AI-generated content, sometimes called synthetic content, is reshaping the landscape of media production and amplifying storytelling capabilities. Explore the impact machine learning, deep learning, and other AI technologies are having in communication industries.
If you’re interested in the latest AI trends, technologies, and best practices, please consider booking an online consultation to learn how we can help you and your organization leverage the power of AI for your business. Learn more.
Advertising
Heinz X DALL.E
The Heinz company used an image of a ketchup bottle with a label similar to Heinz’s to argue that “This is what ‘ketchup’ looks like to AI” in a recent marketing campaign. Heinz fans got involved by sharing their suggestions for ketchup image prompts. The best ones were turned into social posts and print ads, helping to create an ad campaign with visuals generated entirely by artificial intelligence.
Nestle X DALL.E
Nestle utilized an AI-enhanced version of a Vermeer painting to promote one of its yogurt brands, La Laitière. The ad by Ogilvy Paris illustrates the pleasure of taking time. Vermeer’s painting, known as “The Milkmaid” or “La Laitière” in French, depicts a dairy worker in the process of preparing a recipe. The masterpiece has endured through the centuries and eventually became the symbolic icon of Nestle’s popular French yogurt and dessert brand.
Levi Strauss Co. X Lalaland.ai
Levi Strauss & Co. announced a partnership with digital fashion studio Lalaland.ai to generate models with AI. Lalaland.ai uses advanced artificial intelligence to enable fashion brands and retailers to create hyper-realistic models of every body type, age, size and skin tone. With these body-inclusive avatars, the company aims to create a more inclusive, personal and sustainable shopping experience
WWF & Brave Bison X AI/CC Creative Community
The WWF, Brave Bison, and AI/CC Creative Community have collaborated on a promotion to coincide with WWF’s annual ‘#WORLDWITHOUTNATURE’ campaign, which asks companies to remove wildlife from their branding to highlight the dramatic loss of biodiversity in the world. Creators from within the AI/CC Creative Community were invited to use AI tools to imagine what a world without nature might look like. The resulting work supplies a bleak warning, with images displaying desolate landscapes, gas masks, and ghostly images of animals from future extinction.
Literature
Ammaar Reshi “Alice and Sparkle”
Using ChatGPT and Midjourney, Ammaar Reshi generated text and illustrations to create a story that depicts the “magic of AI” to children. He created images on Midjourney, scaled them to larger resolutions using AI functions in Pixelmator, and then recorded himself doing a voice-over that he edited using an Adobe AI tool. Reshi has sold more than 900 copies since he put his book, “Alice and Sparkle,” on Amazon.
Bloomsbury “House of Earth and Blood”
The paperback edition of Sarah J Maas’s “House of Earth and Blood” features a wolf drawing credited by Bloomsbury to Adobe Stock, a service that provides royalty-free images to subscribers. However, The Verge reported that the wolf illustration matches one created by a user on Adobe Stock named Aperture Vintage, who marked the image as AI-generated. This is not the first time a major publishing house has used AI for a book cover.
Pushkin Industries “Death of an Author”
“Death of an Author” was published by Pushkin Industries, a podcast and audiobook publishing company. Stephen Marche, writing under the pseudonym Aidan Marchine, authored “Death of an Author.” He called the novella a collaboration between humans and AI tools, as 95 percent of the book’s language is machine-generated.
Švanda Theatre “AI: When a Robot Writes a Play”
The Czech Center New York partnered with Prague’s Švanda Theatre and theaitre.com to present to the U.S. public an innovative project, ‘AI: When a Robot Writes a Play’. The play, composed of dialogues generated by artificial intelligence, tells the joy and sorrow of everyday life from a robot’s point of view. The play celebrates the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. in which the word ‘robot’ was first used.
News
Associated Press X WordSmith
The Associated Press used Natural Language Generation (NLG) to automate NCAA Division I men’s basketball previews during the 2018 season, allowing their journalists to focus on writing critical, qualitative articles. As a result, AP now produces 4,400 quarterly earnings stories, which is almost a 15-fold increase over its manual efforts. Several years into the partnership, over 50,000 articles have been automated with the help of Automated Insights’ WordSmith.
Bloomberg X Cyborg
About a third of the content published by Bloomberg News is produced using some form of automated technology. The company’s system, called Cyborg, helps reporters churn out thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter. Cyborg gives Bloomberg an edge in the field of fast-paced financial journalism. It also helps level the playing field against hedge funds, which have recently entered the information race by using artificial intelligence to provide their clients with up-to-date facts.
The Washington Post X Heliograf
In 2017, The Washington Post announced that it would increase its coverage of high school football games by using Heliograf, its homegrown AI content generator. Each game story draws from scoring plays, individual player statistics and quarterly score changes, along with The Post’s own weekly Top 20 regional rankings. Technology like Heliograf can be transformative for a newsroom, greatly expanding the breadth of coverage and allowing journalists to focus more on in-depth reporting.
Yahoo! X WordSmith
Yahoo! used Automated Insights’ Wordsmith platform to display fantasy football data through personalized reports, match previews, and match recaps. Delivering engaging and customized content to all its users has helped increase revenues by allowing Yahoo! to sell advertising at a higher price than standardized content. Yahoo! claims that using the WordSmith platform has produced “over 100 years of incremental audience engagement.”