By the late 19th Century, the Monets, Seurats and van Gohs of the world were likely left shaking in their boots. And if they weren’t, the artists who came after them surely were. While we know these exceptional artists will forever have a place in history as “greats,” at the time, a potentially career-altering threat was emerging: photography. And, at the time, perhaps they had an ever so slight inkling that this emerging technology would make their craft obsolete.
“Now you have a camera that can capture a moment,” explained Aude Moreno, Mythic associate creative director. “But that doesn't mean that the art of painting or creating portraits disappears. It just transforms, and I think what we are experiencing today, in a way, is similar to that.”
The technological evolution Aude’s referring to is artificial intelligence (AI), and the creative world like so many other industries has been grappling with just how this technology will affect our craft. Will it make our jobs obsolete? Or can we harness its power to make our work even better? From Mythic’s perspective, it’s the latter, and our creative team has started exploring how we can use AI to enhance our process.
For many who have been working in the advertising industry for several decades, this AI revolution doesn’t seem all that different from the transition from analog to digital. As Aude explained, even during the span of his career he’s gone from sketching out storyboards to using AI to generate images.
“It is an amazing tool, and now the best thing we can do is work with it and understand it,” Aude added. Recently, while working on a campaign for Cotton Incorporated, Aude ventured into the world of Midjourney, a generative AI program that creates images from prompts.
“We had these ideas, and some of them were a little bit complex,” Aude said. “We wanted this campaign to be visually rich and to show where cotton is somehow integrated with nature.”
Rather than comping together several photos in Photoshop for the initial concepting phase, Aude started providing specific prompts in Midjourney and making tweaks until he landed on imagery that matched or exceeded the team’s vision. The team presented these initial concepts to the Cotton Incorporated team and got buy-in on the direction, knowing the comps wouldn’t actually be part of the campaign because Midjourney, like many AI platforms, source from unlicensed photos, which means they live in a legal gray area. So with an approved direction, the Mythic team got to work bringing the concept to life using licensed photos and enhancing them with Adobe Photoshop and Firefly’s AI tools.
Using these tools, “you can extend the backgrounds. You can change the backgrounds. You can put things in the foreground. You can create a new background,” Aude explained.
For one of the final assets, Aude said the team found a beautiful image of a woman on the beach and wanted to mimic the horizon line and ensure they integrated the horizon line with the texture of the sweater she was wearing.
In another instance, the team found a photo of a girl lying in a field of flowers. Again, the idea was to integrate cotton with the natural world, so the team changed the color of her shirt to match the flowers around her and added AI flowers in the foreground. Similarly, in the ad featuring a hiker, the team used these same AI tools to generate a new backpack so the fabric looked like canvas instead of nylon and the pattern blended into the mountain background.
Aude explained that embracing these AI tools rather than shying away from them has been extremely helpful because it really allows creatives to visualize concepts in a way that either wasn’t possible or easy before. And on top of that, he’s found that using AI for concepting in particular has given him a little bit more control over ideas and provided even more inspiration for the final product.
So while fear of the unknown or becoming obsolete is common with any new technology, Aude said he likes to look at it as “a tool just like any other tool. In the end, you have to have an idea of what you want to generate or create, and go from there.”
In a world where attention spans are limited, we're glad you stuck with it and made it to the end of this article because we certainly think it was worth the read. If you like what you saw and want to know how you can partner with a team that's brimming with creative ideas, reach out to our CMO, Taylor Bryant (tbryant@mythic.us), and get a conversation with Mythic started today.
