Outsourcing Creatives

I just had lunch with a colleague today that got me thinking about how we are dealing with AI and creativity in the creative space.

In many business organizations that have creative teams, a lot of times those creative teams are looked at as the bottleneck. It seems like there's always an endless need for creative content, and yet it seems like the creative team can never produce enough to fulfill that need. If they do, it's because they're going at 150% and burning themselves into the ground.

So the natural inclination is to look at a creative team and think the creatives (the people) are the bottleneck.

But after working in multiple industries and with multiple teams doing multiple different types of content creation, I can tell you that most of the time, that's not the case.

One of the sad things that we've been doing in the creative world is looking at AI as a way to alleviate this creative bottleneck by allowing AI to do the creative part. We think that will solve the bottleneck.

What are we really getting? We're getting the same generic AI-designed content over and over again.

But I think we're looking at this all backwards.

The creative process is a mixed bag of so many different things. Some of that is creative, and some of it is just pure management.

When I was at Nike, I realized that I could move really fast when it came to my creative tasks, and that's where I really got into the flow. After all, I was hired as a creative. But what I quickly realized is that my process slowed down dramatically because of the requirements of mundane things. Those things were data wrangling. They were sifting through multiple Illustrator files. They were managing render outputs in different ways for different teams. They were quick 3D changes that led to massive downstream problems.

3D was supposed to be the designer's dream, where you could build fast and design and iterate very quickly, but what it actually became was a lot of data that had to be managed and wrangled.

As I look at this across not only the fashion industry but also in games, movies, product design, and everywhere else, there is a common theme":

It's not the creative process that takes so long. It's the management of the process in the creative process.

But instead of looking at the creative process and trying to optimize the things that don't require creativity, so many times we think that we need to optimize the creative part. And many times, this means outsourcing our creativity to a machine… A machine that can output 100 times more than a single person can do in the same amount of time.

But is the output apples for apples?

Companies hire creative people for their creativity, but often creative people are the first ones to go when AI is brought into the picture.

In doing so, we lose a lot of the humanity of the creative process.

But what if we had it backwards?

What if AI's strength wasn't really being creative, and we're just using it wrong? What if AI's true strength is automating and optimizing things outside of the creative process? That means creatives can actually be more creative and more productive as creators?

Maybe it's time that we stop hiring creatives to do non-creative work. Maybe it's time that we use the tools at our fingertips to create efficiencies, optimizations, and automations that actually let creatives be more efficient at being creative and get everything else out of the way.

This, to me, is the power of AI in the creative process. It's not to take over creativity. It's to take over the non-creative parts of the creative process and let creatives truly be creative.

So maybe instead of letting AI take over creativity, how about we willingly let it take over all the parts that are non-creative and focus our human creativity to its maximum?

One thing that I love doing is talking in person with individuals at companies who are trying to figure out their 3D/Ai pipelines. If you would like to discuss what you are doing with your product pipeline, and would like to know more about how you can make it more powerful, efficient, faster, and more flexible, set up a quick disocvery call with me. I look forward to meeting with you!

About this newsletter: Every week, I share some insights into 3D content creation pipelines - tools, processes, success stories, pipeline mistakes, and more. It’s meant to help those involved in 3D product creation, from artists to managers and leadership, understand what is happening in their world, and how to use the latest technologies to create higher quality with greater efficiency, saving time and money.

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