Artificial intelligence tools are taking over creative practices, allowing new products and aesthetics that seamlessly merge virtual and physical realities, resulting in an uncanny blur.

Analysis

From product design and writing to audio and artwork, creative practices are being overhauled by AI. These works of synthetic creativity – which encompass various types of manipulated creative work or artificially powered content – will force humans to evaluate what we consider to be ‘real’ when any form of media can be so easily manipulated.

In the coming years, we can expect surreal aesthetics and the Uncanny Valley phenomenon to be more present across art, entertainment and more, making it harder to decipher the real from the synthetic. In this study from 2022, fewer than 50% of participants could tell the difference between a real human face and an AI-generated one.

While synthetic creative work can contribute to consumer distrust and uncertainty, it also enables new creative possibilities and allows designers to expand their scope of storytelling.

Nestlé brand La Laitière utilised DALLE.2’s new Outpainting tool, which extends the borders of an image. The brand used this to create an extended version of the famous The Milkmaid painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, keeping with the original oil on canvas look from over 350 years ago. The extended scene now shows characters absorbed in suspended awe over the preparation of La Laitière.

Benjamin Benichou, the CEO of e-commerce platform Drop, has used AI to generate a series of realistic-looking future store concepts on Linkedin set in imaginative, awe-inspiring locations such as outer space. He hopes to inspire imagination as brands and artists dream up the future of retail.

South Korea-based company Supertone is an AI-based audio company that can break down the human voice into separate elements such as tone, pronunciation and accent, and manipulate each factor individually. In one event, it was used to manipulate Elvis Presley’s voice to sing a popular Korean ballad in a realistic way.

Why it matters

In the coming years, synthetic creativity will no longer be an unusual anomaly, it will be a normalised finding in culture, transforming how we produce and consume creative work. However, it’s important to remember that AI lacks certain human skills that make something truly compelling and believable. It will have to work in tandem with human creatives in ushering creative work into a new era of limitless, imaginative potential.

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