Savantic held two days of creative workshops with Pond Design. The goal was to explore how much help AI can be in a creative process. Emilie Camén, New Business Director, at Pond wrote a blog entry about it that you can read below.
How close are we as creatives to be replaced by computers?
AI taking over the world has been everyone’s fear (or hope!) for quite a while, and here at Pond Design we were curious and eager to understand how it can and will affect us as humans and professionals in the coming years. As the topic raised a lot of interest internally, we decided that we wanted a dedicated workshop to explore further.
We invited Marcus Weiland from Savantic – a consultancy building AI solutions and guiding companies towards becoming more data driven, as our personal AI guru. Besides teaching us the basics of Artificial Intelligence, we also got to try out different AI tools meant to replace some of the work we do in our daily roles. It was an interesting exploration and what we found out was that not only can AI create some great laughs, but it can also actually help us more than we initially thought when it comes to creative tasks. AI is perfect when it comes to generating a large number of suggestions or ideas in a short amount of time which in some cases is actually pretty relevant. Using these kinds of AI-tools can help us get going faster allowing us to focus more on our creative humanly magic. We also learnt what AI can’t do, which is foresee when people act and behave unexpectedly, exactly where it starts getting interesting and what a great creative human brain is phenomenal at; thinking outside the box.
The answer to our initial question in the headline is: well, we are pretty close, but we will probably see AI more as a colleague than a threat. We will definitely explore more about this and are looking forward to integrate AI more in our work in the coming years.
Thank you Marcus and Savantic for being so humanly intuitive in understanding exactly what we needed in terms of AI goodies!
These are my thoughts in response to what Emilie wrote:
Working with true creatives
At Savantic we normally work with applying AI to solve problems. Challenges we tackle include automatically counting and classifying cells in samples to help diagnose a disease, implementing intelligence into a production process to detect defects or using AI to predict how much of a product needs to be kept in store to meet future demand. Pond works in a much more open space where the number of possible “solutions” are unlimited. AI has traditionally performed quite bad in such settings and creative AI has only recently seen a surge.
For us it was very exciting to explore this area together with Pond. Using the latest AI technology within natural language processing (NLP) and generative adversarial networks (GAN) we tried to push the boundaries of creative AI. Some of the results can be described as peculiar at best, but others were truly creative and the AI tools pushed the creatives of Pond in directions that would otherwise not have been explored.
For me it was particularly rewarding to see the excitement AI can create. Many people fear being replaced by AI but everyone at Pond was laughing and embracing the technology. It is also nice to see how much we have in common. At Savantic we use the same creative approach towards solving problems as Pond applies to creating a new brand. In some respects data scientist have more in common with designers than with programmers.
A big thanks for choosing to do this with Savantic. We look forward to further collaboration in the exciting space of AI design!
