We have been living in an AI-generative world for quite some time now, but it is accelerating at a rapid pace and the leaders in the know say it is on the cusp of reimagining much of what we create. It is going to feel very different in the next 12 months than it feels now.
Yet here we are again reconsidering what it means to be human! AI does not replace a creative person, but it does speed up the creative process. What a creative person feeds the app has everything to do with what comes out. There are no rules around AI, but we know that we must engage societal norms and guidelines around compliance, risk, manipulation, rejection and acceptance.
The power is in the creation. Early scarcity has created abundance, giving way to ethical brand guidelines, brand safety, transparency and privacy. And we should prepare for the vigilant guardians within ourselves.
I turned to Brandt Krueger, senior production manager for EideCom, for his insights into AI and ChatGPT, and I found his perspective quite refreshing.
Are you using AI and ChatGPT in any of your daily work? If so, what is the impact on your productivity?
We’re experimenting heavily with these technologies, using both the text-based ChatGPT as well as the AI visual generator MidJourney. Our creative director, Wayne Johnson, has actually been using them together, using ChatGPT to revise the prompts being used to generate images in MidJourney to stunning effect. His photorealistic renders of stage sets that have never been imagined before are a great way to quickly generate some fresh options for stage design and lighting. These tools are enabling us to react quickly and return a fully rendered quote in greatly reduced time. As another example, we’ve fed a 45-page RFP into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize the most pressing issues for a client. We then compared it to the actual question asked by that client in our pitch, and they were surprisingly close—making it an excellent tool for preparing for a pitch meeting and understanding the needs of a client.
What do you feel is the biggest benefit of AI and ChatGPT? And how about a drawback?
The biggest benefit that I see for creators is overcoming “blank page” paralysis. These tools are great ways to get the creative juices flowing. They should not be seen as replacements for authors or graphic designers, but tools that these creatives can use to be more productive and to unleash their creativity. Now, literally anything I can describe with words can be drawn by generative AI. Same goes for text—people just need to keep in mind that the “facts” can be wrong, and sometimes completely made up. That being said, it’s important to realize that these tools will get better, and right now they’re literally the worst they’ll ever be.
Are there applications that you would recommend to other eventprofs? What do you think our industry should be watching out for?
I’ve found the chat tools to be remarkably good at summarizing. You can “train” them with websites, text, PDFs—whatever you want—neatly and concisely summarizing them in as many or as few words as you’d like. I had ChatGPT write me a new bio of various lengths, so when I apply to be a presenter at a conference, I now have easy access to 100-, 200- and 500-word versions. They’re also great at handling one of my most disliked activities: writing “learning objectives” and session descriptions. If I have a scripted presentation, or even an article available that I’ve written on the subject, I can feed it to the AI and it will write them for me. Just a few tweaks and it’s done.
On the downside, be prepared for a lot of people to only take the first step of having these tools write articles and create art, passing it off without proofreading or editing. The real trick, again, is to use them as a creative tool and a jumping off spot—not as an auto-generated final product.
