Chapter 8. Artificial intelligence as a content-generator

As current trends in graphic design will influence the future, so will the trends in technology change the way we perceive and produce content. Content is information or an experience translated to the audience. It is an essential part of design fiction storytelling, which works in pair with graphic design.

New way of consuming information

With the constant technological development in the last century, the world accelerated dramatically. When 20 years ago my mother was writing her master thesis, she had to go to a library to get all the information needed for the project from books. This work was hard and extremely time-consuming. Now, to repeat my mother’s journey of gaining knowledge, I need an internet connection and 5 minutes of time to make a quick research on any topic, book, or question and consider whether it interests me. I would go to a library for a book only if it was not possible to find information on the internet or if I wanted to get a special, almost luxurious offline experience of reading from paper.

Therefore, the transition to new technologies drastically changed people’s behavior patterns. Nowadays, we have access to an abundance of possibilities and information. In an attempt to experience as much as possible of what today’s world offers, people tend to save time. That is why the content changed as well: it accelerated, shortened, brightened. We do not want to read nor a whole book neither a whole article, we need just a brief and clear answer to the question we have. We also we prefer not to watch long videos to get the message. One of the latest trends in advertising is 6-10 seconds long videos, exactly the length of Instagram Stories.

If we apply this tendency of consuming more and more information with the highest efficiency and speed possible to the future, we can imagine that reading will become completely a habit of rich people who have time for it, and intelligent people who are prone to critical thinking. I can see that people who do not read much, consume information from pictures. Because the first thing that happens after some breaking news gets published is that millions of memes are created. One does not even need to subscribe to any news portal – having an account on social media is already enough to know what is happening in the world. While it could not be considered a believable source, not everyone seeks the truth. By most people information is consumed for entertainment.

New way of producing content

Another tendency in technological development is automatization. It led to the wide spread of artificial intelligence in all spheres of life. Artificial intelligence (or shortly AI) is a great helper. We might not notice it yet but it is already possible to create a lot of the content with it. I believe that in the future this technology will become even more popular and common as it develops.

I also think that complete automatization is what scares people now. They are afraid that no work will be left for them, if “robots” can do it all. The creative industry, in this case, is under the smallest risk. One cannot exchange creativity with machine learning. But is it true in times of post-postmodernism? Post-postmodernism philosophy usually means the impossibility to create something new because all the ideas have been created and the only new thing an artist can do is a combination of what already exists. Artificial intelligence can combine ideas too. I guess it is not such a big threat but society does not want this “artificial” future. That is why artificial intelligence generated content is a suitable tool for telling my design fiction story in the manner of Defensive Pessimism.

While working on Planet B, I discovered a numerous amount of AIs and collaborated with some of them to create the content. It is interesting how many creative functions they already can imitate. Artificial intelligence can generate imagery: portraits of people and animals, landscapes, anime and manga pictures, and memes. They can also generate brand names, marketing slogans, titles, articles, and even nonsense if one needs some. There is an enormous amount of things that can be done by a neural network, but the initiator is still a human. That is why I used the word “collaborate” to explain my work-flow with AI. Nevertheless, I believe that this technology reflects the future of content creation and is the right choice for this project.

Content ideas generator.

Source: semrush.com/title-generator © Semrush

Website that generates portraits by generative adversarial network.

Source: thispersondoesnotexist.com © Phil Wang

Slogan generator.

Source: oberlo.com/tools/slogan-generator