AI in Production and Post: What Does the Future Hold?

There was no escape from AI in 2023 as platforms like Midjourney and ChatGPT truly democratised the tech. Last year brought endless opinion pieces and debates about whether the robots were taking over and, depending on their stance, leaders in this industry either praised AI as a creative catalyst or condemned its usage as a mindless producer of countless blobs of personalised content goop.

However, if you ask the experts, it turns out AI really wasn’t that new to the creatives and creators of adland. Inarguably, generative AI tools did take a foothold, not just in the industry last year but in public life too, but in fact, artificial intelligence has been employed regularly across the board - by production companies, agencies, VFX studios and more - for some time.

Exploring this, LBB’s Ben Conway has posed the questions: What really changed in the year that AI took over everything? And as we begin a new year, what does the future of AI in advertising look like in 2024?

To kick off this discussion, we’ve spoken to experts in the worlds of production and post- creators who have been using AI technologies in their day-to-day, be it image generation, VFX tools, virtual production or personalisation. Giving their thoughts are representatives from Hogarth, Framestore, ArtClass, Familia, Pomp&Clout, VuFinder Studios, STUCK IN MOTION, Good Times and Not Just Any.

Read their insights below.

Production

Priti Mhatre

Managing director, strategic consulting and AI at Hogarth

Recent breakthroughs in deep learning have led to generative AI, which has marked a paradigm shift in mainstream applications, making AI accessible to everyone through platforms like ChatGPT and Midjourney. From idea generation to copy generation, and text-to-voice to personalisation at scale, generative AI platforms have found a wide range of applications in marketing.

At Hogarth, we view generative AI as an amazing opportunity to deliver industrialised scale to our clients. We combine the power of generative AI with our craft expertise and cultural insights to supercharge content supply chains for our clients and drive their growth. We have invested in building deep expertise in-house through training and strategic partnerships with leading AI companies like NVIDIA, Microsoft and Getty.

AI technology is being increasingly utilised in creative teams to accelerate the process of generating ideas and visualising them. Although AI has made content creation more accessible, it requires the expertise of production specialists who can write technically optimised prompts, integrate the client's brand identity, apply local insights, and deliver visually stunning results that foster an emotional connection.

 We have established ethical frameworks and principles to ensure the safe use of AI for our clients and within our organisation, empowering our creatives to explore its possibilities in a responsible way. In the past year, there has been a shift from experimenting with AI to building AI-driven content engines that combine the best of virtual production and AI to deliver the scale and speed that clients have always strived for.

Melania Kulczycka

Founder, client services director at VuFinder Studios

I don't believe that AI has taken control of every aspect of our lives. Instead, I see AI as a valuable tool that has significantly enhanced various facets of our daily activities. In general, it has proven instrumental in boosting our work efficiency. AI not only assists with routine tasks like composing emails but also contributes to more sophisticated functions, such as facilitating visualisation and creation processes.

In the context of VuFinder Studios, AI holds a pivotal role. We leverage AI to optimise the virtual environments we display on our LED wall. Additionally, AI serves as a powerful tool for generating 2D images, enabling us to provide clients and agencies with visualisations of our creative vision. This approach is incredibly time-saving compared to the traditional method of manual drawing.

Moreover, we are constantly experimenting with creating virtual humans. We've scanned individuals, including myself, transforming them into 3D entities that exist in the virtual space. This innovative application allows us to incorporate these virtual humans as extras in the background of scenes, showcasing the incredible possibilities that AI unlocks. And this is just the beginning of what we can achieve with this technology. I cannot wait to see what the future holds for us.

Lisa Paclet

Director at FAMILIA

It has been hard not to anthropomorphise AI tools, as in the past year, I’ve used them to create short films and music videos. I always make sure to credit them, so that when GAI and the Singularity come around we can start off on a good footing. Is AI coming for our jobs? Most likely some. Yet so far, I have experienced it mostly as a tool to expand my own ideas and capabilities. By itself, AI is only able to echo ideas that are an average of the collective soup that is the internet… The only good AI Art I have seen has been highly curated and edited by a human mind. 

As anyone going through school can painfully attest too, just being able to write, or draw, or photograph beautifully is not what makes the object of art intrinsically interesting or valuable. It seems that in all the euphoria we forget that art is not just born of skill, or production capabilities. It is the muse born of coincidences, channelled through the experience of the artist. So I believe that for AI to truly replace artists it must probably become conscious. If that happens, we’ll be in an interesting new world where we couldn't consider AI a tool anymore. Then we will probably see some interesting new art.

[Above: Lisa Paclet - 'Midnight Interviews Ep. 1']

Paul Trillo

Director at ArtClass

The most obvious fundamental shift that has happened by putting AI in the hands of anyone is that we are no longer limited by the arduous steps in production. Within minutes or seconds, even, we can create insanely detailed, photorealistic renders or excessive, explosive spectacles or prose that, if you squint, could resemble a Shakespeare sonnet. As exciting as this is, it’s also an extreme commodification of creative expression.

This shift forces us to redefine how we value craft and what makes for a wholly original full-blown creative work. These constraints of production are going to get looser and looser and give unknown people wild creative freedom. This will, of course, lead to an even higher frequency stream or hose of generative content - much of which is pretty bad. I could see this trend causing viewers to become less caught up in the technicalities of how something is made and instead should value concepts and personal expression. We can and will shoot for bigger and more ambitious ideas now but good art has always been about showing restraint and speaking with authenticity. 

As we dream up more audacious worlds and AI progressively becomes more invisible in the creative process, I hope we continue to elevate original voices with human experiences that truly have something unique to say.

Aidan Gibbons

Executive creative director at Not Just Any

We used AI on a few jobs last year – to visualise concepts for director Ayla Spaans's treatment for Naked Smoothies, for director Luc Rëso Janin’s music video inspired by our experiments with Stable Diffusion, and for an AI-powered film for EY – creating and puppeteering the faces of over 400 EY employees.

The single most hidden (and negative) impact AI could have on our industry is on the creative process itself and the devaluing of skilled work. AI has allowed creatives to start with this fully beautifully rendered idea at the quality of a Hollywood movie. Creativity is all about like-minded skilled artists collaborating on an idea, shaping and moulding it to create something much more than the sum of its parts. What scares me is clients might come to expect final-quality, fully visualised campaigns at the pitch phase. These clients might get a shock when they find out the time and cost to execute.

I fear that AI might start to replace some artist’s jobs, and that makes me very sad. Proponents like [DreamWorks co-founder] Jeffrey Katzenberg underestimate the creative minds of the artists. We should all champion a love of craft or else we really are all doomed. When I see ‘prompt artists’ on X and LinkedIn, I bite my tongue because that phrase is an oxymoron to me. AI is here to stay, but the ability to use AI tools does not make you a creative person.

It’s not all doom and gloom though - AI shines when it’s used as a conceptual tool when you’re really stuck and need to get something from your brain down on paper. It’s great at spell checking treatments. I’m all for embracing it within a workflow, but not replacing one.

[Above: EY.ai - The Face of the Future]

Ryan Staake

Owner, director at Pomp&Clout

We’re on the cusp of massive changes across the board. If this goes the dystopian route, in a few years, traditional live-action commercial production will begin to feel like an archaic misallocation of time and financial resources. Agencies cut out production. Instead of having three production companies pitch treatments, they generate numerous spots for clients. Clients review these options in large conference rooms with expensive food and drinks. Then, after much deliberation, they choose their favourite of the three on the spot and request changes that the agency ECD excitedly changes in real-time by re-editing prompts at specific timestamps.

On the way back from the presentation, the client wonders how much the expensive food and drinks cost them, and feels confident they could do this whole ‘commercial thing’ themselves. The next morning they ask their internal social team to experiment with generating their own creative and final photoreal spots. The results are surprisingly effective and very cheap, so at the advice of the client and CMO, the board decides not to retain the agency next quarter.

The client fully internalises creative and production responsibilities and saves a ton of marketing spend in the process, which results in robust earnings reports and causes the stock to spike. Doubling down in the next quarter, they plan to increase engagement metrics further by using AI-based focus groups to assess the most effective spot, bypassing the need for their internal creative team.

The spots AI crowns ‘the winner’ are objectively not that good, but the sales numbers back it up… and that’s just our industry!

Corwin Carroll

Executive producer at Good Times

AI was an indomitable force in 2023. I worked on one of the first AI projects with GoFundMe and AKQA and what was challenging at the end of 2022 was easily accomplished by March of 2023. Last year marked a pivotal moment in acknowledging AI as an integral part of our creative toolbox. For those of us on the production side, AI's emergence isn't a sudden disruption but a continuation of our industry's evolution. We’re always building or using new tools to enhance creativity and efficiency.

It’s more than just a buzzword or a futuristic concept; it's a practical asset that we interact with daily. It has become a co-pilot, assisting in generating ideas, and streamlining workflows at a scale previously unimaginable. Its ability to handle iterative tasks frees our human creativity to focus on the more nuanced and intricate aspects of our projects.

However, it's crucial to remember that AI is a tool, not a replacement for human ingenuity. Since the days of Buster Keaton, our industry has thrived on resourcefulness and adaptability. The integration of AI into our processes represents a natural progression in our ongoing journey of innovation. It challenges us to continuously evolve, pushing the scope of what can be produced with time and technology.

As we reflect on 2023, it's evident that AI has solidified its place in our industry, not as a threat, but as an invaluable ally in our quest to deliver exceptional stories and content. The mantra 'innovate or die' has never been more relevant, underscoring the need to embrace AI as a means to enhance, not replace, our creative capabilities.

[Above: GoFundMe - Help Changes Everything, dir. Paul Trillo]

Post Production

William Bartlett

Executive creative director at Framestore London

Right now we’re at the early stages of the AI revolution and a lot of the focus has been on how we use AI tools to speed up and augment our existing workflows and creative structures. This trend will certainly continue but alongside it, we are also developing entirely new ways to assemble the patterns of pixels that make up images. Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Pika and Runway have all become part of the day-to-day tool sets that VFX companies are using.

There are many questions about a fundamental ceiling of creativity that AI will reach and if it can ever be anything more than a ‘creative partner’. Some limits have been seen with the first wave of tools but new models like Google’s Gemini [AI language model] will evolve the complexity of generation as they learn across different modalities. Up until this point, large language models (LLMs) have broadly been creating original writing based on huge datasets of language. Multimodal models will be able to genuinely build in inspiration for original writing from music, images, sound and eventually even touch. And likewise, this cross-pollination of perceptual stimulation will work in all directions, exactly like it does with our own creative output.

Alongside this, the further evolution of tools for conditioning and controlling outputs will broaden the scope for real world applications and I think we will continue to see a rapid expansion of the AI footprint in the creative arts.

The Team at STUCK IN MOTION

AI may not have been ‘new’ in 2023 but it certainly kicked into hyperdrive. We have noticed a significant difference in quality and reliability which now make some AI tools a necessary part of our daily workflow. 

For designers, the introduction of Photoshop (Beta) now allows for extremely fast rotoscoping of talent and objects. Generative Expand extends environments in just a few clicks - for when that shot comes back from set just a little too tight. AI tools for sound make dialogue clean up much faster. New generations of ChatGPT allow us to workshop creative ideas in ways we were not doing a year ago. Of course, AI transcription is not new but it is getting better and faster.

One thing is certain: there are a lot of benefits to AI but it's not 100% dependable. Text image generation still struggles with human anatomy such as hands, feet, ears and teeth. Getting consistency across multiple images and adjusting details is nearly impossible.

In its current state, we consider AI to be more of an augmentation to the creative process rather than a replacement.

Tommy Shull, executive producer, creative, principal, adds: "We're actively testing AI tools to genuinely enhance our team's productivity, improve work quality, and deliver cost savings to our clients."