While gaming and the metaverse have been grabbing most of the headlines, a sleeping giant in creative technology has awakened. A decade of assistive AI in the forms of Siri, Alexa and Google assistant has given the technology majors a foundational base for queries, behavioral patterns, and human soft skills, which has led the way to its newest avatar Generative AI. And while current controversies will expose the flaws of the technology as it’s developing, in my opinion, it also has the potential to put power back in the hands of the consumer, by creating a new layer of personalisation and interaction with digital content.

Put simply, generative AI is a technology that allows people to create new imagery, audio, or video content from existing content, such as written text. Platforms like Dall-E, Mid journey, and Stable Diffusion more recently apps like Lensa AI and ChatGPT, have started to gain traction. As the focus of this technology filters out from the creative technology community and into the hands of the mainstream, there are several factors that we need to consider. 

From creative technologists to the mainstream

At the moment, we’re at the tipping point where this technology goes from being the domain of the creative technology community and digital artists to something that everyone wants to play with.

India specifically is a very adaptive and fresh market, whilst also being a forgiving market. India may not be 100% on the quality of content but the consumption rate is so high that consumers would be enamored by the product itself.

For this to move into the mainstream more broadly, as with technology like AR and filters, social platforms can be the key to fully awakening the possibilities by putting the technology in the hands of the masses. If you look at what Snap did for AR, by starting out with user-friendly filters for customizing influencers’ storytelling needs. That is the way generative AI will first be rolled out. You can start small and scalable at the consumer level, so it picks up momentum. We are already seeing this with Lensa AI climbing up the app charts globally. It simply uses AI to generate artistic selfies of people, which can then be reshared back onto their social media profiles.

From a creative production standpoint, generative AI is already used by creatives and concept artists to convert ideas into conceptual art. Anyone in the advertising industry will know the challenge of sourcing ‘reference images’ to visually communicate an idea. It’s humans who will always generate the ideas and Generative AI will become smart assistants to create content in an iterative manner to match a creative vision.

The unresolved issue of copyright and AI

As we are starting to see in social media, there is a backlash against AI selfie apps, and there’s a huge copyright repercussion for generative AI too. When you’re generating something out of AI, its real intelligence is in zeros and ones, data, that is then fed into its deep learning algorithm.  From there, AI is picking up all the elements and stitches them together to make them look unique.

We absolutely condemn plagiarism and believe copyright must be respected, both for artists as well as one’s personal data. I feel the marketplace for AI and machine learning to feed off to be able to run original results out of their code is still extremely small and nascent. Over the years, as this marketplace/data pool gathers more information to use in its code, you will find more originality coming to the foreground.

A lot of internet laws are still being written. The metaverse law book hasn’t even started. I don’t think anyone’s even close to writing a law book on what would and wouldn’t be a copyright infringement in generative AI.

These challenges will not slow down innovation or adoption, as it hasn’t in most other fast-moving tech trends. But it’s an important discussion when the creative and technology worlds come together in such a profound way. The consumer adoption phase of this technology is only just starting but it’s one, all businesses should be looking at.

Generative AI has the potential to change content forever

The future of this technology is what excites me. With generative AI, you are putting power back in the consumer’s hands because it no longer has to be a story that you template, people can personalise it. If we start to think about what’s possible in a few years, we could allow stories to be experienced from different characters’ viewpoints, showing the same story but from the protagonist, or a bystander’s perspective. What this technology will be able to do is allow people to create narratives as they see them.

At the moment the technology centers a lot around text to static images but generative AI is going to move into video generation in the future. This is where you’ll find a lot of influencers moving into this space. It helps continue the trend of the democratization of creativity because, if generative AI is able to generate video, content can be made when one doesn’t have the expertise in shooting or animating. Right now, we are already seeing it happen with metahumans and virtual avatars, where people are creating caricatures of their own. If they can further use generative AI, they will be able to create environments and conversations to build a unique style, enhancing the narrative.

All these small pots of gold will really explode when the promise of the metaverse comes in. Generative AI goes hand in hand with the transition from the physical world to the digital world. AI technology can push or accelerate further into an interactive digital world. We may even see the first AI movie hit our screens in a few years’ time.

Fixing the attention short attention span on digital content

The reason all of this is important is that, when you look at consumer patterns, the attention span has dipped low on digital content because there’s so much content to compete with. When you are on social or digital platforms, if you haven’t created it or interacted with the content, you don’t want to spend time on it. That is the barrier that everyone wants to cross. 

Could generative AI be the tool that will be a savior to the marketing woes of brands in this over-saturated content market? Or will it die a fast death if stuck too long in the legal storm? 

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