On the current Freepik Upscale occasion in Malaga, I spoke to the corporate’s CEO and co-founder Joaquín Cuenca to learn how Freepik helps groups use AI, what the long run holds for inventive professionals, and why AI is pretty much as good as a pencil or a paintbrush for some creators.
- Does AI redefine that which means of creativity?
I think that the AI is such a novel tool that it makes you adapt everything, almost. So, even if the definition is in chains, and strictly speaking, is independent of the tool, there’s so much more that you can do with AI. For anyone that has to use it, you know that you need to go off with other solutions, actually, even more than ever. You need to combine more things. You need to be more creative in how you do those things.
- What does it mean to be a creative professional in the age of AI?
I call it a creative engineer. I am talking about a new kind of job. We talk a lot about the jobs that are going to be displaced or changed. That’s part of the change, but in a good way. So, what does it mean?
Number one, it means that you are not looking for vanilla results. You’re looking for something that touches people, that connects emotionally. And a big part of doing that, it’s the same pre-AI and post-AI. You need a message, you need an angle, you need to understand how to create an emotion.
I just think that this is solidly still in human nature. But now becomes much easier to explore different ideas. It becomes much easier to explore like different ways of treating that emotion. Because in the process, how do you go from that idea to the solution? It’s changing completely.
What do we mean by [creative engineer]? What I mean is a professional that uses technology to its fullest extent to get a creative piece out of it. With the new tools that we are creating, with Freepik Spaces, we believe that we are enabling this kind of new job, new position to work in teams. We are helping people collaborate. We think this is important, because very often what is missing is stronger feedback, stronger storytelling, stronger message.
We are getting it out because it’s easy not putting enough effort in the story, in the emotional connection. When you work on a team, you very often you get experts at that, but you have been working in isolation until now. And that’s why we are so excited about Spaces. It’s not only about workflows and it’s not only about the AI part. It’s also the comments, the rationale, the thinking, the emotional development of the story.
- AI can feel like a minefield for employees. What is Freepik doing, and what do businesses need to do, to make sure staff feel confident using it safely, legally, and creatively?
This is a huge part of the Freepik added value to enterprises. We give you a safe way, a legal way, to use AI.
The difficulty when individuals start using AI is that they start signing up to many different providers. And that’s fine. That’s absolutely right. The problem here is that people usually don’t read carefully the terms and conditions. It’s very, very easy to end up in a situation where you buy a subscription to a provider that you didn’t pay attention but they can actually use what you create to create a new version of the model. So, what you’re doing, it doesn’t stay private anymore.
We are killing that risk. Like nothing that you do on Freepik Enterprise, no matter the subscription, for all of them there’s full protection. We never use that data to train a model. We never allow partners to use that data to train models [when used inside the Freepik platform].
The other thing that we do is offer protection to people using it. We offer insurance. There is like a condition to the insurance, that the images or the videos should not have been made with the intention to violate trademark.
Let me explain. It is very easy to violate a trademark – with AI and without AI. You draw two circles that intersect each other, and you try to use that in a commercial setting, and you may get a call from MasterCard.
It’s very easy to draw Mickey Mouse. You don’t need AI to do that. It’s very easy to run into trouble. It’s the same as if you use Photoshop, it is the identical in case you do it your self by hand. So, we defend our prospects from any legal responsibility with a single exception when they’re attempting to violate any person’s copyright.
- Is AI actually democratizing inventive work by decreasing the barrier of entry? And is that basically an excellent factor?
I believe it’s, I believe it’s. I do know that drawback right here is that specialists working with conventional tooling. They acquired there due to their expertise, and they’re often very, excellent at many alternative issues, together with storytelling. And so they see many individuals which might be beginning to play with AI. And for instance, fairly often they do not just like the outcomes,
However what they do not see is that these folks, they did not have the posh of many years wiping out those that weren’t ok. They’re evaluating a really main trade with an rising trade. A giant a part of what you see with AI, usually it does not hit the mark since you want that form of polish, that means of, you realize, of slowly maturing,
So, is it an excellent factor that it’s opening creativity to extra folks? My opinion is completely. Identical to a digicam. You realize, cameras have been opening creativity to new folks, making it simpler, and that was good. I believe that every thing that permits folks to create issues which might be locked of their heads is sweet.
For some folks, AI goes to be an ideal software. They’ll grasp it, despite the fact that they do not grasp different strategies of creations. For some folks, it’ll be a digicam. For some folks, is it’ll be a pencil.
- What are the boundaries of utilizing AI, and the way will they be overcome?
I can speak about short-term limits. Issues that we all know which might be being labored on, issues that we now have notified many suppliers, they know already. Like, on picture, the small particulars have at all times been a problem. Picture mills generally tend to see issues as a giant blob. They get issues roughly proper, after which it paints every thing with textures.
[Cucena holds his knuckles against his shirt]
When you’ve got issues just like the fingers, the generator says, “these are wrinkles on the shirt.” And it is like, 4, 5, six [fingers], who cares? As a result of it is form of a sample. So, the small particulars has been a robust problem, and we’re getting higher with the small particulars. Now, it is uncommon to see the incorrect variety of fingers, it is uncommon to see the incorrect textual content. The subsequent era goes to be even higher, it’ll be thoughts blowing.
We just lately acquired a breakthrough on Edit fashions. So we acquired ChatGPT, we acquired Nano Banana, we acquired Seadream. The final era fashions have change into excellent at understanding edit directions and following them. Nonetheless, very removed from perfection. It is nonetheless a problem to grasp advanced directions.
However video is like ten instances extra underdeveloped than picture. Photos, you will get them fairly properly usually, and also you want much less and fewer heavy processes, it is extra like real-time era. On video, we’re excellent now beginning to give extra context to fashions. That is one thing that we now have been speaking about for a really very long time.
It is nonetheless very dangerous on the era of a number of sequences. Some fashions can generate that, however they’re often not excellent. Doing lengthy clips, that is one other very clear weak spot. It’s totally troublesome to do a one-minute, two-minute clip. You realize, you can’t do this a lot.
- How shut are we from AI work being indistinguishable from human work? You see lots of people saying they will spot AI photographs, video – is {that a} coping mechanism or all the way down to the standard of the AI?
For static photographs, in some instances, we’re already there. There are often some telling indicators nonetheless when it is made by AI, however you do a blind check and I do not get them, like, anyplace near 100% of the time.
With movies, clearly, it is nonetheless early days. Actions are usually not at all times the proper ones. However once more, in some instances you possibly can you get movies which might be truly very convincing..
- So, it will not be lengthy till video catches up with photographs?
I am a techno optimist. This is among the industries with the best density of funding in historical past. And I simply suppose that for humanity, after we put our minds to one thing, we now have tendency to repair it. And proper now there are a lot of, many individuals attempting to do it, simply as bizarre as it may be. I believe we’ll get there.
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