Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way over the last few years – bringing striking new tools and ideas that were previously unimaginable to life. And better yet, they can help make your IC life a little easier …
The rise of the machines – and AI in particular – isn’t to be feared. Contrary to the belief that robots will slot into careers seamlessly and put us all out of work, clever software has allowed many of us to cut out time-wasting tasks and focus on what we enjoy doing at work.
As more proficient programmers and deft developers realise the potential of automation, AI-based platforms have rocketed in popularity – putting it right at the heart of many of our own comms toolkits.
While we’re not quite able to delegate a creative campaign to a browser-based personality, we’re not a million miles away, either. Here’s a quick look at five of our favourites and how they might be able to help you.
Before the pandemic, competent AI writing software was still in its infancy. But over the last 18 months, computer-generated content has come a long way.
Rytr is just one of countless new platforms hitting the market. The idea is that by taking writing, articles and content from across the internet, the platform can identify the components behind a story and create one itself.
The tool won’t be creating its own magazines anytime soon, but the progress Rytr has made is promising. For IC pros, it’s incredibly useful to help you out of a creative rut – just choose your language, tone, format, keywords and how many versions of the copy you’d like.
Not only is it valuable for content marketers, but it can help spark inspiration for content creators outside of IC, too. If you’re looking for song lyrics, or a business pitch, Rytr might just be able to help you.
This is likely the tool you’re the most familiar with already. For the uninitiated, Otter is a platform that takes your calls, chats and conversations, identifies who’s speaking when, and lets you share the transcript however you like.
Similar to Rytr, the platform takes in conversations and audio – plus users’ corrections and edits – analyses them and determines what you’re saying, with a surprising level of accuracy.
It’s a brilliant example of how AI can help make our lives easier – by capturing conversations quicker than even the fastest typists around, or allowing you to be fully present in a conversation without having to capture notes as you go.
Visit thispersondoesnotexist and you’ll immediately lock eyes with a fictitious stranger – literal warts and all. This is where our IC application of AI gets a little more conceptual – and where its specialised use can take us well and truly through the uncanny valley.
The algorithm behind the site is trained to learn what people look like using a huge set of images, before creating new examples.
That’s an incredibly oversimplified explanation, but the potential application of AI image creation is huge. Stuck going through the same three stock image characters for an illustration? Just make your own.
Let’s take a step further down the rabbit hole. Rather than helping artists and illustrators fill in the gaps of their work, Nvidia’s GuaGAN AI art tool aims to spark inspiration among creatives – and even help them bring their ideas to life. It’s an AI-assisted image creator that transforms your squiggles into something a little more artistic.
Just like thispersondoesnotexist, look closely and you’ll see a few tell-tale signs that something’s not quite right here. Just as the former site neglects its backgrounds, reflections and scenery, even Nvidia’s impressive platform can’t make your abstract doodle a completely believable scene.
But it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Want an Instagram-worthy beach sunset, or a foreboding mountain range sprinkled in snow? Try the browser platform and – if your machine can handle it – the Nvidia Canvas app.
Now you’ve got a very basic understanding of how AI learns from huge sets of information, why not give it a try yourself?
Teachable Machine is a web-based tool that helps anyone create a machine learning model and play around with AI. You don’t need any tech-savvy skills to use it – just an idea and a little patience.
So if you fancy training a computer to recognise the difference between two groups of images or audio clips, head over to Teachable Machine and dive in. And if you’re struggling for inspiration, check out what other people have been up to on Experiments with Google.
