Generatively Creative
cyberpunk despair · a non-band band · a cute cat ·
☝🏽You can choose to listen to this as well, just click on the play link above to hear my soothing tones! 🎧
Creativity is threatened by AI! Or, it is liberated, boosted, empowered, given new wings!
As with much, what you think of that depends on which couch you lounge on in the creator-consumer-platform-brand-artist party. The tension between new technology and creative expression is an bottomless cocktail in this party, and I settle on a barstool today to partake liberal sips. I offer my questions through the lens of a new folk-rock band, a cute cat, cyberpunk despair and musings from Bali.
My intent is to engage and prod, while sharing and discovering meaningful commentary. So I look forward to hearing from you- reply to this, drop a comment, text me… but let’s connect if this means something to you.
▶️ Curated/Cuts are led by one such thought-provoking short, an exercise in simplicity from Levis, as well as a request to Canva to make the logo bigger.
➕ entertainment quickies- a look at where the Korean industry hopes to head, anime makes a point (again) on Netflix and elsewhere, 1sec views, Tiktok’s Africa programme, and potential Spotify x Netflix collabs?
This is the Colour Bar- where creativity, content, culture, tech, brands & humanity collide.
PS- Linkedin suggests we should add video to our covers, which happens to coincide with my recent forays into video, so here we go!
Generate/Create
I have been thinking about the tension that thrums weekly between creativity and Gen-AI. This week’s AI stories reflect some of that, sparking questions on how we perceive creative efforts, our choices in consuming them, and what we are ok to accept in the name of creativity.
Some provocations to consider, with echoes of a ‘what is art’ debate:
Is it about the intent? Made to maximise engagement, made to express something?
Is it the way it is made? The effort, time put into something, even the struggle (especially the struggle, for some).
Is it the experiences of the creator? Does the life the have lived give their creation soul?
Is it originality? Loaded question- inspired, derived, riffed, regenerated…
With that , onwards to some stories in this swirl. Bring the above lens along. Or not!
Velvet Unknowns
Some time in June, a band called The Velvet Sundown appeared on Spotify. In weeks its folk rock-ish music had hundreds of thousands of listeners and was on a whole lot of Spotify-generated playlists. Today they have over 1.1m listeners.
Except they are no one. Nobody. Revealing their AI origins weeks later, they called themselves “a synthetic music project”, a description cloaked in artistic statements about pushing the edges.
“This isn’t a trick - it’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”
The music? Its actually not bad, nor memorable. Objectively, it is easily accepted as human-created, especially for listeners who vibe with the platform, its recommendations and continuous streaming rather than intentionally seek out their artists.
“What may now be the most successful AI group on Spotify is merely, profoundly, and disturbingly innocuous. In that sense, it signifies the fate of music that is streamed online and then imbibed while one drives, cooks, cleans, works, exercises, or does any other prosaic act.“ from The Atlantic ·
Dean Wilson tries to not hate on AI while questioning, “now we’ve got AI bands streamed by AI bots, quietly making money for platforms that already make discovery near-impossible for actual humans- how do emerging artist stand a chance?”
This also reminds me of music creator & curator Derrick Gee’s take many months ago, and his attempt to grapple with AI-generated music- “should it be treated like just another category, like aisles in a bookstore?” (Erm, does that even matter?)
The Velvet Sundown story had more than a few twists, including a ‘representative’ telling Rolling Stone and The Washington Post that he was from the band, terming what the band was doing as “trolling’. Andrew Frelon now admits he falsely claimed to be a spokesperson, and his hoax was aimed at “testing the media”, who presumably failed it because they ran the story. This convoluted tale is well laid out on The Fader.
So- if the tunes are up your street, are you ok with this playing in your ears and your living room? Or does provenance matter to you?
A Biggie, this Cat
One of the biggest powerhouses in Korean content, CJ ENM announced a new animation IP for kids, launching later in July. Cat Biggie will have 30 short, two-minute, non-verbal episodes. According to CJ, the series “took a total of five months to complete, including content planning and character development, which involved a compact team of six specialists.”
This is remarkable. Animation takes time and human hands. To drastically reduce that in such a way is already past being a mere ‘temptation’ for large organisations. It will fast become a must-have. (CJ themselves said a regular 5min animation takes between four to five months).
As for how good this will be? Cynically, you could argue ‘iPad babies’ are fed all kinds of video content off Youtube, and ‘quality’ or ‘intent’ is not the first port of call for parents who are tired/busy/lazy/absent. This will hardly worsen that pool. Yet, it’s also worth asking if we should pause to consider what we make for our kids, rather than rush to achieve the best (cheapest) volume possible.
The studio is clearly bullish about use of AI and unveiled a suite of products including an “IP discoverer”. ‘AI Script’ is designed to “help discover original IP.” It analyses consumer demand and market trends, using that track record to suggest preferred genres, and identify IP that can succeed. Not dissimilar to a exec brief that says, ‘make more of what has done well’.
Both the crunched animation process and this mode of IP-hunting beg some questions. Will there be a flattening of creativity (and creatives) in a search for ‘what works’? Will entertainment thus begotten actually make a lasting impact on ‘culture’? Should we not care? Is market-tested efficiency best for the bottomline, best for creative expression, or both? Or neither?
Eri Calderon was spurred to share some worthy thoughts.
AI at APOS
That last question was one of the more fascinating aspects of Monica Landers’ talk at APOS, an aspect I was lucky enough to discuss with her in a little more detail. ‘CEO of Storyfit’ is/was one of this founder/consultant’s many hats (though I have to say she did not pitch any of them!). When Storyfit worked with studios and networks, they developed “hundreds of proprietary models to measure 100,000+ story components matched against millions of audience data points to create the best possible opportunity for success.”
So far, so similar to the above IP discovery. The apparent difference lay in championing creatives, working with them to uncover new spaces they could play in. The most revealing bit? They often found that what the models told them was what creative minds often root for- breaking the rules. Their data and predictive models repeatedly suggested that blindly following a successful template didn’t work; you had to take it and make it your own, even by upending it.
There’s the germ of an answer, if you want one, about using AI, and what humans bring to the room.
Elsewhere at APOS, AI was on many lips. Google APAC’s boss Sanjay Gupta tethered his keynote to the “magic wand” of AI, the regions’s youthful population primed to grab the future with it. His advice was to, “find what your company is very good at and apply AI to it”; an interesting offset from a common desire to use AI for what you can’t currently do. Hernan Lopez said what many know but can’t necessarily embrace, “It will be studied, scrutinised, regulated. But it cannot be stopped.”
Depth, nuance and candour on this is still hard to find; the real questions happened over canapés. What really happens to jobs? What about the next layer of talent? What are young creatives learning, and how? Is this sustainable, will pure human creativity eventually roar back? The mood seemed generally positive, excited, with some dabs of dissent. Nuanced protest might be the overriding ask in this next bit-
Abundantly Empty
I saw another AI-generated video (watch it up ahead). A rare one not engineered for passing amazement or viral delight. ‘Post Scarcity Blues’ from Matt Zien/ KNGMKR is a short that challenges us to face up to a dystopian future. One where all the ease, efficiency and abundance that machines have brought, have in turn rendered people as lost, vacuous, irrelevant.
The lyrics “Nobody needs you to solve anything; nobody needs you to create anything,” seem specifically for creatives losing their place in the ecosystem. Pause to consider the examples we have just read, and the questions we have let float. “Will I matter anymore? Do I matter anymore?” are words that speak- if bleakly- to the concerns many are starting to feel deeply.
These are dystopian versions of some of the questions I offered earlier. Maybe we do need to first be confronted by an ocean of slop, a proliferation of easy ‘creativity’, before we can embrace those questions meaningfully, fearlessly, honestly.
The video is ahead:
🎬 Curated/Cuts.
1. Post Scarcity Blues
Archival footage of time yet to happen, lyrics awash in dystopia, sung in moody blues by a holographic singer. Matt Zien has created a bleak vision of 2035. Irony is embraced, as the film shows us what we can do with gen-AI, while telling us what gen-AI can do to us- creators, consumers, society at large. Watch it for the cyberpunk vibes, the clever use of the found-footage aesthetic, the questions it raises. Or, for the entirely AI-generated music, song and visuals.
I don’t dwell on the occasionally clunky lyrics, because their intent is to make us think, to question; be concerned, feel uncomfortable; maybe just pause. If you are the kind who flinches to consume AI content (and hey- I feel you), maybe take 3 minutes out for this. There is a lot of AI slop out there- this is not one.
The ‘extended song’ on Suno has a more ’optimistic’ second half here
*This has been created using mostly MidJourney video and Hailuo. And the song was created with Suno and Audimee, per Machine Cinema.
2. Levis x Nike
Levis and Nike have created the fictional American town of Blue Arc County. And oh, they also have a new collaboration of denim outerwear and Air Max 95s.
I specifically was drawn to it by the simplicity of this spot and Marketing Director John Radaza’s little tribute to a game that “taught me everything. Rhythm, ritual, and a reverence for chaos.”
3. Make it bigger, Canva!
An OOH takeover by Canva has some clever executions that show off its features while connecting on the pain points or daily challenges casual designers and creatives often have. “Do you think we should’ve made the logo bigger though?”
Entertainment
Netflix says over 50 percent of its members now watch anime. That is significant- over 150 million households, or approx 300 million. Anime viewership on Netflix has tripled in the last five years; 33 anime titles appeared in Netflix’s Global Top 10 (Non-English) rankings. This comes around the same time a Dentsu report flew the anime flag too. Its 10 country research found that 31% of consumers watch anime at least once a week, including one in three U.S. consumers, an d more than one in two in Thailand and Indonesia. Interestingly, 29% of US anime viewers cited “fatigue with Hollywood sequels and remakes” as a reason to watch.
Looking ahead in Korea. Meanwhile, in Korea’s not so steady film & TV industry, there seem to be rays of positivity coming in, largely from the hope of political and regulatory support from the new government. These include cinema ticket vouchers, renewed support to the creative/production industry, strengthening international performance and the much-awaited re-penetration into China. All this and more, from veteran entertainment journalist Patrick Frater, who had some potential uplifting scenarios after a visit to Seoul.
➕
Spotify x Netflix? A report in the WSJ suggests that the two are potentially collaborating on music-related initiatives. Discussions centred around a music awards show, a live concert series, celebrity interviews, as well as documentary projects.
Every non-live video on Facebook is/will soon be a Reel, with all metrics consolidated. So now every social platform now counts a “view” after just 1 second. Someone scrolled past your content with a heartbeat thrown in? There you go!
According to a new report from Dentsu Gaming, less than 5% of global media investment goes toward the gaming business. Ouch- this is the biggest, most engaged base of people?
Tiktok announced they will “upskill and train” 3000 content creators across sub-Saharan Africa through its flagship #LevelUpAfrica programme.
Instagram & Spotify users can finally listen to previews of songs that they’ve shared from Spotify to IG Stories (previously it was just a link).
