3 ways I'm using AI in my creative workflow

Adapt or die. That seems to be the law of the land in the digital age. Well, maybe not ‘die’. But definitely ‘get out-priced by your competitors’. Technology continues to lower the speed and cost at which creative can be produced. With companies like Adobe and Squarespace investing heavily in AI integrations within their products, it is clear that AI is here to stay.

Here are 3 ways I’ve started incorporating AI tools into my creative production workflow to save time and money and increase the production-quality of my work.

1. ElevenLabs Voiceover Generator

ElevenLabs is a text-to-voice, AI-based, voice generation tool that instantly turns user-inputted text into downloadable audio mp3 files. You can browse a library of pre-generated voices, generate new ones based on input parameters (gender, age, accent), or clone an existing human voice.

The thing I find most-game changing about this tool – aside from it being next-to-free – is the ability to instantly hear my video script in a bunch of different voices. Previously you would have had to individually contact several voice actors and have them each record reads (timely and costly). If you aren’t totally comfortable using an AI voice in your piece, this tool is still great for quickly temping in a voiceover to pitch a script to a client or create an audio cut before a shoot. 

Check out the following video I produced using this tool (can you tell this isn’t a real human VO?)

2. Runway’s ‘Expand Image’

Runway has a whole set of amazing image and video AI tools, but one that I’ve found particularly innovative is the ‘Expand Image’ tool. Input an image along with a text prompt and Runway will generate an expansion of the image. Like most AI tools right now, it isn’t perfect but if you mess around with the parameters and generate enough iterations you can get a few good results. Check out the video below to see how I applied this tool to a video use-case.

3. Midjourney Image Generator

One of the most popular AI tools right now is a text-to-image generator called Midjourney. While the trained eye can still detect most of the images created by Midjourney as ‘not real’, I think this is an incredibly powerful tool for the right use-cases.

The main thing I use this tool for is creating proof-of-concepts and inspiration boards. When you need to bring an idea to life and it doesn’t need to be pixel-perfect, Midjourney will turn any text prompt you give it into a JPG in seconds. This is a massive game-changer for mocking up concept creative for client pitches. Gone are the days of spending hours searching the web and Photoshopping the perfect composite image to bring to life an idea. Check out some of the images I created with Midjourney below. 

While the outputs of current, creative AI tools aren’t always perfect, they can be incredibly useful for saving time and money on your projects. Many of these AI companies offer these tools for free (or very cheap) right now but as they become more refined and investors begin to look for their profits it is likely the cost to access them will significantly increase. As we’ve seen in technology time-and-time again, refinement progresses exponentially. AI is still in its infancy and I think it is smart of creatives to adopt these tools early to continue to keep their capabilities relevant.