Stay curious.
A marker of creativity and relevance is to stay curious, that’s where OSINT kicks in. But how is OSINT relevant to branding, and what exactly is OSINT you may ask?
OSINT stands for Open-Source Intelligence, and it’s the art (and science) of gathering and analyzing information that’s publicly available, not hacked or stolen.
Today, I sat down to generate some random new ideas. The realisation that I can sketch a pretty dodgy-looking drawing, feed it into an AI with some instructions, and get a decent-looking visual representation of my idea is incredibly liberating.
Stock photography made us lazy.
Before it became so commonly used, an art director would render up their concept, and once approved by the client, they would hire a photographer, stylists, models, makeup artists, and props. The salon came stock photography, making the process more accessible and getting an idea into print cheaper.
Budget constraints meant that photographers were only needed for big budget or custom jobs, so rendering concepts for approval became less of a requirement.
Here’s where the beauty of AI comes in. As a creative, once again, I can still storyboard or sketch my ideas and commission someone to bring them to life – that someone is AI. AI is the amplifier.
How many times has Facebooks ‘people you may know’ actually been correct?
Out of the 70 plus people it feeds you daily, how many of those do you really know? Some are old acquaintances that you don’t want to reconnect with, some are there because someone you knew has had their mobile number recycled so you clearly DO NOT know that person? How many of those people do you really want in your intimate circle?
This is why human judgment is crucial in the age of AI. It’s trained on past human experiences/knowledge, responding to the present in the absence of the subtleties that make us human.
I see some are abandoning creative input in the favour of data, idolising the cold hard facts. People try a bit too hard to quantity, commodify and replicate creativity through its polar opposite: numbers, patterns and data sets.