Empowering Expression or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI
I’m Omar. I’m an AI image and filmmaker, but I’ve also been a creative director, strategist, founder and many other roles over the last 15 years in advertising, PR, creative, fashion and tech. I share that because in my career nothing has come close to the epoch that generative AI (gen AI) represents for creatives, creators, and the creative industry as a whole - and it’s the most exciting thing, perhaps ever.
Gen AI needs to be demystified, so we can begin to explore its creative potential, not as a replacement for people but as a magnifier of human creativity, vision and innovation. It is not replacing what we do, it is an entirely new category and medium.
The ways to create, tailor and integrate gen AI into our creative processes is open and available to all of us. There is tremendous potential for diverse and inclusive ideas.
Adventures in AI
This column is where I’m going to share my adventures, experiments and projects in AI, making ideas come to life. And rather than pontificating on what I think is going to happen and what you need to use, we’re going to look at the myriad of tools and let the technology fall away, so we can explore the creative potential of gen AI in all its modalities.
There are about ten different core methods of making AI film and over the course of the experiments, projects and ideas I share here, I’m hoping to bring you along on the adventure of investigating each one and what is possible with them.
Don’t say, Do
We’re at a time where the waters in the creative world are murky, many are stepping forward with little lived, hands-on experience. This column is a way for more to see, learn and understand through play and experimentation - which includes the failures. Everyone stands to gain if we begin to share lived ideas, insights and experiences that allow us to experiment and learn in the open.
It’s Not a ‘Tool’, It Is Also Not a Panacea
Calling AI a tool is extremely short-sighted. A tool can be used by anyone, to mechanically complete a task - tighten a screw, bang a nail etc. Gen AI is far more like an instrument, a device that with skill can create something new, normally something of huge creative value.
Believing that AI is a tool also limits the way we think about it, when imagined as an instrument, the creative, creator or director can create a unique voice, look, feel, story. Especially as most are using the same tools.
Importantly, gen AI is not a cure-all for any part of the creative process. While it has the potential to enhance creativity and elevate the current creative workflows and create ideas that resonate, it cannot remotely replace human creativity, it only opens new creative possibilities and potentials for all stories that we have to tell.
Gen AI Will Make Everything Bland
Gen AI and the tools that most use, already feel like they are locking us into visual styles and choices. And that’s where human skill, taste and texture comes in. In order to stem the sea of sameness, people will gravitate toward the real, the human, the vaguely imperfect - the craft of creative expression.
We’ve defaulted into an idea that AI is a replacement for traditional cinema, many AI campaigns are called that by simply replacing a scene or clip - this is more akin to stock imagery than a generative process.
To shift using gen AI into making work that is impossible to create without it, that shows clients what we want to make before we make it and have the creative vision to push this new technology as far as we creatively can, will help keep the human at the heart of creativity, for years to come.
JOY MACHINE
If you found this article interesting and would like to continue the journey I will be hosting an in-person monthly event called Joy Machine at 25 Woodseer St Gallery, 25th July. And should you or your business be interested in consulting services I can be reached here — hello@omarkarim.party.
