Project Context

Over the years, as businesses continue to prioritise speed, sales, and profit, there is an observable shift towards seemingly templated or formulaic creative directions. And now with the capabilities of AI, this significantly increases the risk of the creative industries losing their intrinsic value. As such, Creativity as a Commodity is a design project based on research, one that speculates a potential future of the creative industries amid the increasing adoption of generative AI technologies.

Monolith is a new creative giant that sits within this speculative future. Set in the year 2035, in a world where boutique agencies and creative freelancers have been absorbed by companies like Monolith, this installation showcases a potential future where the commodification of creativity has reached its climax. Targeting stakeholders in the creative industries (professionals, executives, and consumers), it seeks to provoke thought and discussion about the challenges and opportunities of integrating AI into creative practices, inspiring a reevaluation of the importance of human creativity in an increasingly automated world.

Part 1: Explorations

The first component of this installation contains all the technical experimentation I conducted with Gen AI. This serves as evidence for the speculative creative who attempted to train their own AI tools to stay independent, but were ultimately unable to due to the complexity of the technical requirements.

These experiments included exploring hidden biases in popular gen AI tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion; Learning the basics of web scrapping to form my own datasets (both images and text); Learning to train stable diffusion’s SDXL model with found data, and again with proprietary artwork; Learning to train large-language-models like GPT3.5 and Falcon7B for censorship purposes; And connecting them in a pipeline.

Part 2: The Scenario

The second component introduces the speculative future to the audience, providing contextual clues as to the kind of future that is on display.

Artefacts include a detailed newsprint with jarring headlines such as discussions around the meteoric rise of Monolith as a creative giant, as well as the introduction of Universal Basic Income as a bandaid for the disruptions that gen AI has caused. These are accompanied by an audio monologue recorded from the perspective of the speculative creative, reflecting on the events that have led up to this point.

Part 3: The Workspace

The third component hints at the future nature of creative work in this speculative future.

The highlight of this component is a screen recording of Monolith’s MonoTool dashboard which runs on a loop, showcasing a typical creative workflow of a creative worker in this speculative future. A workflow where the human is now directed by the AI assistant, and their role has been relegated to mostly sales and conversion. These are also supplemented by props such as creative manuals about prompt engineering, and a whiteboard and sticky notes which highlight the creative’s sales-driven priorities.

Part 4: Discussion

The final component provides the audience with a platform for discourse around generative AI.

Visitors to the installation were prompted with the question, “What impacts do you think generative AI will have on the future of creative work and why?”. Following which, they were able to write their thoughts, as well as read the thoughts of others. Some noteworthy comments include fears of disruption, along with excitement over the potential reduction of effort required for creative work.

Part 5: Reflection

The final component provides the audience with a platform for discourse around generative AI.

Ultimately, this iteration of the installation was not as successful as it could have been. One of the major causes is simply the fact that the demographic and location of exhibition was not suitable for the theme of the project.

Hence, to address some of these issues, the blueprint above was drafted. While it is not feasible to exhibit a second iteration of the installation now, this still serves as valuable information should that opportunity arise. Through analysis of each of the prevailing issues that contributed to the installation’s failure, a new approach was drafted that attempts to target and resolve each respective issue. Primarily, it intends to resolve them by creating an installation space that is significantly more immersive.