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With seven West Media, AI has become an essential tool for senior graphic designer Jessica Hankinson and her colleagues in the quest to produce brands and marketing assets that support the various activities of HE integrated media companies.
“Whether it’s through print ads, digital, video, audio, radio or events, the whole Shevan comes out of the marketing team,” Hankinson said.
Over the past year, creative teams have been using Adobe’s Firefly Generative AI tools to augment the output, providing rapid image generation capabilities.
“As a creative, it can be really difficult to explain to non-visual people what’s in our heads,” Hankinson said.
“So, just putting some keywords on this platform, explaining the picture we see in our minds and explaining that something can come up is much faster than sketching it.”
The initial success of the idea led the team to consider how it would help customize and quickly assist the team with storyboard ideas.
As comfort with AI grows, its use has increased across groups, and video teams are currently using AI features in Adobe’s After Effects for tasks such as STEM separation (separation of different audio elements) and dialog cleanup.
He said his trip to Adobe’s annual Max Conference in Miami last year was excited to demonstrate new features, including the ability to create an entire AI-generated video production.
“Authenticity and audience trust are important in our industry, especially as the public scrutiny of media AI continues to grow,” Hankinson said.
“When used, AI is usually part of a broader creative process, such as storyboarding and mixed media artwork, and is not a substitute for human storytelling.
“Obviously our focus is to make sure that the public is very responsive to the way they react to things. So if they’re more comfortable with AI, then they’ll probably evolve to use it more. For now, planning is to use more for workflows and streamlining.
“I don’t think AI will take over our work. If there is, the need for content is to create more work, so I think it’s counter to the fact that all content has that need.
