AI will become ‘a thought partner’

THE DEBUSSY theatre was overflowing with attendees keen to get the latest insights on the OpenAI revolution from company chief operating officer Brad Lightcap.

Responding to concerns that AI software such as ChapGBT and DALL·E — which creates images from text prompts — will make some ad industry jobs obsolete, Lightcap predicted that they will instead enhance productivity. “AI will just be another tool,” he said, comparing the innovation to the advent of PCs or CGI technology. “We’ll have to adapt our work together,” he added.

Replying to speaker Margaret Johnson, chef creative officer and partner at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Lightcap predicted that creatives will be “busier than ever in five years”. Whatever concerns the creative industry has about the AI industry will be outweighed by the idea of “supercharged creativity”, he added.

While creators can struggle to start a project, generative AI tools can help to concept and play with ideas. “AI becomes a thought partner,” Lightcap said.

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and OpenAI indeed collaborated on DALL·E project ‘Dream Tapestry’, which brings dreams to life. Lightcap called it a “very public and visceral” way to allow users to utilise AI to explore their dreams.

In the same way, creatives can spark their imagination by allowing DALL·E to create rough storyboards in minutes. Rather than “staring at a blank piece of paper”, these highly advanced yet simple AI tools can help to explore the “limits of your imagination”, Lightcap said.

The power of AI, which Bill need to realise that AI is their light sabre, their bazooka.”

Swisher and Galloway believe Microsoft has positioned itself well in the emerging AI war by acquiring a stake in OpenAI. Tesla’s investment in the EV-charging structure was likened to Apple’s control of a mobile operating system — more powerful in the long run than producing EVs themselves.

Asked by the audience where he sees investable opportunities in today’s market, Galloway suggested AI-powered healthcare businesses. As for this week in Cannes, Galloway reserved a few acerbic comments for advertising (“a tax on the poor”), but was positive about the Festival itself: “It’s a wonderfully informal environment and does a great job of fostering young leadership through various events in the Palais.”

Gates predicted will have a bigger influence than the PC, is set to impact lives in diverse and complex ways. Lightcap noted that improvements are being made, including making AI data inputs more localised to align with different cultures and users. These adjustments are partly inspired by Lightcap’s current global tour to ascertain how users — from government officials to creatives to entrepreneurs — are experiencing and deploying the technology. Another vital adjustment in the OpenAI ecosystem is to evolve the collaboration between human and machine by ensuring the tools can communicate “the limits of what they are doing”, Lightcap said. Enhancing the collaborative power of AI will, he believes, ultimately help to solve the climate crisis, or even find cures for diseases like cancer.