A few of our digital team members attended the AMA Social Network, hosted at Rambert recently.
The team chose to join the music rights and AI discussion groups and here are a few of our takeaways from the meet up, what we learnt and how we plan to move forward:
We discussed the ethical issues surrounding AI and in which areas of our work we used it to assist us.
The possibility for AI to replace human jobs, particularly in fields such as special effects and illustration hung heavy on us as creatives. Though through discussion concluded that in our experiences, AI had enhanced our practice and helped us to work more efficiently.
We established that the majority of us used AI tools such as ChatGPT and Jasper to brainstorm ideas and look for inspiration in places such as social media captioning. Some used Photoshop AI for editing and CapCut for automated captioning, making accessibility for the deaf community even easier to implement. We all agreed it was a time saver in our capacities and not a threat to our jobs.
Part of my job for example is photo editing and simple edits such as removing a background now takes only 5 seconds instead of 5 minutes. Allowing me more time to cover other tasks and increasing my work output.
One use of AI which sparked conversation came from Becks Turner from Southbank Centre. Becks is Senior Social Media and Content Manager there and has used AI to create a depiction of the venue and posted it to social media. Ethical questions arose from their own social media community, ‘Did AI replace an illustrator or CGI expert?’. Becks told us that it is only over time and with practice that she had been able to master producing her vision with AI and the necessity of using specific prompts, an art within itself. Becks said the resources would not have been there to hire an illustrator or CGI expert, so this allowed them to explore a new area of creativity within their marketing budget.
A huge benefit of the meet up was both moral support and knowledge sharing. It was comforting for many to establish that they weren’t the only ones feeling their way through issues such as changing algorithms and music rights changes.
Many mentioned their use of the video editing tool CAPCUT, how it helped them with accessibility and keeping on trend. We will now be exploring this tool as part of our social media strategy with an aim to elevate our presence and connect with our audience in more dynamic ways, keeping up with trends on Instagram reels and TikTok’s. As well as using their captioning tool.
AI assistants can also be great for helping to produce Alt Text for images you are using in email marketing for example, making your communications accessible to partially sighted people.
We as a team are keen to make more use of AI but agree we would like to be transparent. When using AI for image making we will now use #AI. This approach ensures our audience is informed while still allowing us to fully benefit from AI’s capabilities.
We will keep ourselves as informed as possible, through Culture Hive and other resources as AI is evolving rapidly and we completely appreciate this is a changing landscape to be wary of.
We would love to keep the conversations going so please get in touch if you’d like too chat to us. Email Gabriella, Head of digital at gabriella@culturecalling.com.