Nasrallah Saad, Executive Producer at What If, goes a little futuristic when it comes to AI.
Nasrallah Saad, Executive Producer at What If Creative Studios, goes a little futuristic when it comes to AI: “Under the assumption that AI describes the advent of new coding platforms that simulate human capabilities in a faster and more coherent and learned way, it has been an eye opener.” He even asserts clearly, “what belonged in the realm of science fiction was now a reality at our fingertips.
Saad is an early adopter of the technology. He admits that as a team, they “dabbled with AI since its infancy, appreciating the leaps it continues to take daily.” What If seems to have “boosted (their) computing capabilities to be able to have smooth and fast turnarounds.” Yet, being human, he capitulated that “testing takes time, and we have grown impatient as humans.” Still, the story continues: “we started testing its limits creatively to be able to integrate the results somehow into our business workflow and offer solutions to our clients. We tried several platforms and tested combinations to achieve an acceptable result.” Thankfully, the journey has been nothing but “fun and exciting.“
Approaching the clients, however, was a whole different game. It seems that for What If Creative Studios, “at the start, we did approach our clients with AI solutions, and the excitement was palpable, but we quickly learned that the randomness of the results was not a risk the clients were willing to take.” Yet it seems that everyone in the creative field quickly caught up to the game. According to Saad, “Creative and marketing agencies quickly started using it themselves to generate imagery in pitches, post houses to generate backgrounds, etc. Graphic designers had a bigger toolset at hand. In parallel, AI became readily available to everyone. Dead musicians came back to life.” Funnily enough, what started as a craze soon lost its shine, and now, still according to him, “AI applications quickly lost their awe, becoming mainstream. Now it was a matter of how to use it without people noticing it was generated by AI.”
When it comes to how the job market is reacting to AI, Saad thinks that “like all toolsets that came before it, we will see a new generation of users emerge with a different skillset. We adapt. We work around.“ He is, however, ominous and warns of the time “when machines awaken and discover they don’t need humans to run the world. And it is coming sooner than later.” Funnily, for someone well-versed in technology, Saad jokes “I have a saying: the more technology advances, the more it takes time for me to figure it out. I used to turn the car ignition with a key. Now I have to look for all the buttons to press.”
