"AI hysteria is on the wane... but the tech is here to stay "

We’re on the other side of it now. 

The hype, the pearl-clutching (or whatever the millennial equivalent of pearl-clutching is… phone-clutching?) hysteria of “oh my God, we’re all doomed” is over. 

A bold statement, but one I’m willing to make. Just like Covid, AI has entered our lives, and it’s here to stay. It’s part of our landscape now. 

We’re settling into life with Covid. Sorry, I mean AI. 

Artificial intelligence hasn’t stolen our jobs (yet), passed the famed Turing test (which assesses if a machine can exhibit real, human-like intelligence) or made even one of the 40,000 new chemical weapons it’s thought up.

But for creatives, and those working in digital and video production, if it’s harnessed early and appropriately, AI is a welcome tool. It’s streamlining our working practices and making more space for the things that matter. Like ideation, strategy and true off-the-wall creativity. 

We were deploying AI apps and programmes for specific, niche tasks long before the ChatGPT media frenzy began in 2023. There’s the plug-in our in-house video editors use to transcribe the interviews we give them, saving hours of typing drudgery. Or the programme that fixes audio. In the catastrophic event of tinny sound, it isolates voice tracks from the crackle, buzz and static of the world around it. Like a magic wand, or that Instagram filter, it can help to tweak and finesse. 

Text-to-image generation can aid mood boarding or briefing directors and photographers, though text-to-video editing tools, rolled out by studios such as Runway, aren’t giving our video editors a run for their money yet. I’m willing to bet these tools won’t steal jobs, but they will enhance them. 

And even though ChatGPT is an even bigger bullshitter than Jay from The Inbetweeners, it also has its uses. 

Large Language Models such as ChatGPT and Google Bard will never write scripts for videos, at least never for this writer (you can hold me to this in 2045!). But they can assume alternative points of view, question your arguments and hoover up large datasets while conducting market research. 

Hell, they can even suggest interview questions and social copy. One news editor friend tells me that ChatGPT does the job of a (very) junior newsroom journalist, but faster and with a similar need to have every word they write fact checked.. 

If you know how to prune and edit the piles of vacuous nonsense it can spew, ChatGPT can assume the role of another brain at the table – albeit the least original (someone has to be). 

A recent study by Accenture estimates that 40 percent of ALL working hours are going to be affected by LLMs such as ChatGPT. In the world of social media and marketing, this carries the risk of a ubiquitous sea of tosh-flavoured sameness.

Which is why bespoke and organic visual storytelling is becoming even more valuable. 

Will the proliferation of AI tools replace the ancient craft of telling a story? It can’t. 

It is, however, freeing up vital time and space for creativity, spontaneity, humour and risk.