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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.
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.
