In a world powered by AI, does human creativity still matter?

Debunking a common misconception, Jensen Huang, Founder, President and CEO of NVIDIA at Cannes Lions 2023 said that AI is not the true creator rather it empowers individuals to unleash their creative prowess across various domains and modalities.

During a session, named 'AI Unleashed: How AI Is Revolutionising How We Live, Work and Create', Mark Read, CEO, WPP, and Huang discussed the limitless opportunities presented by artificial intelligence (AI).

Huang said, "We are a computing company and we invented a new way of doing computing called accelerated computing. We are at the centre of a computing revolution that's happening after some 60 years of being basically the same. For the last 60 years, probably the single most important event in computing was in 1964 when IBM announced the System 360. The CPU, or the Central Processing Unit, was invented at that time. Multitasking operating systems, I.O. systems, scalable computing architectures, backwards compatibility, all of those concepts were introduced at the System 360. And it's largely remained about the same since. We invented this new way of doing computing called accelerated computing...We invented this processor called the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)." 

Furthermore, he added that the world has a trillion dollars for data centres and all of a sudden Chat GPT moment took off and people realised how important this new way of doing software is. 

Speaking about NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for creating and operating metaverse applications, Huang said, "Omniverse is a virtual world and in order for us to learn how to create AIs, we have to create it in software. There are a lot of AIs that we would like to create that are physically based. For example, a car is physically based and in order for us to create an AI that understands a car or an AI that understands tennis shoes, you need to have it be physically based. It has to be grounded with physics. So, we created a virtual world where the AI could learn how to create an AI that's physically based and grounded by physics."

There are digital twins of a car, ship, building, airplane, a person, etc. If you create this digital twin, then you can apply AI to it. You could infuse it with AI and see if it does the right things in the physical and in virtual worlds. So, you could manage a factory, you can control robots, etc, he stated.

Read said that Huang is better known in Hollywood than in the advertising creative industry because his company's technology has powered an amazing explosion in the quality of production. 

"There are no movies that I know with computer graphics that NVIDIA is not in the middle of and so we have been in the virtual production business for a very long time. They just happen to be either manifested in games or manifested in a movie," Huang stated. 

Furthermore, he said that the biggest moment of modern AI was probably at a computer vision contest called ImageNet. Some young researchers in University of Toronto used NVIDIA's GPUs to teach an AI how to recognise and classify images and it was able to recognise images better than any computer vision algorithm that was ever created by humans over the decades. That caught people's attention.

"We realised that not only would you use it for computer vision but for a whole new way of doing software. A software that learns from images and called machine learning or otherwise artificial intelligence. We have since taught this AI. The major thing happening now will impact the industry just so profoundly, which is generative," Huang said. 

Read said, "We used AI in our industry to optimise media and manage production but what it brought home certainly to me and a lot of people is that suddenly machines could do things we thought only humans could do - like taking a photograph, creating a video, writing text, etc. That is both amazingly exciting but also a little bit scary."

Speaking about the generative AI explosion, Huang said, "The machine is not truly creative, you are the creator. This is the observation that a lot of people get wrong. We will democratise content generation not the content or creativity. Creators and the creative process are going to be supercharged. You could create in all kinds of different domains and different modalities."

Read emphasised that creative directors need to give feedback to the machine. Striking a similar tone, Huang said that through prompts and words one has to direct AI to generate content which should be aligned to their values and brand tone. 

Furthermore, Huang said that in the long-term, some jobs will be obsoleted but some new jobs will also be created and almost everybody's job will be impacted. “We will have to create a whole bunch of new jobs because this new technology needs AI researchers, AI engineers and AI operators to do things like prompt engineering, fine-tuning, alignment, etc." 

Read said that the machine also needs training depending on the brands' needs and values. Brands have different competitive sets and histories, so such things will have to be built into the system. 

Speaking on similar lines, Huang said, "There's a whole field of AI work that needs to be done. The data processing, AI model tuning and alignment has to be built inside your company. Hence, new jobs need to be created for this." 

Read highlighted that there has been a lot of debate around responsible AI and ethics. 

Huang said, "Nobody's going to stop and the reason for that is obviously the people who are trying to advance the art, we still have to advance the technology so that it could be safer. It takes technology for human directive alignment, to the guardrail, to align, to fine-tune, to make AIs more transparent and more explainable. So, we have to put as much energy into the capabilities of AI as we do for the safety of AI." 

Huang stated that from the creative process to the customer, there will have to be ad agencies in the middle that understands the technology to make sure that safety is designed into it. 

"You can't just have an AI-generated. That entire process in the middle requires humans in the loop, human understanding of how to align and guardrail and so on and so forth. You have to understand the voice of the brand you are trying to represent and the story you're trying to tell," he added. 

Advising people in the creative industry to get ahead of this technology, Huang said that people need to understand that for the very first time, the creative process can be amplified in content generation. For the very first time, AI is no longer just in distribution but is actually in content creation. The industry is going to get revolutionised with technology.

Read said, "The brands and the content creators need to own the AI, they need to own the models and they need to own how it's going to be represented and then we go to our partners and distribute it through their technologies." 

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