Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Art Directors?

22 Jun

AI generated image of worrying Art Director, created by DALL·E 2

At the moment of this writing, a lot of creatives in the advertising industry are attending the most prestigious award show in the industry: the Cannes Lions. Much like at the Cannes movie festival just before it, the winners of the gold Lions get called on stage. Often it is both the Copywriter and the Art Director of the winning campaigns that take the honors and go collect the much coveted statue and the applause that comes with it. And I can’t help but wonder: will an AI algorithm collect its Golden Lion next year? Because I think it could.

Previously, I wrote a blog post wondering if AI would eventually replace copywriters. To demonstrate how far the technology had actually advanced, I had an AI algorithm write the actual post. Little did I know that a mere 3 months later, I could do the same experiment with images instead of text. You tell the algorithm what kind of image you want, and some 20 seconds later, it has generated 6 proposals for you. If that sounds crazy: wait until you see the results. It’s nothing short of mind-blowing.

DALL·E

Open AI labs describes their algorithm as follows: “DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.” And that pretty much says it all. The good news: you can use it too. And it gets better: for non-commercial use, it’s free. The bad news: you need to get on a waiting list. I had to wait 2 months and a week. But after that, it’s play time!

Once your account activated, you can give it 50 descriptions or instructions per day. For each of these instructions, DALL·E generates 6 variations. You can then chose to make variations of your preferred image, or you can edit parts of the image you don’t like and give it a new description. For example, the description I used for the image above, was “Gloomy image of an unshaven unemployed art director in a low-lit office staring at threatening computer screens in matrix style, digital art.” I then generated six variants of one image I liked most. Another image of the first set was the one below.

Strengths

Where to start? The magic of 6 images appearing within 20 seconds after whatever you throw at it, is utterly addicting. Next to the speed, a huge added value is that it stretches your own imagination. Because you already have a vague picture in your head when ask DALL·E to create an image for you. And it rarely generates a picture close to what you have in your head. Rather, by offering six alternatives, it often triggers new ideas for composition, colors, lighting etc. After thinking of the idea itself, that is basically what Art Direction is all about.

Next to its speed, it’s incredible how knowledgeable the system is in terms of art and photography styles. You can tell it to paint like Monet, Picasso or Hockney or whatever artist you like. You can instruct it to make a photo through a 50mm 1.4 lens. You can chose to draw things in Marvel comic style. You can even tell it to use New York in the 1930s as a background. The only limit here really is your imagination.

Weaknesses

While DALL·E excels in idea generation, it often lacks in finishing touch. Worse, it sometimes makes odd mistakes. Look for example at the hands of the art director in the picture on top of this post. While I’ve met my share of odd Art Directors, I’ve never met one with hands that have actually grown together, losing most of his fingers in the process. Similar things happen with feet, bicycle or car wheels. Faces often get strangely distorted, though sometimes it really does a fine job: I haven’t figured out yet what triggers the one or the other. Much like a human Art Director, it’s good in drafting good ideas, but for the execution itself, it will still need a designer, or a photographer, or an illustrator.

Maybe not so much a weakness, but really an inconvenience is that you can not use it as a tool for story boards. You can’t generate the same character doing different things for example. DALL·E doesn’t ‘remember’ what it has drawn before, it generates new creations over and over. So you couldn’t even reproduce the same images with the exact same instructions.

Conclusion

It’s hard to over-estimate the impact that AI already has on our daily lives. It already decides whether you get a loan or not. It’s already better in predicting dementia just by looking at one brain-scan than any specialized doctor. Tomorrow the AI in your self-driving car may decide whether it will sacrifice your life in a car-crash or that of the family of four in the other car.

And yes, if you look at an Art Director as the one who generates the images that bring an idea to life, it can do that too. Often better and surely way faster than any human out there. And it can trigger ideas that would not have been triggered without it. Much like translators already rely heavily on AI trained translation memories to do the volume work for them, AI could really impact the way Art Directors work. Make them more efficient, no matter how much the uttering of the very word makes them cringe.

But the algorithm still needs you to tell it what it needs to create. As a creative, you should embrace that. It just might help you get onstage in Cannes next year.