Creativity x AI from Lightricks & Figma

On the morning of 6th March 2024, a member of our digital team headed down to the most recent of Figma’s Coffee Mornings. Figma regularly hosts these Coffee Mornings with the objective of bringing members of the digital design & development industry together to have a coffee [and doughnuts!] together and spark conversations about ongoing topics coupled up with a thought-provoking talk. This week on the agenda was the topic that is all around us, Artificial Intelligence and how our creative industry can make use and benefit from it. 

The talk was presented by Kass Yassin & Mattan Arbel from Lightricks, a company with multiple AI products under their belt, with FaceTune being the most popular from their line-up. The talk left us with some interesting thoughts & insights: 

1. The digital industry is notorious for moving quickly with new technology being released every other day and it can be difficult to keep up. AI can easily feel like another burden on the shoulder to learn, however it may be worth putting some time aside to tinker with it if you haven’t already. Many members of the creative industry have stated that they have seen an increase in productivity particularly in early stages of projects after using/adopting AI tooling at the workplace. It’s worth noting that if you are looking to adopt AI at your workplace, it is important you seek permission from your employer particularly if you work with sensitive data/projects. 
 
2. The way forward for creative AI tooling is about giving the users more control. Currently tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney and others can feel like a bit of a pandora’s box where you enter a prompt and hope for the best with arguably little control. The tooling that will be more successful in the creative industry will be tooling whether the user has more finite control, think being able to draw a box within an image and prompt just for that area or extending beyond just a text field to prompt but to more human like inputs such as “magic brushes”. 
 
3. Matan presented an interesting story where he was trying to get a particular idea executed by AI however, he was struggling to get the DALL-E image generation model to do what he wanted. English is not his first language and as a result he was struggling to write an effective prompt. His solution was starting a separate ChatGPT thread and listing out all the points of his idea and asking how to create the DALL-E prompt for it, “learning to prompt, by prompting” as Luis from Figma put it. This can seem counter-intuitive at first however Matan reported that the new prompt that ChatGPT returned was able to produce exactly what he wanted and noted that ChatGPT listed out a few helpful tips on prompting that helped boost his confidence for the future.  
 
4. Currently, a well-structured and effective prompt is key in getting the most out of today’s AI tools on hand. For creatives, the Lightricks team mentioned they had the most success when following the idea of the individual playing the role of a Creative Director and AI as the creative. It’s worth noting that there are multiple companies hiring for “AI Prompt researchers/engineer” to get the most out of commercial AI products. It’s serious stuff! 
 
5. Some final food for thought trailing on from all the discussion regarding prompting, will knowing how to prompt/interact with AI become a valuable life skill? After the talk, we were having a discussion within the audience. One of the participants was a father of two young children and he raised the question of “Should I be teaching my children how to prompt, will it become an important skill they will need for the day-to-day in the future?”. It’s likely too early to say. We’re still exploring what AI can do and it’s unclear whether the technology will become cemented into our everyday lives. Additionally, it can be argued that should the latter play out, AI will have reached a point where one shouldn’t need to know how to prompt but rather it should feel effortless and natural.  

Once again, thank you to Kass, Matan and the rest of the Lightricks team for the great talk as well as Luis and the rest of the Figma team for organising these industry meets. We look forward to the next. 

[These were soooo good!]