Navigating the New Wave: How AI is Reshaping the Creative Landscape
In a digital era where technology perpetually reshapes our boundaries, the rapid ascendancy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the creative sectors poses both exhilarating opportunities and formidable challenges. Alex McFadyen, EVP of Technology and Head of Technology Evangelism at BENlabs, recently shed light on these transformative developments, emphasizing how AI not only enhances creative processes but also demands a new understanding of audience engagement and content management.
The Surge of Generative AI
“AI has been around since the ’80s, yet all of a sudden, it’s on everyone’s lips,” McFadyen remarks, pointing to the surge in computational power, vast data troves, and advanced algorithms as the catalysts propelling AI to the forefront of the creative industry. This new wave, particularly generative AI, is revolutionizing how content is conceived and produced. It automates complex processes that previously took hours or weeks, now accomplished in mere seconds. “You can go to DAR and with a prompt, you get an output which would have taken hours of effort to produce seconds worth of effort,” McFadyen explains, highlighting the efficiency and scalability brought about by AI.
Navigating Generative Junk
With great power comes great responsibility—and challenges. McFadyen introduces the term “generative junk,” referring to the mass production of low-quality content that AI can generate without adequate filters. “This is beautifully summed up by the infinite monkey theorem—with infinite monkeys and typewriters, one of them will eventually write Shakespeare. We’ve just given everyone infinite monkeys,” he states. This proliferation of content necessitates discernment and quality control, pressing creators and platforms alike to prioritize substance over sheer quantity.
Deepening Audience Connection
In the evolving landscape, understanding and connecting with one’s audience has never been more crucial. McFadyen stresses that while algorithms serve as useful proxies, they cannot replace the nuanced human insight into audience preferences and behaviors. “The algorithm is the audience,” he says, “but ultimately, if you can connect your content to the person on the other end of that algorithm, the algorithm will love you for it and will push your content out.” BENlabs harnesses AI to analyze unstructured data—such as images, text, and interactions—to help brands and creators forge deeper connections with their audiences.
Conclusion
As we navigate this new wave of technological innovation, the creative landscape is undeniably being reshaped by AI. For marketers and brands at BENlabs and beyond, the journey involves leveraging AI to enhance creative potential and audience engagement while managing the challenges it brings. “AI is giving more power to all workers,” McFadyen concludes, “but especially to those in creative industries.” It’s an exciting time to be in the creative field, where AI is not just a tool but a transformative force redefining the very essence of creativity and connection.
This blog post reflects the insights shared by Alex McFadyen at BENlabs, underscoring the impact of generative AI in the creative industries and inviting marketers to explore how this technology can be harnessed to drive innovation and engagement in their fields.
TRANSCRIPT: The Future of Audio and Ent - AI and/vs/for the Artist?
so yes I’m going to be talking about Ai and specifically how it can affect artists I work for a company called Ben labs and we are an AI company focused on video intelligence and human behavior uh that means that we help creators and Brands engage with their audience in intelligent ways and we do that with proprietary I technology and also for the Creator space we have Tu buddy which is one of our Flagship products you would have seen our work even if you don’t know the name Ben Labs uh we’ve been in the industry doing
product placement for over 40 years so if you saw James Bond kah that was us if you saw KFC in stranger things that was us too if you saw durx in little nasx and Sam Smith and young blood’s music videos that was also us and it’s not just film and television and music videos that we help we also help the digital creators as well with our tubebuddy product we’ve got 14 million users on tube buddy which means that if you’ve seen a video on YouTube you’ve probably seen a video that was helped by
us everyone from Mr Beast the BBC through to brand new YouTubers who are only just starting out we’ve got patent we’ve got Awards we’ve got all sorts of stuff but I’m not here to talk about us I’m here to talk about AI specifically why AI has become so huge in the last 18 months some of the challenges that we’re going to see very shortly regarding generative junk which may be a phrase that you haven’t heard before uh who why audience and understanding your audience is now more critical than ever and then
I’m going to go through a few few quick tools for ways that creators can actually leverage this wonderful world of AI as we said uh this is 30 slides worth of presentation and I’ve probably got about 13 minutes so strap in I’m going to be going quickly why is AI so hot right now ai has been around since the 80s and yet all of a sudden it’s on everyone’s lips what’s happened the short answer to that is massive amounts of GPU power massive amounts of data and some really clever mathematics the
slightly longer answer is what I’m going to give you now on the screen you can see three very popular generative AI tools and that’s the thing that all the new AI that everyone’s talking about has in common as it’s generative which means it’s creating content for you you can go to DAR and a prompt like you’ve seen there and you can get an output which would have taken hours or possibly even weeks worth of effort in order to be able to produce seconds worth of effort it’s amazing and all of this is now
possible and lots of it is of in everyone’s hands but to understand why uh it’s exploded recently I have to give you a little bit of a data science lesson don’t worry it’ll be quick for the purposes of this cor I’m going to split AI into two main groups you have discriminative ai which is the stuff that’s been around since the 80s and you have generative AI which is the stuff that’s turned up in the last 18 months the the image on the the image here that you can see describes the difference
between the two the first being discriminative the purpose of this AI is you give it lots of data you train it and then you bring it a new piece of AI data and it will discriminate it will tell you which bucket of things does it look most like this has been used to identify faces it’s been used to identify good moves in chess it’s been used to identify uh fraudulent Bank transactions it’s revolutionized many Industries but it’s pretty dull the one at the bottom is the much more interesting one which is generative
where we invested so much data into these models models that all of a sudden they could do things they could never do before and they were emergent properties no one knew that the model was going to start being able to do maths at that point no one knew whether it was going to be able to start doing maths at all but by asking it the questions and keeping those uh tests running they started seeing these things happen first it could do maths then it could get words in the right sequence then it was writing poems then it was passing the
bar exam and this is what happened in late 2022 and has continued to happen is these tipping points of abilities of these models have continued to fall but what’s really interesting is no one knew what it was capable of doing until you asked and that’s one of the reasons why many AI companies have been opening up these models to the general public to find out what it’s capable of doing and when they did everyone started using it almost all software developers are using it these days teachers are going in all
all in on AI and you can be absolutely sure that the kids are using it to help them with their homework help them creatives are the same creatives are all already using AI to be able to support them in their efforts and what’s interesting is when they’ve done studies people don’t seem to mind only 40% of people said they trusted AI generated content less than standard generated content and that’s really important and the adoption has been fast it took chat GPT only a month to get to 50 million users it took the internet
seven years and TV 22 years before that so this is like nothing else we’ve seen before and so now we have this amazing new future you can generate pretty much anything your hearts desires even music V music and video now as possible with generative models and everyone’s got access to it this is wonderful it’s a great time to be a creative but it does have some downsides for those of you that are old enough to remember there was a period in the early days of the internet where everything was on fire
every single piece of text had flames on it because Photoshop had the ability to press a button and put flames on your text huzzah great time you see it when you see it the first time after that yeah not so great then the latest version of that is generative junk the ability to generate thousands of these bits of content with no quality control or filter is resulting in some very interesting problems late last year you could Google can I melt an egg and Google would confidently tell you that yes you could because it was indexing a
COR article that was a piece of generative junk and so this is beautifully summed up by a long dead French mathematician which with infinite monkey theorem with infinite monkeys typewriters in time one of them will eventually write Shakespeare we’ve just given everyone infinite monkeys you can make massive amounts of content for almost no effort of of your own the problem is we haven’t given them the time or the Judgment or the creative skills necessary to be able to understand if what they’ve produced is
any good and this is a problem but this is also an opportunity as creatives and artists you know what good looks like that’s what you’re trained to do and as a result I think this is one of the reasons why creatives and artists are going to be one of the leaders in terms of the new AI revolutions and yeah there’s been a huge exposion of content either generated or otherwise and it’s risking drowning our audiences in junk that they just don’t want to see and the platforms are feeling this you’ve got uh Twitter or X
or whatever they want to call it this day uh having real problems with Bots right that they’ve got a huge problems there Amazon are bringing in new rules on their uh book publishing side to stop people’s submitting so many AI generated books because they’re drowning in it photo websites are also entirely Banning in some cases AI generated content because they can’t deal with the volumes that are coming through and as these volumes increase the platforms are going to continually and and and more more
more and more aggressively lean into the algorithms because that’s how they can deal with this huge swarm of content and as a brand or as a creator that means you’re going to have to adapt even faster to keep up with this everchanging landscape which brings me to the third point which is your audience this is now more than ever even more critical many people say the algorithm is the audience and while it is a good proxy in many cases ultimately if you are able to connect your content to the person on
the other end of that algorithm the algorithm will love you for it and will push your content out so understanding your audience and how to connect to them is now more important than ever and this indeed is why people use influences is why they do product placement because they want a shortcut to that authentic connection to an audience and when we talk about audiences lots of people talk about demographics and that was you know the predominant way and still in many cases is the predominant way to discuss and
look at and think about audiences the problem is demographics Aren’t Enough these two people have identical demographics but you can be sure that their browser history looks very different and so from a creest point of view if you’re trying to connect with one of these two people your approach and the content that you need to create will be very different the structured data the neat boxes that we used to put people in is no longer enough you need to be able to understand the unstructured data the image the audio
the text the the tone of voice the connections between content that’s the unstructured data and the entertainment field is a gold mine for this sort of information because it’s what it is artists and creatives live in this world and once again that’s why I think they are going to have one of the biggest advantages when it comes to leveraging these new AI Technologies and it’s something that we spend a lot of time at Ben Labs worrying about and thinking about what you can see here is a map of
uh hundreds of thousands of Instagram accounts on the left hand side they’ve been clustered together by our AI but not just using structured data it’s used the unstructured data of the content and the connections around that content it puts the the creators together that have content that is accessed by the same audience frequently and this has been amazing it was incredibly expensive to produce but it’s allowed us to do things that we could never have done before we can see from an audience perspective
which content is similar and which creators are similar are you the biggest Creator in your cluster are you the smallest and what’s even more interesting is when you overlay the audience’s other clusters that they’re accessing you can start to see is my audience really clustered around the content I’m already creating or do they have diverse other interests which gives you content ideas it gives you potential partners and it’s allowed us to scale our influence campaigns in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without this
sort of analysis also unstructured data allows you to get into predictive it allows you to see before content goes live what the potential impact of that content content is going to be top of the funnel metrics like views and things like that are very easily predictable when you get further down into things like clicks and conversions we can still predict those accurately which has made that when combined with the previous model that you saw about understanding audiences it’s really allowing us to diversify the
sorts of creators and the sorts of audiences that individual brands are going after once you know that you’re going to get an Roi it allows you to take more risks on creators that you may have never worked with before or that you’ve never seen before and this has really been opening up our ability to spread out those brand dollars to more and more creators allowing them to create more of their content and basically it works uh we launched the Apex Legend game with uh EA which was a huge launch and it was only used
influencers we predicted with 99.98% accuracy I think it was the number of views they were going to get in the first two weeks before that content went live and that meant that we could accurately pay the creators and it meant that the brand was also very happy we can scale to billions of views and it works outside of influencer as well so we do it in the US we uh our AI tried to decide which are going to be the next big TV shows because we do a lot of product placement and we get eight out of the 10 uh best the highest ranking
new TV shows which beats many I think almost all of the human uh critics and their predictions but that’s obviously for the brand side how as a Creator can I benefit from all that great Tech well already obviously there’s things like GPT mid journey and all those sorts of things and everyone’s already using those increasingly more and more companies like Ben labs and others are focusing those AIS on the specific specific problems that creators have themselves we do this through a product called tube buddy I’m going to show you
a few very quick uh examples so here’s title generator it takes your existing title and gives you some more options for it something as simple as that results in 84% more views for the users that are using it this one’s great as well this is suggested shorts it analyzes the videos that you’ve already put live it looks at when uh your audience is most engag with that video or when they’re dropping off it can then highlight those sections and then repeat them back to you so you can then either
slice down and use it as a short or indeed use it as inspiration for an entirely new piece of content then my personal favorite thumbnail analyzer what this is doing is it allows you to predict uh and look at the thumbnail before it goes live and it will tell you if you give it three or four which one it thinks is going to be the highest performing but as well as that as you can see on the image on the right it’s able to show you uh which parts of the image the AI thought was most important in that prediction and again the results
speak for themselves fundamentally what I’m trying to tell you here is that if you start using these Technologies you will engage with your audience better it just and we’ve done many many studies that have shown this I’m not saying you have to use CH buddy there are many other tools out there but these sorts of tools are giving people a distinct leg up from our point of view we’ve got some really interesting things in the pipe this is bringing the wonderful mapping technology and clustering technology
into the hands of creators allowing them to see who’s in their Niche what’s going on we can also tie that into other external data sources so we can start seeing what things they’re buying on uh on Amazon the audience is buying on Amazon or what they’re reading on Reddit to allow you to have that holis IC understanding the unstructured understanding of your audience so that you can better connect with them and then you can lay a generative on top of that you can start then providing that information to an AI model and say hey
give me some ideas based on this audience or I’m thinking I’m about to write a new series about this give me some ideas for ways that I can describe that to my audience that you think will resonate and when we’ve shown this to creators and they’ve started using it the feedback has been fantastic um some of them think that we’re hacking into their email because they’re already halfway through making some of the ideas it’s suggesting uh others that we they would like this one here for example is
suggesting collaboration with someone that they had done a collaboration with many years ago and the person immediately pulled out their phone and was fing oh you know I haven’t spoken to you in ages and seeing that creative spark and those like real human connections as a result of these sorts of tools is is what I live for it’s it’s great I can’t talk about AI without a little bit of fear and kind of addressing the elephant in the room which many people are worried about uh is is AI going to replace you um no I
don’t think it is personally um and there was a great talk that was given by Richard Baldwin at the world economic Forum where he said AI is not going to take your job it’s someone using you AI that will take your job some of you may have heard this before later on he also says AI is giving more power to all workers but especially to those average workers now I think that’s a little bit derogatory and a little bit harsh but what he’s trying to say there and I completely agree is you should lean on
AI for the places that you don’t want to invest where you don’t have the unique selling point or the your strength if you’re not good at doing thumbnails let AI help you with that if you’re stuck for an idea let AI help you with that focus on the thing that’s most important which is your connection to your audience and that audience trust in you so in conclusion generative AI is powered by artists everyone is already using it generative junk is a reality your judgment and audience are your
biggest assets and with great power comes great responsibility of course thank you please like And subscribe
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