AI is moving fast and creeping into our working lives whether we like it or not. We creatives aren’t particularly good with change, especially the radical kind that might put us out of work. We feel pain when we know we need to stop what we’re doing, learn new tricks, and change. We learn to embrace a new future of creative co-creation, where Humans leverage AI as a tool to enhance our contribution rather than replace it. We study the unique value of emotion, empathy, and connection we Humans need more than ever. And who is best positioned to deliver this? Creatives.
AI Professional – Fiona Passantino, early October, 2024
Grief and Loss
What does it mean to a Creative and realize that the gift you have spent your adult life mastering – your art, music, writing, design, communication – can now be done just as well by a bit of software? Sure, a Human call center employee can be replaced by an AI bot and a taxi driver can be made redundant by a driverless Waymo car. But a digital artist, a poet, a filmmaker? Impossible.
We lament the state of our new world. We rage against our foolish masters who see no value in our more expensive, slower Human talent and ability. We shake our fists against the market forces that determine that “free, fast, bland and uncomplicated” is good enough to meet the needs of most of our clients. We grieve the loss of our creative businesses, as our clients, one by one, discover the power of AI and do the work themselves, setting up their own in-house creative agencies run by an intern.
Giving it a Name
We Creative Content Developers can console ourselves using the Kübler-Ross grief model. The AI bot that is feeding me background information as I write this book is gently reminding me, The Creative Griever, that not everyone will experience all stages, and the order and duration of each can vary greatly from person to person. Thanks, GPT.
Stage 1. Denial
While many non-technicals are already diving in and taking ChatGPT out for a spin for work and play, many of us are still here, hiding our heads in the sand, bleating to ourselves in the dark that it can never replace our particular, original brand of Human creativity.
We live in disbelief and a refusal to accept the reality of our (aforementioned) loss. It’s how we protect ourselves from overwhelming emotions and the daunting learning curve we see before us. Deep down, we know we will need to climb this huge mountain of change that is our future. We will need to learn, adapt, experiment, fail, invest and repeat. It’s so vast and imposing that we deny it’s there. We look at the valley of the past and instead.
Stage 2. Anger
As the reality of this loss sets in, we Creative Communicators may experience anger and frustration. We spend some time raging at the world, at OpenAI, at the market, at the whole of Silicon Valley, at the internet for feeding this beast the full collective knowledge of our civilization. We are mad at ourselves for freely posting so much of our art online or sending our music out into the world. We start Instagram pages with fellow ragers and scream at, with, among each other, at the world. We can be angry about all the years we have spent learning our craft, becoming artists, writers, journalists and designers, and that our skills are no longer valued as before.
And still AI powers on; and the gap between you and your future, AI-Powered self grows ever wider.
Stage 3. Bargaining
We understand the nature of a learning curve, and that jumping in sooner rather than later will save significant time and effort. Do we have to learn all of it now, become versed in this irritating, strange, coder-bro-babble of prompt engineering just to stay interesting to our clients, or have meaningful conversations at cocktail parties?
Can we hide for just a little bit longer with our convictions, our Human-centrism, perhaps even make it a “thing”, by weaving Luddism into our personal brand for just a little while longer? Can we become a digital artist that specializes in 100% Human-drawn artwork and convince buyers that it’s worth the price? Can we still demand of authors that they must guarantee that their books are AI-free before we consider publishing them, just for a little while?
Stage 4. Depression
Once we realize what’s happening around us, we may enter a state of sadness, emptiness, hopelessness and powerlessness. The world is going in the wrong direction. It’s all going to hell. We are all entering a universe of AI therapists and LoverBots, imaginary AI friends and AI teachers. Soon, we will have no idea if we are having a genuine Human experience when entering anything within the digital space. We mistrust everything we see, hear and experience coming from our devices, anything that has a digital layer and feel powerless, out of control.
Stage 5. Acceptance
At last, we come to terms with our new AI-Human co-creation mandate and take our first steps into the tools of our future. As we tap out our first prompts, we find some sense of peace in the fact that it’s actually not all that hard to get started. We start to imagine a future where much of the legwork and tiresome detail tasks can be done by someone else. We can spend more time with our ideas, our thoughts, our learning about the world and our places in it. We can spend more time in Human parts of our lives, with other Humans.
Stage 6. Opportunity
Once we have learned where the machine’s limitations are, where its great talents lie and where it still needs our help – our hands, our ideas, our hearts and intuition, we will learn to weave AI into our workflows, each in our own way. Much like everyone uses the internet in their own way, AI will be one tool of many we will come to rely on, appreciate, hate and love.
Just like your smartphone, which now accompanies you everywhere you go, our AI assistants will soon be an inseparable part of every digital process we touch. We will see that AI needs us, too, to keep doing out Human thing.
The magic is in the co-creation.
The Co-Creation Model
The answer is co-creation. Let’s park our emotions and everything that’s wrong with the world for the moment and invest time and effort into learning about the fundamentals of these new tools; what they are, how they work, where they came from and where they might be going. We need to learn how to fold AI into our daily workflows and private lives.
This book is a basic guide to Human-AI co-creation. It walks through the many variants of AI step by step, explains what it is, offers a few best practices and poses the questions you will need to answer.
But before we can do that, we need to first understand what AI is, how it’s built, how it thinks, and how it arrives at the output it sends you.
Here’s what AI does well:
- Writes basic “vanilla” text; coherent, correct, and contextually relevant copy, fit for purpose.
- Provides general background information on a wide range of topics, if fed the material it needs to start with.
- Edits existing text, improves readability, and provides suggestions for better syntax and flow. Can also restructure, rearrange and reduce.
- Assists with brainstorming, creates outlines and bullet-point ideas to start you off.
- Generates text in a variety of written styles; from Shakira to Shakespeare, haiku to rap to Biblical verse and beyond.
- Explains and summarizes complex documents into simpler, clearer language that we don’t need a law or medical degree to understand.
- Makes comparisons between documents or blocks of text. Finds connections between topics, subjects, perspectives or suggesting areas of further study.
- Takes bullet points of topics, values, information, and expands it into a longer story or in-depth article.
- Spotting Human bias, slant, or opinion in existing text and pointing this out.
- Provides quick and immediate responses to general questions.
- Chit-chat: engages in natural conversation to offer personal or professional advice.
- Writes or de-bugs working code.
- Translates just about any known, written language into just about any other language written and read by Humans in the world today.
- Writes storyboards and scripts for video, film, theatre, audio and commercials.
- Writes technical manuals and product packaging copy.
- Provides entertaining and creative responses, and even some original jokes (the jokes need a bit of Human massaging).
- Simulates Human dialogue for educational or training purposes, taking culture, background, accents, and regions into consideration.
- Visuals, graphics, illustrations that are general.
- Generic music, video, voice (multimodal AI) for general use.
- Solves tricky math problems and offers step-by-step clarification.
- Writes music lyrics for almost any genre.
- Writes letters from personal to customized job applications and provides text for “those difficult conversations” with a boss, friend or family member.
- Plans a 3-course menu, complete with a shopping list, for your next dinner party for your vegan, gluten-free, nut-allergic, lactose-free friends.
Here’s where Humans still do it better:
- Project management; initiating prompts, refining, and directing AI sessions.
- Fact-checking everything, looking up and verifying AI output, sources and references.
- Inserting the Human voice, adding quirky tone, style and readability, or unconventional phrasing.
- Humor in any form. This is where AI consistently fails the Turing Test.
- Reducing sentence length and complexity.
- Conducting research in areas of current events.
- Providing pointed anecdotes, illustrative details, personal stories to connect an abstract point with the reader.
- Providing current statistics and research-driven analysis from the current web.
- Providing context to the specific use-case (business-specific, or client-specific information).
- Providing specific industry background information for specialized or niche domains.
- Infusing emotion, empathy and connection.
- Sarcasm, irony, silliness, current memes, and the random stuff.
- Making inferences, drawing conclusions, sharing strong opinions.
- Visuals, graphics, illustration, video or graphs that relate specifically to the content.
- Finding and compensating for biases present in the AI training data.
- Controlling the length, specificity or depth of generated responses.
- Adding examples from lived experience.
- Providing external validation and verification of generated information.
Taking Control of our Creative Process
If we remain in charge of the creative process, AI serves to amplify our work; but only if we are the main creator. If we allow AI to have the final word and we copy-paste-post the results, straight from the prompt window, and mainline it into our social feeds, we may find ourselves, as a species, drowning in vast tubs of bland, biased, inaccurate, hallucinatory AI-generated gibberish. Which may accurately describe 80% of what’s found on the internet.
We Humans still hold the advantage in the non-technical realm. We outperform our AI co-creators thanks to our warmth, empathy, history and unpredictability. We have a more sophisticated understanding of nuance and the ability to form emotional connections with our words. We retain our randomness, wonder and spark that is still our strength and domain.
At least for the next few months.
Need help with AI Integration?
Reach out to me for advice – I have a few nice tricks up my sleeve to help guide you on your way, as well as a few “insiders’ links” I can share to get you that free trial version you need to get started.
No eyeballs to read or watch? Just listen.
Working Humans is a bi-monthly podcast focusing on the AI and Human connection at work.
About Fiona Passantino
Fiona is an AI Integration Specialist, coming at it from the Human approach; via Culture, Engagement and Communications. She is a frequent speaker, workshop facilitator and trainer.
Fiona helps leaders and teams engage, inspire and connect; empowered through our new technologies, to bring our best selves to work. She is a speaker, facilitator, trainer, executive coach, podcaster blogger, YouTuber and the author of the Comic Books for Executives series. Her next book, “AI-Powered”, is due for release soon.
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