Enterprises can get creative with AI (if done right) 

Three years into the gen AI boom, creative industries are asking a big question: Can AI be an ally rather than a threat? As generative AI reshapes how ideas become reality, brands and artists alike are racing to define what responsible, ethical creativity looks like. At the Artist and the Machine Summit held last week in Los Angeles, artists, brands  and technologists gathered to explore how responsible, ethical AI could amplify—not replace—human creativity.

For ElevenLabs, this means securing licensing agreements to train their music model and release music generators that are safe for commercial use. And for Adobe, the answer is clear. The company recently launched Adobe Firefly Foundry with a fundamental goal: putting proprietary and IP-protective generative AI models in the hands of businesses.

This is an essential step for enterprises that might be wary of copyright infringement. Every piece of data that trained Adobe’s model, Firefly, was licensed by Adobe. “That means a creator gave permission,” said Hannah Elsakr, Adobe’s VP of Global Gen AI New Business Ventures, during the conference, which IBM Think attended. “That was very important to us because our entire heritage is around the creative community.”

When Adobe introduced Photoshop decades ago, the company did so with leading artists like David Hockney, Elsakr said. And now, AI is experiencing another tectonic technical shift that’s bringing new opportunities along with it. “We’re able to go from a creative idea or marketing brief to finished assets in a much quicker amount of time,” she said.

Video generation is a core function gaining traction in the gen AI space, with tools showing ever-increasing performance (recent examples include OpenAI’s Sora 2 or Google’s Veo). But at a time when many artists and professionals fear losing their jobs to AI, using AI in consumer-facing products isn’t always a straightforward decision for a brand.

Think of Coca-Cola. Last year, Coca-Cola released an AI-generated holiday ad for the first time and faced some backlash. They repeated the experiment this year, using the same AI studio, and encountered the same mixed reception from the public. Two weeks after its release, the ad had more than 900,000 views on YouTube and was one of the most talked-about Christmas ads on the internet, according to PR Week.

“We get a lot of hate on Twitter from artists,” acknowledged Jason Zada, founder of Secret Level, the AI-native production company behind the ads, during the event. “The Coca-Cola team tested the spot for months before it was released—without telling people it was AI—and it tested very well,” he said. “So, is it slop? Or is it just how your brain perceives it [when you know it’s AI]?”

For Zada, the advantage of using AI is not about cutting costs but freeing up time for people to do more meaningful work. “To me, it’s not about spending less,” he said. “It’s about efficiency gains and doing all sort [of] things you normally wouldn’t be able to do.”

Legacy brands also face a tricky balance when building new products with AI. When the toy giant Mattel announced its strategic partnership with OpenAI earlier this year, critics worried AI would steal kids’ imagination, said Carrie Buse, Head of Discovery for Mattel Future Lab, during the conference.

But internally, the partnership is viewed as an opportunity to create new toys in new ways. “We have the opportunity to do something that aligns with our values,” she said. “And what’s been fun is trying not to go for the low-hanging fruit ... The truth is that there is more to do than talk to your toy. And that’s been where the rich work is happening.” 

Mattel hasn’t yet announced the results of its partnership with OpenAI. But Buse believes AI could unlock new experiences: “That’s the opportunity with AI: it gives you tools to take that thing in your head and make it real.”

For enterprise organizations, many are also embracing AI to empower their employees, observed Lovable’s Creator Lead Mindaugas Petrutis. The European-based startup, which promises to build platforms without code, is growing at a fast pace. Lovable has been adopted by large companies like Microsoft and HubSpot, Petrutis said. 

“These companies say it’s saving them time and money,” he said during an interview with IBM Think. “[Non-technical teams] can prototype and implement the solution, and that alone is huge.”

But the tool can also be used by artists to augment or extend their work. Visual artist Shantell Martin used the app to build a platform allowing users to mix and match her signature graphic elements, an idea she first explored 10 years ago. 

“I tried to work with different designers and different UX designers to create a platform,” Martin explained during the event. “I never really got anywhere, [though] we would spend a lot of money and do a lot of research,” she said.

But this changed with the dawn of generative AI tools.

“The interesting thing is that sometimes you have these little ideas, and they might be bad, but you have to spend a lot of time and resources to work out if they’re good or bad,” Martin said. “With something like this, you can have 20 different ideas and then make them, and then you can figure out if it’s something you want to pursue.”

Few artists have embraced technology like Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes. In 2023, she notably invited her fans to use her voice in new creations (with a royalty split). She recently launched The Tutorial, a series about making art with AI, with filmmaker Matt Zien.

“We ran into a lot of philosophical things,” Grimes said during the event. “We’re using the tools, but as we’re using them, we’re debating how they should be used and approaching them with moral philosophy.” 

Leveraging video-to-video AI tools makes sense, as she sees it more as an augmentation than a replacement of human capabilities. “The only good AI writing I’ve ever seen is when it’s writing about itself, which is interesting,” she said. “I would love it to stay that way: let it write authentically about itself, don’t replace humans as writers.”