Humans or Machines? 5 Years From Now, What Will It Feel Like?

Catch+Release had a busy week attending, sponsoring and presenting at three industry events; DMLA, Visual1st and ANA. We also publicly launched our Creator Community, powered by search, so that brands and creatives can instantly discover amazing content gems for all types of downstream campaign usage. Let your creativity flow! Be careful though, as you can easily get sucked in and, before you know it, hours fly by in this playground of discovery and inspiration. Search tip: Try emotive words like happy, dreamy, gloomy or even geo-specific words like; San Francisco, Jackson Heights or Irish coastlines. Have fun and click the creator’s profile to discover even more beauty.

Digital Media Licensing Association

DMLA held their first physical event in over 4 years and the packed agenda included several interesting panel discussions. Of course, DMLA’s entire focus is on all aspects of licensing and, for that matter, all types of content. From medical imagery, to war-torn photojournalist content, DEI and promotional commercial usage, there was something for almost every industry vertical. The one consistent theme threaded across all sessions was AI. Even sessions titled without the word AI got into the topic quickly.

The TLDR on AI revolved around these main themes:

• How are organizations leveraging new technologies to find the right content?
• How can content providers (yes, the ecosystem of players) improve a user’s experience? Ultimately what is the buyer (user) seeking? Are there new content types that we haven’t yet fully explored?
• How can we analyze the performance of an asset and better yet, predict for specific usage? Which leads to the next question around how to use data driven models to learn from our existing digital content types and usage.
  

In a nutshell, audience members are asking how to find, use, improve, analyze and learn from the content we want, need and use.

Because machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are relatively new, the questions centered around how these tools are being implemented, to what value and do they solve a problem that already exists or are they creating new (or more) problems.

Many of the AI discussions felt like talking in circles with some crystal-ball gazing. Given DMLA’s focus is about usage permission, there was a dedicated panel on US copyright laws that brought on Suzy Wilson, General Counsel for the US Copyright Office. Surprisingly the entire team for all US copyright issues comprises only 10 humans. I expect that team will be busier than ever before.

Our CEO, Analisa Goodin, speaking at Visual1st in San Francisco

The panel titled Thriving - How Studio Operations Leverage Adopted Technology/Streamline for Future Innovation was well orchestrated and all panelists came prepared. Moderated by Thomas Ladefoged, CEO, Pixelz, he asked the panel “what will this industry look like 5 years from now”. In spite of the leading question, the panelists from in-house production teams at The Gap, Redbull and a studio agency, IDX were clear and concise in their answers. It was somewhat comforting to witness the confidence in their answers, passionately assuring the audience:

The AI hype will tamper down. Yes, embrace the new technologies, but consider more so how you might leverage AI to boost productivity. This tech enables us to be more creative and focus on less tedious work. In many ways it already has.

The panel then went on to share additional thoughts on the “humans vs machines” debate saying that creativity and humanity are the scarce resources. And what it ultimately comes down to is integrity and relationships. The ones that will win are those that let their ethics guide them and so everyone should stay focused on their core business values. This panel felt optimistic that new technologies will complement our human talents and of course our desire to stay human and stay connected in all storytelling.

In the words of Redbull’s Kelly Elaine Garthwaite, who leads the Photo Operations team; “I will stay living in my truth. That’s what I’m going to focus on. I want to hit the point home. Human connection is always going to be important, no matter what”.

Content Libraries, Agencies, Editing and Tech Tools Will All Merge into One, Over Time

Earlier that day we heard from a panel of experts that took the Gen AI question head-on. This panel titled: Surviving (and Thriving) in a World of Generative AI featured speakers from Shutterstock, Wirestock and StegAI. According to Wirestock’s CEO, Mikayel Khachatryan that helps creators sell their content – shots, videos or that generated by AI – empowering them to get paid for their talented work.

“Ultimately it’s about content from real people. As long as you maintain the human contributions and respect the artist with the right levels of consent, you will be fine”. If you are asking contributors for their work to build training models, you must also get their consent, and they need a way to opt-out, now or in the future.

The panel shared that in this current frenzy of Gen AI interest, it’s easy to forget the human element. However, you can tell when someone is having fun with the technology and building something deliberately AI vs a true creator who may have further modified an original asset.

The Association of National Advertisers: Masters of Marketing Conference

That same day, the ANA Masters event was kicking off on the other coast in sunny Orlando, FL where the CMO of Coca-Cola presented an incredibly beautiful AI-produced spot that honored the representation of original content including the museums where it was shot with appropriate license usage. This is an excellent example of tech, creators, great storytelling and production teams all coming together in a beautiful, highly impactful way. It’s so great, you may want to watch it a few times. Also try naming all those artists. Check out Vermeer’s Girl With The Pearl Earring at the end.

In the End, Creators Rule

Even though the entire industry is experiencing a shift with Gen AI experiments and exploration, it’s a very interesting time. If a spot is generated by text to image technology, the human behind the machine has to maintain creative excellence for the piece to stand the test of time, let alone make an impact. What the Coca-Cola piece shows us is that it's all about the clever storyline and original idea or concept. A human had to script this and decide that Vermeer’s piece was the most interesting one to end with.

As I was settling back into the office after a busy week of events, my team shared an interesting article on ARTnews that talks about a new tool called Nightshade for creators to prevent unwanted scraping of their images by Gen AI tools like Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. This gives creators the power and control to protect their original piece and therefore maintain the IP owner's copyright.

No doubt we’ll see the pendulum swing back and forth for a while before we experience the new “normal”. I firmly believe that the market of consumers and users will ultimately decide what’s acceptable and what will perform. It may take some time. The recent Bitcoin and cryptocurrency innovations are a good learning lesson, which started out with a lot of frenzy before things settled down. Hopefully, in our case, we won’t see much jail-time from bad actors.

In the meantime, I urge you to embrace our most precious resource that is human creativity. Grab your coffee and have some fun exploring our new Creator Community in all its beauty. My recent search “Irish coastlines” produced some amazing results (600+) but then again, I’m a little biased.