis by transferring money to your personal account. Be sure you have enough to keep up with loan payments, and use a home cost calculator to determine how much you can spend on property if you’re on the market.
Keep Marketing
The nature of freelance work means bouncing from contract to contract or project to project, so you can never cease promoting your services, or your revenue streams may dry up. With little cash to spend on advertising, choose a few inexpensive means of getting the word out, and batch them into your schedule. Social media channels are on your side, so make daily or weekly posts that include a link to your blog or website, and don’t be timid in asking for referrals from past and current customers.
Watch Your Health
When striking out on your own with a new business, you need to be at your best mentally and physically, so this is not the time to neglect your diet and fitness routine no matter how much you want to tap away at your laptop. Turn it off, put on your sneakers and head out for a jog, cycle or power walk. When it’s time to eat, load up on vegetables, lean proteins and whole grains while keeping sugar and fat intake at a minimum.
Starting up your own business may be a bit nerve-wracking at first, but once the revenue starts flowing in, you’ll begin to appreciate the freedom of being your own boss. It’s truly liberating, so enjoy it.
Image via Pexels.
Courtney Rosenfield started her career in the gig economy after several years of enviously watching others do the same thing. She started Gigspark to be a resource and a first step for people who are looking to join the gig economy, either to supplement their income or as a way to fulfill their dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.
Four of the Most Important Freelance Jobs to Hire Out for Your Small Business
by Courtney Rosenfeld, gigspark.biz
There are many advantages to hiring out freelance work for your business. If you run a small business, for instance, you may have realized that you don’t need a full-time staff. Or, perhaps you would like a full-time staff but can’t afford it. Either way, hiring freelancers can free up time and money for you to spend on growing your business in a way that would be much more difficult than if you were paying a full-time staff.
Yes, it still costs money. But it can cost less money than paying a staff over time, and the growth and reduced stress you experience will likely make it more than worthwhile. Determine what kind of projects you need done, set your budget, ask around for referrals, and review job boards. Once you have a candidate in mind, send them a test project. If they return a completed project to you on time that meets your standards, you may have a keeper. If not, keep looking until you find a freelancer in that specialty who provides the product you’re envisioning.
Finding the best freelancer you can at a price point you can work with will help you focus on the tasks you need to, and it will ultimately help your business flourish. While there are many different types of freelance work, these four are some of the most essential ones to consider.
Virtual Assistants
Any successful business owner will tell you that delegating tasks is vital to effectively running a company. When you delegate tasks that don’t come naturally to you and that will waste your time, you can spend time on things that grow your business. There are many tasks that can be taken care of by a virtual assistant, and looking on the right job board can direct you to qualified, reliable candidates. Essentially, a virtual assistant can do anything from administrative support and scheduling to customer service and data entry.
Web Designers
It’s no secret that an awesome website is necessary for any small business. There are many platforms available today that allow someone with minimal design knowledge to build a website; however, these websites are often easily spotted, and the limited features of these platforms can make it difficult for your site to stand out among the crowd. Bringing in a web designer can give you a unique, high-quality site with responsive design technology. Also, a professionally designed site will be more reliable, run more efficiently, and increase your company’s search engine optimization (SEO).
Content Writers
Providing audiences with written content has become increasingly important for small businesses of all kinds. Having a blog on your website that discusses industry-related subject matter and offers expert advice highlights your company’s credibility. Qualified content writers can write about topics your audience cares about in a readable way. Furthermore, they can clearly translate ideas that you don’t know how to put into words, and they can provide an unbiased view of your products and services.
Social Media Managers
Finally, hiring a social media manager can prove invaluable to your business. Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter offer affordable (and sometimes free) marketing tools, and bringing in a professional who knows how to utilize and manage those tools can free you up to work on the things you’re best at. A social media manager can lay out a strategic plan for your social presence, consistently post meaningful content, promote your brand and products/services, expand your customer reach, and ultimately boost your sales.
As a small business owner, virtual assistance, web design, content writing, and social media management are all jobs you should consider hiring out to freelancers. Remember to find the best candidate you can within your budget, and test them out before committing to multiple projects. Hiring qualified freelancers can free up your time to focus on the projects you do best so that your company can grow and thrive as much as possible.
Photo Credit: Burst
Courtney Rosenfield started her career in the gig economy after several years of enviously watching others do the same thing. She started Gigspark to be a resource and a first step for people who are looking to join the gig economy, either to supplement their income or as a way to fulfill their dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.