Evolving from Gen Z to Gen AI
The '2024 Best Employers of the Year Report' from Zhaopin reveals a notable trend in the workforce: 53.3% of professionals are either using or learning AI technologies and tools. It’s particularly captivating to note that gen z is driving this initiative, with adoption rates of 58.4% among individuals born after 1995 and 55.6% for those born after 2000, both of which are higher than the average across all demographic groups.
Gen z isn’t just adapting to AI - they’re transforming into what might be called 'Gen AI.' These digital natives are seamlessly integrating AI technology into every aspect of their lives, from work and studies to creative pursuits. The result? A dynamic community of AI-powered content creators, artists, and entrepreneurs.
Fresh professions are taking shape, like AI avatar designers, AI sticker illustrators, and copywriters with a focus on AI - each role blending technical skills with artistic endeavours.
2024 marks a pivotal year for the application of large-scale AI models, and for gen z creatives, this technological evolution represents more than just a tool -it’s becoming second nature.
These advances aren’t just reshaping their daily lives; they’re opening up unprecedented possibilities for efficient production and pushing the boundaries of creativity.
Invited to the Winter 2024 FORCE Power Conference by Volcano Engine, dentsu Z took a closer look at the most upgraded AI technologies from ByteDance.
Despite its cute name, ‘Doubao’ (which literally means ‘bean bun’) - its capabilities are truly impressive. Throughout our time at the forum and experience zone, we were constantly amazed at how deeply integrated AI is in every part of our lives and its future role as a companion in our workplaces.
Next, we will bring you a first hand report on our experience blending creativity and technology from the event.
Upon arrival, we immediately noticed the impressive concentration of AI professionals in attendance. Even as digital natives from gen z, we felt a bit lost with the technical language, such as ‘API,’ that often came up in talks.
The venue was packed to capacity – not a single seat was empty, with people standing along the sides and back of the stage. The enthusiasm was so contagious that even we, as non-AI specialists, couldn’t help but get caught up in the excitement.
The main forum began at 10 AM, with Volcano Engine president Dai Tan introducing the major upgrades to the Doubao Large-scale Model.
This upgrade of the Doubao Model Family introduced ten core features:
Text generation
Image generation
Video generation
Recommendation and search
Data analysis
Intelligent decision-making
Conversational Q&A
Knowledge management
Multimodal integration
Logical reasoning
When combined, these features enable image interpretation, visualisation, and idea association, offering us more diverse perspectives for thinking. In real-world work scenarios across various industries, AI shows immense potential - it could serve as a teacher, assistant, inspiration source, or even our intern.
AI’s Growth Outpaces All Expectations.
A particularly resonant perspective we heard at the event was, “We will focus on meeting specific and genuine needs, developing our technology with users’ real lives in mind. ”If AI application development is also centred around human needs, then it shares a common ground with our creative work - We explore authentic humanity to inspire ideas, and craft works that resonate with consumers. Extending this to our work, AI can create posters, write copy, do 3D modelling, and compose lyrics and music; it’s capable of more than we imagine. While perfection may still be a long way off, our creativity could help AI shorten this journey. In turn, AI can help us instantly transform our inspirational ideas into reality.
Beyond the Hype, AI is Actually Fun.
After the forum, Volcano Engine staff guided us through an interactive experience with the Doubao AI Model applications, where we successfully collected stamps from all exhibition zones.It became clear that AI can innovate how we approach photo editing, songwriting, and short video creation. The three most impressive experiences were intertwined with our present life and job.
The First Project: the AI-driven Photo Editing Tool.
Although AI in image processing has advanced, many are still accustomed to basic apps like Meitu for tasks such as object removal and enhancing portraits. To master AI editing tools, one must invest time; novices frequently watch online videos to learn essential skills, but the complexity of prompts can be intimidating. However, with Doubao, you get powerful AI editing that’s simple to use. Capture an image, provide a text prompt, and in a minute, the edited version will show up. We’re curious to understand how AI interprets Chinese text and applies it to our faces. Adding a bouquet of lilies to our images and changing our appearance could be done in no time. We got so caught up in playing with it that that we spontaneously gave impromptu tutorials to other visitors!
The Second Project: AI Song Generation: Haimian Music App.
Ever since AI-generated Stefanie Sun went viral across the internet, the adoption of AI technology in the music industry has skyrocketed. AI has brought millions of fresh compositions to the music world – we’ve even seen AI versions of Phoenix Legend covering Blackpink songs and a digitally resurrected Michael Jackson performing rap.
Just when we thought we’d seen it all with AI-generated music, Doubao’s music creation capabilities still exceeded our expectations. Creating a song is as simple as typing in a sentence, and the results are surprisingly good! We never imagined creating a song could be so easy.
We also participated in an interesting game where we had to guess whether six different songs were AI-generated or human vocals. Surprisingly, we only achieved a 40% accuracy rate...
The Third Project: AI Generated Videos.
Gartner predicted that by 2025, generative AI will create 10% of all produced data. With short videos being young people’s most important content consumption, AI-generated videos are becoming an inevitable trend.
As avid short video users, we also have great expectations to witness Doubao’s upcoming AI lifestyle video innovations.
We entered a theatre showcasing AI-generated films, experiencing AI films on the big screen for the first time - it felt like watching a movie. Scenes like people gliding on rainbows or subway cars filled with flowers, which are difficult to film in real life, were effortlessly created by AI.
Additionally, dentsu and Volcano Engine’s collaboration provided an opportunity for our creatives to experiment with Doubao’s video generation features ahead of the launch event.
Special thanks to Jianhao Chen, the chief data and solutions officer for Greater North Asia at dentsu, and Chris Chen, the chief creative officer of dentsu in China, for connecting us with the ByteDance’s Doubao team and sharing their valuable perspectives on how AI could be applied in the industry and within businesses in the future.
