The AI Creative Department and Prompt-Based Creativity
A New Language For Creative Professionals Emerges
My weekly Forbes Column this past week was dedicated to the inevitable evolution of the creative tech stack dominated by companies such as Adobe. I highlighted how these established platforms are being challenged with generative AI apps and detailed the likely outcome of consolidation. But this weekend’s newsletter isn’t going to get into the tech industry side of things—rather I want to talk about how we’re going to see creativity transform before our very eyes.
I know a thing or two about creativity. I graduated high school with the “Class Picasso” moniker because I could draw and paint well. After a couple of years soul searching what I wanted to do with my life—I transferred to Pratt Institute in NYC, a prestigious design school with a rich heritage in engineering and architecture. There, I found myself surrounded by exceptionally talented artists, designers, and at the time—groundbreaking computer graphics artists. The colossal revolution back then was that pencils, stencils, etc., were replaced by computer programs like Illustrator and Quark.
I graduated knowing how to use this software combined with a high-quality experience of being trained by some of the best design instructors in the world. And I found work immediately as a result.
Much has changed since then. But also, some things have not. For example, most companies still have “creative departments” despite decades of thought leadership pieces claiming that the creative department is dead. It is certainly not—it just goes by different names such as “content studio,” etc. Many tools, platforms, etc., have changed over and over again in these past few decades—but the creative process has not.
It all starts with ideas; they begin to take shape using the plethora of creative tools that writers, editors, art directors, etc., have at their disposal.
The language of creativity has largely remained unchanged.
Until now.
A New Kind of Creative Language
I’ve begun exclusively using prompts and AI platforms to generate images that support my writing here. And I’m not alone—my network includes some of the most talented creative professionals working today. Many of these innovators are experimenting with a new kind of creative language in the form of text-based prompts, and their creative output is nothing short of astounding. Some of you may have seen AI-generated images of brand mashups of brands such as IKEA, Patagonia, Adidas, Burberry, British Airways, etc. Things that would take days to create can now be done in minutes and hours:
The Prompt-Based Creative
The professional world refers to people who work in creative departments as “creatives,” and those departments will see the emergence of a new kind of talent, likely coming from some of the same places but also some newer ones. Prompt-based creatives will approach a blank input field in a similar way that a creative has approached a blank screen in Adobe Creative Suite or Google Docs. Instead of creating images, videos, or written stories, the creative will start typing a series of prompts, refining them, typing new ones, building on others, and then mixing these results with the digital tools they’ve come to master.
Enter the prompt-based creative who will live and work in the AI creative department. Of course, over time—much of this will become invisible. We don’t think of creative departments and studios as being defined by their proficiency in digital platforms such as After Effects—all technology, when adopted, becomes like oxygen, and we take it for granted.
We don’t think about breathing, we just do it.
But in the short term, the new prompt-based language of creativity is worth digesting because it’s both a natural evolution and a new expression of the traditional creative process. Creatives who think visually, for example—will have more and new competition from those who can put concepts into words—words that transform into prompts—prompts that transform into ideas. And there will be some really bad examples in the short term—that’s always how it is—in the early days of Photoshop, features such as filters were not used with good creative judgment. But as I’ve stated previously—Photoshop now feels completely invisible.
Text-To-Everything
This space is moving fast regarding apps and the soon-to-be integration of AI-powered features in existing software that helps creatives make things. WIX, the Website making platform, now offers an AI text generator integrated right into the platform, allowing the user to have copy automagically generated for the entire Website they are making. There are already apps for text-to-images, text-to-text, and text-to-video, and it will only keep coming. UX professionals, a subset of creatives, will now be able to create graphical user interfaces using text prompts—it used to be GUI (Graphical User Interfaces) used to create GUI, and now we’ll have CUI (Conversational User Interfaces) as well. Gallileo AI is one of these emerging Web applications we’ll likely see bundled as feature sets in more established platforms:
Prompt-based creatives will master keywords and phrases the same way they have mastered spellcheck or the lasso tool, albeit with a shift in the creative process versus the mere adoption of a new tech tool.
That’s because of the conversational interfaces they’ll be using more of as this space matures, evolves, and becomes part of the creative process itself.