Introduction

It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you today.

I'm going to be talking to you a little bit about creative AI use. So something very non-technical in terms of the use cases that we're going to be discussing, but something that I like to think a lot of you might be wanting to experiment with or already doing so.

So before we get into it, is there anybody here that considers themselves an artist?

Fantastic. Do we have any creative writing people here?

Fantastic. Do we have any sort of visual artists here in any shape and form of the word?

And do we have anyone that is wanting to start that sort of thing and maybe doesn't really know how to sort of get into it? A few sort of half hands up, I'll take it.

That's perfectly fine.

About the Speaker and Czech Radio

So first of all, a little bit about myself and Czech Radio, of course, as well. Czech Radio has two types of implementation of artificial intelligence.

One of them is very technical. We're experimenting with voice recognition, speaker recognition, recommendation algorithms, use cases in the newsroom, fact checking, all that jazz.

All of those things are not what we're going to be talking about today. Today we're going to be talking about the second facet and that is creative AI use or the implementation of AI in creative processes and that's what I do.

So I'm Chief Dramaturg for Digital Audio Content at Czech Radio and I'm also a Creative Producer for Technological and Content Innovation and I'm also an Author, Moderator, Director and Marketer for Audio Content. I'm also a skeptical techno-optimist, which I attribute mainly to the fact that I grew up watching Star Trek.

So I do have to ask, do we have any Star Trek fans here? Oh, I was hoping for more. To be honest with you, I was hoping for more, but I'll take it nonetheless.

Using AI in Creative Processes

So when using AI in a creative sense or when implementing AI in creative processes of any kind, I feel that there are two main facets that absolutely need to fall into place in order to make sure that everything is all right and you've not forgone your, what we like to call, artistic integrity. Let's just call it that for the sake of the argument.

Choosing the Right Tools

The first thing is, and it's a huge recommendation, is to pick a lane. In order to illustrate that, I do have a sort of short story for you.

At Czech Radio, we have a project that's called the Digital Writer. It's a project that utilizes GPT from GPT-2 to chat GPT and GPT-4.0. And we started doing it in 2020.

It's basically a series of short stories written entirely by artificial intelligence. Then it has four seasons. So in the second season, we created these sort of collaborative processes between actual human authors and their sort of digital counterparts.

The third season is written entirely by GPT-4. And the last season, which came out about two months ago, is an entirely fictional, uncanny valley-based podcast called Solved Mysteries. We actually managed to trick a few, unintentionally, a few of the listeners of Czech Radio into believing that aliens actually exist and they were very upset about that fact.

So, I mean, that's what happens sometimes. So my suggestion to you, if you want to get into creative processes and you want to utilise AI, is to pick a lane and to pick a system that serves your particular needs.

And I'm saying this because we've been working with Chad GPT or GPT in general since 2020 so we have a fairly good understanding of the results that we're able to get when we actually deal with the system itself. So four years, quite a lot of development.

If you take a look at the project which is on our website of course you can gauge entirely throughout its entire history since 2020 what the outcomes can be and what sort of outputs you can actually get when you prompt in a more or less normal manner. 1If you want to use a large language model, just pick one that you align with.

Make sure that you shop around a little bit and see if the user interface is comfortable for you, if that's something that you want to engage with, if you find pleasure in engaging with the system itself, because creative processes are inherently about pleasure to some extent. If you want to have an image generator, Pick one that delivers.

There's a slew of them. Pick one that you're comfortable with using. Also, pick a sound generator that you understand.

And when I say understand, I mean you understand how it uses your data, how it uses the voice prints that you might be able to generate, how it generates sound, what sort of data set it's working with, and all of that to mainly be able to say that the outcome, the result, the artwork that you've produced is still your own because you understand all the facets of how it came about.

Approaching AI as a Creative Partner

I also suggest to approach the task as you would if you were dealing with a person. Very often when you come to conferences or talks of this sort, you will have AI experts tell you, and I'm not sure if some of you have this experience, that you can be rude to a large language model.

If you're talking to it, you can just kind of troubleshoot. You don't really have to, you know, you don't have to say thank you, please.

You don't have to say hello. You don't have to say goodbye, which you obviously don't.

You can, and it does add a certain air of humanity that I personally very much enjoy when involving an AI-based system in my creative process. If I were talking to one of our graphic designers, I'm going to say hello when I enter the office.

You know, it's that sort of thing. So when I open ChatGPT and I want to do something or, you know, with Midjourney it's a little bit different, but when I open ChatGPT, I tend to be nice to the system and I understand the parasocial implications of that, but I still do enjoy it and I feel that it brings a certain air of humanity to a process otherwise slightly devoid of it.

If you're not getting the results that you want to get out of the creative use, understand where your frustration lies. Is it in the inability of the system to produce the results that you want? Is it in your inability to prompt properly? Is it somewhere in between? Or are those two things entirely the same thing? So just understand where the frustration is coming from and why you're not getting the results that you want to get.

Ethical Considerations

Now, the creative use of AI obviously in any debate is always surrounded by an air of general distrust, which is perfectly fine. Creativity, I feel, is something that we like to think is inherently human, and that's not really something that anyone here, I think, can dispute.

But secondary ethics is something that I find incredibly interesting, and that is the sort of second step of ethical questions that you get to once you're past the primary quintessential ethical question, do I want to involve artificial intelligence in my creative process? Once you're past that, and you know that you do, you arrive at secondary ethical questions.

And that is when really the sort of artistic integrity line of questioning really comes in. How to retain that, how to not forego that, how to be entirely comfortable that the results that you're putting out into the world, be it a sound, a video, a presentation of any sort, be it, I don't know, a short story, a picture, whatever it is, how can you be comfortable saying, yes, that is my artwork and I used artificial intelligence to enhance it. I used artificial intelligence based tools.

These are the things that I find you have to do and you cannot do. Now please understand that this entire process is obviously very personal because we all approach creativity in vastly different areas.

For some of you data engineering, data science might be the peak of creativity. Some of you will be doing oil paintings and those are both entirely valid outputs for creative processes.

So these are my findings and what works for me in my creative process which is fairly scattered as I'm sure you've noticed.

Practical Advice for Using AI Creatively

So what to absolutely do is experiment. Shop around for the system that you find works best with your creative process. How you want to work with artificial intelligence is always going to be the best way for you to work with artificial intelligence.

Use critical thinking. A lot of you will probably be using artificial intelligence in creative processes that lean slightly more towards the truth. So in that sense, we've spoken about, my colleagues have spoken about hallucinations.

Be aware of those. They can be very beautiful sometimes, so keep that in mind, but not when you're in the newsroom and you want to make sure that something is actually true. So there's always that.

And there's also disclosure. And I understand that disclosure is really something that carries over quite heavily from my work in public service, because public service is heavily, heavily focused on trust. And I'm very happy to say that Czech Radio is one of the most trusted media sources in the country.

1So if you do use artificial intelligence, tell people about it. Which is why I have to tell you that none of the images in this presentation I have taken myself, I made them in mid-journey, which I'm sure surprises absolutely none of you, but nonetheless, I do have to put that out there.

You can also tell by the very strange head on this gentleman over here. These images are part of the last season of The Digital Writer. They're based on strange short stories that we created in collaboration with ChatGPT.

So if you do use artificial intelligence and it was an integral part of what you've created, disclose it. There's absolutely no shame in that. It's very much the same as when someone would use Photoshop to enhance images, to do something with images, to create a piece of art that simply needs a tool to make it better, to make it more you.

So yeah, disclose it, absolutely. If you write a short text, disclose that it was written by artificial intelligence or that you used help.

There's, again, no shame in that. And I also feel that it's part of responsibility for a techno-optimistic community, which I would imagine a lot of you are a part of, to make sure that the tone of voice around AI is positive and if we kind of admit to the use that is not really admit is maybe not the correct word but if we disclose this this use it's just simply going to help people understand that it's just not really something that's taking your job it may be something that is making your job slightly easier.

What to Avoid

What not to do? Frivolous use.

If you can write a better paragraph, write it yourself. That's always good.

If you can make a better image, make that image. If you can make a better piece of music or a better voiceover, do that. It's better. It's going to be better because you made it.

I would imagine that this would be something pertaining especially to, I don't know, does anyone here write marketing texts? A couple of you, yeah.

There's not much fun in it, but if you can write a better one than AI, just write it yourself. It's as simple as that.

You can then use artificial intelligence to enhance it, to bring a pop of something here and there, but it's better if it's you. It's just always better if it's you.

And of course, disingenuity, that ties in very much to disclosure. Don't say that you made something you didn't make. I mean, it really is as simple as that.

something that I would imagine any of you would be up to but it's always good to kind of understand that that shines a bad light not on artificial intelligence but on you as well and quite frankly I still am a firm believer that if you just sold it to something it's going to be better than something that pops out of any algorithm that was ever created.

Conclusion

Now this last slide I think is fairly self-explanatory. Have fun with the art that you make because I feel that it's a two-way street. If you had fun making it there's a very good chance that it's art.