‘Flaco’ Joins Superheroes as AI Creative Director Owl

SuperHeroes agency has hired Flaco, the world’s first AI Owl as a new creative director. Flaco’s first day with the agency featured a special appearance at the Cannes Festival of Creativity where she wowed the audience at a panel on AI and creativity. 

At SuperHeroes, Flaco will be tasked with adding super powers to creative ideas throughout the agency’s offices in Amsterdam, New York and Singapore. SuperHeroes built Flaco in-house, in the form of an owl, to work as a robotic side-kick, imbued with the wisdom known to the owl family as powered by ChatGPT4. Flaco’s custom built mechanical skeleton  also includes NVIDIA and Teensy 4.0 circuitry, an edge based computer system, as well as Nodejs and Tensorflow software. Flaco’s creative capabilities are powered by Google Cloud speech recognition, Google text-to-speech, camera tracking and facial recognition.

“AI is impacting the definition of creativity. To better understand and leverage it, we wanted to find out if we could make AI’s impact also more tangible in our day to day creative processes. In our own not boring way of course”, explained Rogier Vijverberg, chief creative hero at SuperHeroes. “We are fortunate to have a group of tinkers and experimenters on staff who saw an opportunity to create a physical presence with AI properties that could participate as a team member as we take our creative ideas and brainstorming to new realms.”

When asked if an agency really needs an AI Owl, Flaco said: “Of Course? Who needs human creativity when you can have an AI owl spitting out concepts?” She added that she “is looking forward to being part of the Superheroes team.” 

Additionally, SuperHeroes creatives have also built an AI toolkit that brings together a growing array of AI solutions in one place to simplify and streamline the agency’s ability to trial and adapt new tools. The AI solutions in the toolkit dubbed ‘Athena’ include, Chat GPT, Dall- E, Text2Speech, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Damo Text to Video, Free VC, Swinir, Speaker transcription and others. The agency also has started sharing the toolkit with its clients as well. 

SuperHeroes is on a mission to save the world from boring advertising. It now also uses AI to do so, for tasks such as image and video generation, natural language processing, storyboarding, VO recording, and also analysis tools for the strategy teams. Athena works as a cloud-based 'middleware' that brings together an increasing array of AI tools that agency employees can have secured access with one login.