A colossal kick in the imagination
We all like saying “when things go back to normal”, but every day yet another abnormal event occurs, leaving the world more chaotic and bonkers than the day before. But we’ve all adapted and accepted that bumpy is the new norm.
Fortunately, as creative minds, we’re pretty well equipped for it. The chaos of finding ideas and having the capacity within us to hold that discomfort of the unknown is where the tension lies. How often do we leap into the uncomfortable dark of our imagination, flailing our way around for an unknown magical solution to a logical brief. But always, the best way to take the leap is with constant vulnerability, optimism and a healthy dose of wonder (between cynical mutterings of “no, that’s a shit idea”). Plus, we know that creativity can innovate in chaos and the harshest of realities. It is often where the best ideas are born.
And Santa has gifted us something amazing for the birth of ideas: a colossal kick in the imagination. We’re talking about the revolution that text-to-image AI has been undergoing in the past six months. It has been fascinating to watch. It has moved at lightyear speeds through different iterations of enthusiasm: from Midjourney to DALL-E, with machine learning creeping into every application that we already use, like Adobe and others. Come January, it’s going to be everywhere.
Some Luddites proclaim it the death of art, but really it is a massive evolution for art and creation. It’s not so long ago that the art of photography was held in the tight grip of a select few Hasselblad hands. The other thing that this visual revolution does is that it recombines writing in prompts with specificity, to form incredible visualisations. A meeting of art and copy, which, when you break it down, is ideas. It is a wonderful dopamine hit as we learn to tease and prompt absolutely anything from an AI trained on high art and dank memes. Any tool that removes barriers to creation, that limits us only to the power of our imagination, that enhances creative risk-taking (without replacing it) is something to celebrate.
So, as we leave 2022 behind, we can also learn from ourselves and leave a bit of logic behind, take a jump into the mostly bewildering dark of our imaginations to find thrilling solutions. Remembering to tell ourselves, and, as leaders, to remind our teams that no-one is alone in solving a problem and that the best creativity, however it happens, almost always happens without fear.