Augmented creativity: summoning the AI genie

Previously, I explored a framework that will help you think about your AI strategy – will you launch AI innovations that augment human creativity and/or intelligence, or those that accelerate human productivity, by automating or eliminating mundane tasks. Read more on that here. Or read on for this week’s deep dive into 25+ examples of augmented creativity, across 10 different industries.

If convenience is king, then creativity is a genie. 

Convenience might well rule our days – dictating many of our choices and actions as we attempt to get more done, faster and with less effort. 

But if all constraints were removed, the romantic in me feels that most of us would seek to be more creative. Creativity empowers us to imagine new possibilities, solve problems, and express ourselves. Creativity is how we change those around us, and make a dent in the universe. 

Until the current wave of generative AI tools changed everything, most people thought of creativity like a genie – a skill that only the fortunate few could summon at will, but which remained elusive for many.

DALL-E 2, MidJourney and Stable Diffusion – the text-to-image generators that burst onto the scene last year – continue to improve exponentially. They make it possible, trivial even, for anyone to create stunning images in just a few seconds. And while the ability to create images at will is undoubtedly a remarkable superpower, the potential impact of generative AI to augment our collective creativity will be so much more profound that ‘just’ a flood of AI-generated, unique images

No industry will be immune from this revolution. The ‘obvious’ candidate is the media and entertainment industry. But things start getting really interesting when you see how generative AI will change other industries, such as policy making, real estate and food.

This week’s newsletter dives into 10 industries which are already experiencing the first waves of transformation. Featuring 25+ examples of generative AI innovations, it’s a big one. Make a coffee (or perhaps pour a strong drink!), lean back and prepare to be inspired…

Industries covered:

1. Media & Entertainment (video games, music, movies, social media, web design)
2. Product design
3. Policy & Research
4. Urban planning
5. Real Estate
6. Travel
7. Food & Beverage
8. Fashion
9. Education
10. Healthcare

(Click on an industry above to read the post on Substack)

1. Media & Entertainment

Video games: Roblox launches Code Assist and Material Generator

Remember pre-AI, there was the metaverse? In February, Roblox, perhaps the platform that came closest to realising the tech fantasists’ vision of virtual worlds (as long as you were a pre-teen who loved creating and playing 3D games), announced its first generative AI tools. These tools allow users to generate code snippets and object textures based on text prompts. For example, a user can type "reflective metallic finish" and get a realistic texture for their game. 

Music: Drake, Grimes, AISIS offer different views on AI-created fan covers ;)

While Universal Music were busy getting Heart on My Sleeve, the (in)famous hit viral AI-generated Drake x The Weekend song pulled from streaming platforms, other artists were taking a different view – Grimes posted on Twitter that she would ““split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice”. Similarly, Liam Gallagher of 90s Britpop band Oasis tweeted approvingly about a ‘new’ fan-created AISIS album.

Movies - The Great Catsby, The Galactic Menagerie and more…

One truism that will remain constant amid all the looming AI disruption? The internet loves cats. The Great Catsby, a decadent, glamorous 1920s-style AI-created movie trailer racked up 7 million views on Twitter in less than a week. Aspiring creatives and film makers, time to add another platform to your AI toolbox, alongside ChatGPT and MidJourney… 

Notable other new releases include an imagined Wes Anderson-directed Star Wars, and the (comedically bad…until next month) completely automated pizza and beer commercials.

Social Media: Snap’s auto-generated filters

Snapchat pioneered the use of real-time AR filters, which helped many users get over the perceived awkwardness of sharing selfies. Now, like most AI tools there are real dangers as these become ever more sophisticated, but there are also lighter, more creative uses – such as the company’s first AI-generated filter, Cosmic Lens, which turns users and their surroundings into an animated sci-fi scene. 

Web design: Studio AI launches voice-driven web design

If Studio AI has its way, ironically coding will become a job of the past rather than the ‘job of the future’ we were promised. Its new WebDesignAI feature promises to understand what a user is designing, deploy user feedback to change designs where needed, and turn them instantly into live websites. Its most eye-catching feature? That all this takes place via voice commands. Let’s hope it’s not the new Clippy / Siri / Alexa…

2. Product design

NASA: AI-designed parts

Does an AI care that it’s helping uncover the mysteries of the universe, and possibly give us a Plan(et) B? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop it helping NASA’s designers find solutions that are lighter, stronger, and faster to develop than human-designed parts. A human designer still sets the mission requirements and constraints, but the AI is then tasked with connecting them in an optimal way, before human review and testing. “They look somewhat alien and weird, but once you see them in function, it really makes sense,” said Research Engineer Ryan McClelland. “We found it actually lowers risk … the stress factors are almost ten times lower than parts produced by an expert human.”

3. Policy & Research

Stanford x Google: Smallville simulation

Last month, researchers at Stanford and Google released details of a small AI-powered experimental community, Smallville. The social experiment involved creating 25 characters, each with their own ‘identities’, and seeing how they interacted in the pursuit of their goals. That will sound eerily familiar to anyone who played The Sims family of video games, but what’s different here is how AI radically expands the open-endedness of the simulation and the level of autonomy granted to each of the characters. Essentially, the researchers concluded, we are on the cusp of being able to simulate human behaviour. While right now these simulations might be simplistic and small-scale, it’s clear that these will get ever larger and more sophisticated in time (i.e. very soon!). 

How will politics and economics – at both national and organizational levels – change when we are able to simulate policy outcomes before deploying them?  

4. Urban planning

Laneform: visualising positive urban transformation

Zach Katz, a Brooklyn based artist and safe streets activist started using DALL-E 2 in mid 2022 to reimagine city streets as car-free utopian alternatives. His images went viral on Twitter, and now he has created Laneform, a tool to help people design and improve public spaces using generative AI. The site allows users to edit images of existing to imagine how a street or plaza could look like with different elements, such as trees, benches, cycle paths, lights and more. 

Pair these visualisations with the simulations described above, and you can start to imagine that we will approach debates about the future in radically different ways to today.

5. Real Estate

Realtor.com launched DreAIm Home (see what they did there?) – a tool which allows users to find their dream home via AI art. People visually describe their dream house, before the platform creates an image of a property from the submitted text, while also displaying matching (real world) results from Realtor.com. 

After years of false starts when it comes to visual search, might generative AI finally unlock this new, and very human, dimension in how we discover things? Put simply, “show me more things that look like this.” 

6. Travel

Trip.com: Tripgen travel concierge

Trip.com, the Chinese travel portal, launched TripGen, a real-time travel assistant chatbot which can answer travel-related questions and generate personalised travel tips. The service can handle fragmented and broad questions, and currently supports English, Japanese, Korean and traditional Chinese inputs. Tripnotes.ai is another similar service that looks exciting.

7. Food & Beverage

Sandwiches of Future History

Would you eat an avocado, fried egg, chocolate spread, mushroom sandwich? The recipe was suggested by ChatGPT to TikTok sandwich influencer (yes, that’s a thing) Barry Enderwick. While slightly bemused, Enderwick rated the sandwich at 7.5/10 for his 300,000 followers. Who knew...?

But beyond this specific sandwich recipe, the bigger implication is that AI will help us uncover new possibilities and combinations that humans might not think of. Or instantly write off. What weird and wonderful creations could you ask ChatGPT to conjure up for you?

NotCo: Guiseppe, the AI vegan ingredient hunter

More seriously, but not unrelated is NotCo’s Giuseppe. The food producer, which creates vegan food alternatives such as NotMilk and NotChicken has developed its AI tool to analyse the molecular structure of foods and replicate them using only plant-based ingredients. Its team of human chefs and experts then test the recipes and tweak the algorithm.

8. Fashion

AI Fashion Week: democratising creativity?

You didn’t think the fashion industry would miss a chance to jump on a hot new trend did you? April 2023 saw the inaugural AI Fashion Week launched in New York, a competition for aspiring AI designers to see their creations brought to life IRL. One nice anecdote highlighted by the New York Post is that one of the entrants, ‘Fran’ (not her real name, for professional reasons), is a 57-year-old civil rights lawyer who got into sharing AI fashion creations on Instagram as a hobby. AI-empowered creative diversity, coming soon to a runway near you?

9. Education

If you have kids or are interested in how AI could radically transform the educational landscape. then spend 15 minutes watching Sal Khan’s TED Talk. In it he shows how its AI tutor, Khanmigo, works with students to enhance their learning by offering personalised feedback and the ability to engage with content in the same way as a personal tutor would. Imagine a world where millions more children love school and learning, rather than resent it.

10. Healthcare

I’ve been following the emergence of AI-enabled drug discovery for a while now, but this story just highlights how profound that coming transformation could be. Three high school students, in three different countries – Norway, the US and China, collaborated with Insilico’s generative AI engine to identify three genes to investigate as brain tumour therapy targets.

Mind-blowing, and an optimistic note to end on – if high school students can work with AI on complex healthcare research, what else might they be able to do?

What Is The Future Normal For Your Business?

My new book, The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work & Thrive In The Next Decade, explores 30 trends, from augmented creativity to continuous glucose monitoring and job sharing.

I also give inspiring, actionable presentations that help your team spot and seize emerging opportunities.

Get in touch if you'd like to discuss an upcoming event or project.

Or, sit back and enjoy the keynote that myself & Rohit Bhargava gave at SXSW to launch the book:

Thanks for reading,

Henry