How AI is enhancing creative processes

When you think of AI these days, you think of Generative AI (GenAI) and tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Copilot. GenAI is the go-to tool for content creators and designers. In addition to creating text, video, images and music, it offers countless possibilities, such as co-creating new concepts and exploring innovative forms of storytelling. We'll explore some of these possibilities below. 

Assisting (UX) design or creative teams: summarising a request for a quotation or tender document and analysing it thoroughly. So that the team can distil essential information from the pitch and filter out important elements such as tone, target audience, and characteristics. Because they ensure that a campaign or design ultimately has an impact on both the brand and customer experience.

Based on that knowledge, you can use AI to generate concepts, titles, or even image suggestions. That's where the work of the machine stops, and the work of the human expert begins. They filter the proposals – based on their experience, knowledge of the client and target group, and of course, intuition – and critically, they select the most valuable ideas. 

"You can develop these suggestions with your team into a specific concept or a campaign, or ask AI to refine them," says Gijs Besselink, "This iterative process of briefing analysis, concept generation, and expert selection allows you to efficiently develop unique and qualitative concepts, making the best use of both the power of AI and the expertise of the content creator: it ensures that you can quickly visualise a concept to show your client exactly what you meant. This ensures that there is less noise on the line when it comes to campaign development." 

If you feed an AI model with the right data and instructions, it can support you as an alter ego in your customer interactions – provided, of course, that your customers experience this as an added value. 

• Spokesperson. You can train the language model to be your "spokesperson" and give it the task of manning your help desk or customer care service and speaking to people in your name and according to your values and regulations. Gijs Besselink: "You feed AI with the customer data you collected and ensure that the language model knows and understands the world and views of your customers. This makes it your digital spokesperson who gives your customers the answers they need in real-time."  

• Persona. Or you can harness the power of AI to create more interactive and personal campaigns. You ask the AI tool – based on your customer data – to adopt a persona or act as a representative of your target group, to tell you how your organisation can best meet their expectations and needs. And which content or creative campaigns would convince them to choose your brand, and which would not. "Of course it is important to test this," says Gijs Besselink, "but using AI to virtually gauge what your customers need means that you can answer them more quickly, with the information they expect, and that you can enter into a more personal dialogue with them."  

• Peer-to-peer interlocutor. But you can take it a step further. As part of an awareness campaign, our Swedish iO colleagues asked AI to simulate a human. An insurance company wanted to help schoolchildren to understand the risks of too much screen time. So we created the teenage girl Laika using an AI language model. Not only did she look like a real-life girl, but she behaved like a thirteen-year-old who was overly (100%) exposed to social media all day, every day. Schoolchildren were able to 'talk' to her in real time and saw the impact her screen use had on her mental health. This allowed them to reflect on their own behaviour and discuss difficult feelings in class.  

So, AI really isn't a silver bullet. It is not enough to feed it a few prompts and then sit back while it produces a creative campaign. The question you need to ask with any AI intervention is: is artificial intelligence adding value, is it improving your storytelling and efficiency of your and creation process, and when is it a waste of time? And the answer is simple: an AI language model can be a powerful tool – if you remember three essential considerations: 

1. Choose the right AI model. The AI models each have their unique strengths. They also evolve in their ability to understand your intentions and answer the deeper questions behind a briefing, which leads to improved results. An older or free version is likely to cause more frustration than success.  

2. Ask the right questions. AI excels at delivering superficial answers and general concepts. Do you want a specific result and more relevant answers? Then it is crucial to communicate clearly and precisely with AI and ask specific questions. This is the only way to improve the quality of the interaction.  

3. Deploy AI according to its strengths, not your needs. Always consider where and how you want to deploy AI carefully, because no matter which model you use, it will never replace human creativity. So don't use AI to compete with your own expertise, but as an assistant that helps with things you are not so strong or so quick at. Ask it for inspiration, to research a topic, or to deepen a concept and creation you have already made. Use artificial intelligence to enhance your human creativity and expertise.  

The right combination of these three aspects can help enrich your creativity and storytelling skills. 

If you're going to work with AI, make sure you don't leave digitally vulnerable people out in the cold. Paradoxically, AI could actually improve the participation for that group of people in the digital world. 

"After all, language models are becoming more and more human," says Gijs Besselink, "Soon you will no longer have to work with complicated prompts, but you will be able to have a natural conversation with an AI language model. For example, I recently saw a demo of a parent who helped their child with homework and talked to AI about how the mathematics they learned at school compliments today's mathematics. Or an app like 'Read simple', which – based on a photo – dissects the content of complicated correspondence from, for example, from governmental institutions and translates it into an easier to digest, 'what is in the letter' and 'what you should do.'" 

By combining AI with human expertise, we can enrich the creative process: working more efficiently, discovering new concepts, and creating more personal customer interactions. By experimenting and combining the power of AI with human creativity, with empathy and judgement, and an open mind, we will create customer experiences will inspire brand loyalty every target group. 

At iO, we are passionate about the possibilities of AI in the creative process. We would love to explore how we can use this digital sidekick to tailor your creative campaigns with more precision to your target audience and create stronger customer experiences. For more information about AI and how it can enrich your projects, check out our extensive AI dossier on our website and keep an eye on our events and webinars. Do you have any questions, or would you like personal advice? Please feel free to contact us.