SYNTHETIC STORYTELLING
What is Art? What is a good movie or an amazing Song? When you listen to your favourite artist for the first time and your body shivers or you are inspired by the big screen and you get the feels, humans are making those moving picture stories and sounds. Or are they? Year-over year, more automation has made it easier to create, edit, and share. It’s a mindfield out there of automated AI taking over creative work and forcing us to examine the process of creation. As AI tools like Midjourney, Dall-E give non-visual designers more tools to translate their story from key swipes on a computer into stunning visual magic, how can other tools in the same spirit allow writers, cartoonists, design thinkers are others to create better storyboards, better editing, and more effective pitches?
We spoke with a few people shaping the story world about what they think the future of storytelling that’s shifting right now could and should look like…
We thought it would interesting to chat about this new software platform, Tome who are aiming to make collaborative storytelling easier for filmmakers, business mavens, and children’s storybook writers! Bringing together a little DALL-E, ChatGPR, with a side of framer and video integrations, Tome is setting the stage for what could be a great place for creatives to jam, test ideas, and bring together the music, words, and visuals to help tell that story.
Keith Peiris, Co-Founder and CEO of Tome told us at Forward that they have built a platform that “enables multi-modal storytelling for different people in different people at the same time”. He highlighted the simultaneous collaboration and the smart features like ChatGPT that can technically create a story when you pop in some prompts and let the AI fly….
You can open Tome, set up an account, and use simple prompts and ChatGPT will do the rest. It will literally generate a story for you. A cute example of how this comes to live on Tome is this darling short children’s book made entirely on platform about an octopus who communicates with a fish in the deep sea.
For many filmmakers and artists, these tools are slightly fearful territory. Working with artists, we are always navigating how technology can enhance, not replace their work. Lisa Ogdie, film programmer at Soho House and Sundance Film Festival has a great perspective about art and AI. “There is an alchemy that comes from the creative process, that technology can use to enhance, but replacement seems like a miss. In the same way tools like test screenings, back-end production tools, and others can help storytellers get closer to characters and the story, the same can be said for AI”.
From the story to the pictures that take our imaginations to new heights, we have Midjourney, DALL-E and platforms like Stable Diffusion, whic is a latent text-to-image diffusion model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input. It cultivates autonomous freedom to produce incredible imagery, empowers billions of people to create stunning art within seconds. For those without the skills to sketch, shape, and design, these tools stand to save people time and budget. In the same way many moons go Shopify dropped the barrier for small businesses trying to create websites and build an e-commerce presence, these tools will allow creators, thinkers, and brands the ability to test ideas, concepts, and move a lot quicker. Young Fortnite gaming creators can build their worlds quicker, filmmakers can put treatments together in seconds to get interest from producers, and brands can play with co-creation with audiences and test out how they can make their brand more open in a world of connected platforms.
While we aren’t saying drop the pen and let AI do all the work, we challenge everyone to see how we can use these tools in a fun and ethical way. Push them, test them, and share it with your colleagues, artist friends, and others. In the same way that streaming came into our lives or platforms like Canva and Miro, technology that elevates creativity needs us to shape it, design, and set expectations that allow us to become more fully realized artists and thinkers. To all you brands out there, maybe bring a think tank together with some of your most loyal customers to see how they imagine your brand using AI. To our music and film friends, ever needed a writing partner and just don’t jive with others- Maybe Tome could be your new best bud in the journey to your next streaming hit or Netflix smash! You never know what will happen!
