We Are Covert Look to the Future of Creative Innovation

The creative industry is always looking to push the boundaries of innovation and as we step into this nascent future, the We Are Covert team are embracing these new developments and evolving with them.

One such recent development is that of generative visuals – another term for AI art. Sure, if you listen to some people, you would think we are only a short step away from Terminator’s Judgement Day, but Covert co-founder Simon believes we should see ‘AI as a collaborator, not a replacement’.

Midjourney, an AI-powered system that creates images from user’s prompts, is an example of how AI is changing how we create and interact with imagery. Just type in a few words and voila - you have got an admissible image. The Covert team have become gripped by the possibilities that Midjourney and other similar platforms offer. Whilst the team’s creations have been a little strange, that’s more as a result of their odd prompt choices than the system itself - it’s the speed in which these pieces were created that is the pivotal crux. The system manages to create striking imagery in mere minutes. Whilst there are those who will use this as a case in point for the Judgement Day argument, the counterargument is simple – emotion.

Yes, Midjourney produced passable images, but it has only done so as a result of a user’s imagination telling it what to produce. Art is contextual and relies on human interpretation. AI cannot understand how using a certain shade of blue can evoke the memories of a perfectly balmy, sunny sky on that holiday to Cornwall - it can only produce the shade – and so AI alone cannot compute the complexity of our emotions. We need to view AI as a tool to empower us and give us capabilities we didn’t have before, but it’s a tool not a replacement.

Whatever school of thought you are from, artificial intelligence is no longer merely the realm of science fiction (No Alexa, I didn’t ask you to turn up), but by embracing the changes and adapting with them, we can steer it to a place where AI empowers us not replaces.