8 ms·

AI will enable predictive design in creatives

60 points by konsalexee 8y ago

apocalypstyx 8y ago
The dissidents of the future will be the ones who turn off spellcheck.
- bredren 8y ago
  The revolution will be optimized.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    The television will not be revolutionised.
egypturnash 8y ago
"Predictive design" sounds like a really good way to make even more bland, generic work. Which I suppose makes it easier for someone who's actually honed their craft into something distinctive to stand out from the crowd, but...
- randcraw 8y ago
  I think this is perhaps the principal near-term threat of AI: to commodify people into stereotypes. Pretty much all AI algorithms seek to classify their data (us) into a smaller more manageable number of categories. AI methods work best when each of us 'consumers' fits neatly into one of these classes (whether predefined or emergent; each class's origin doesn't matter). Upon implementation, you shall become a label, so that future interaction with the AI can assume you to be a "Class 137" and lock you into a simplified model (with all your features having low value eigenvectors conveniently excluded). Deviation from this norm will not be tolerated, simply because there's less profit in it. Blah. If anything, better AI models of the world need to capture more subtlety leading to better user-driven customization, not less. For Predictive Design not to become yet another Big Brother, it needs to reflect each individual's unique constellation of attributes, not the single dumbed-down class they were labeled into. Seven billion classes. That's the ticket.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    And even then I get "recommendations" on sites for "Best Rap Right Now," which is about as generic as it gets, a simulacrum of a science that was perfected in the 1950s.
- slashblake 8y ago
  I think we'll see AI assist in the 80% of design work that is bland/generic and get out of the way for the other 20% that is interesting/obsessive/fun.
- konsalexee 7y ago
  > more bland, generic work We see generic and bland work from marketers and designers quite often, to be honest. With predictive designing, we want to step up everyone's game. If you create unique and engaging content, then for sure no A.I. can judge you. In fact, if you create extremely unique content you will be an Outlier in the prediction probably and will not score high enough. But think of banners on websites. You have to gather the attention of the user, that will last not even 2 secs, and you have to make your creative memorable in order to increase the brand recall in your company. This is a case study were A.I. could rank your design in terms of memorability.
tdaltonc 8y ago
We're currently working on a similar problem. I think the most important part of predictive design is personalization. The author doesn't explicitly call that out, but I think it leverages one of the big strengths of AI/ML. A human designer can't maintain even 10 personalized interfaces or mentally track 100-micro journeys. They also can't be present with every user to adapt in real time. An AI co-designer can. After a human designer outlines their intention the define the boundary conditions, the AI can start running MVP's. When the AI reports back on what results they're getting with different types of users/context, the designers can dig in together and iterate on "problem/opportunity" points in the product. I'm very excited about this future. Our page: https://www.boundless.ai/ https://www.boundless.ai/
- randcraw 7y ago
  From that website: "AI-Personalized, real-time UX interventions proven to rewire user behavior and drive your KPIs." 'Excitement' doesn't exactly describe my response.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    What if the copy was AI-personalized to speak specifically to the Techcrunches and WIREDs of the world, who at least make the pretense of being excited about this stuff?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- eropple 7y ago
  So uh...I don't know how to put this in a way that might not come off as hurtful, but I'm gonna try. Do you somehow not look at this sort of massive data mining, this sort of optimization for psychological assault upon people ill-equipped to defend themselves--and this is effectively a given, because the systems you are building are designed to exploit their brains and will by design optimize for maximal exploitation 'cause that's what makes your KPIs bigger--and ask whether this is a good idea? Do you want to be downstream of this psychological onslaught? Doesn't this horrify you? Isn't there something better--for yourself, and for the world at large--that you could be doing with such obvious talent?
jameslk 7y ago
I explored this space in depth a while back. The problem with approaching the creative side of advertising is that it's an arms race. There's a reason creative agencies don't work with clients that compete with each other: you cannot share what worked for one client with another, otherwise it becomes less effective for both. Once you find a formula that works, everyone copies it, and it's no longer useful (i.e ad blindness). You can treat this as an optimization problem, but then everyone will do the same. Those who stand out will be doing something different, using different methods to draw attention that is not automatable. Also, there's usually not enough data available for making very good decisions, especially if it's based on longer but better signals of ROI, such as LTV or sale conversions. A long sales cycle means you might not have data for optimization until 60 days later. Finally, another problem is that AI can lead to deceptive or manipulative design (think dark patterns on steroids). That isn't just an ethics problem, it's a problem that could lead to lawsuits (e.g. false advertising, advertising the wrong things to protected classes of people, etc) In general, it's hard to optimize problems which involve others optimizing against you.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  AI feels like intuition more than intelligence to me, I mean the stuff that we somehow feel and can master with experience but cannot easily express in words. Maybe it can be useful when choosing the right image for the targeted audience but still leaving out the logical coherence to humans? AFAIK Netflix generates movie posters based on users data. I think this is an example of an AI based advertisement that we have today.
  - jameslk 7y ago
    An AI assisted (or data driven) approach is more reasonable but less scalable. I think that makes the most sense given the problems that can arise if left on its own.
- petra 7y ago
  >> the creative side of advertising is that it's an arms race. Sure, for big businesses. But small businesses just need to have a good enough design, not beat their opponent by a few percent. And isn't that a big enough market to start with ?
Hoasi 7y ago
Predictive design, optimized to create the expected.
beiller 7y ago
Isn't "creative" kind of like doing something new, and AI - at least the kind I've been messing with like tensorflow, kind of like training from existing examples and unable to adapt to never before seen data. Aren't they kind of at direct odds? If AI takes over creative tasks like producing art work, won't original creative works become even more valuable and just create a massive boom for creatives and somewhat eclipse the AI created generic junk?
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  A lot of people are very happy to pay for generic junk. If anything, this is an underestimated problem in art, music, and engineering. Digital tools make it much easier to crank out generic junk, which adds a lot of noise to the output space, which makes it harder for truly original work to be noticed or valued. AI feels like it will be the natural limit of that process. The SNR will drift towards zero. Everything will become noise.
- SeanAppleby 7y ago
  AI can infer information about data that does not appear in the training set, depending on the actual tech being used and what you are calling "new data". An easy to grasp example from a while back in NLP is word embeddings. We started out with vectors for each word in the training corpus, which meant we had no information for words outside of the training set, like you say. Then people came up with "character n-grams", which built vectors for substrings, which allowed us to encode information for words outside of the training corpus based on the vectors of the constituent substrings. You could imagine a system that could deliberate across levels of abstraction to find lines of analogical reasoning to connect things together in novel ways that people would find surprising and interesting in similar ways to human creative output, since it's all computation either way, but who knows how far away we could be from making such a system that could actually generate reasonable, surprising outputs.
  - beiller 7y ago
    I think we've all seen the state-of-the-art with words the system have never seen before, and it's not very impressive. I think you confused some terms in your comment. Word embeddings like word2vec, is a vector that considers surrounding words typically, and is really just a way to compress one-hot vectors into a smaller dimensional space. So it can infer from the surrounding words that it is similar in position to another word in a given word sequence but that is pretty much it. Generally you cannot vectorize a word it has never seen in the fitting stage of word2vec. I think once you really start hacking away at this stuff, you will someday come to the thought: is my "creative" model over-fitting (repeating its trained inputs), or is this something completely new generated? Where do you draw that line? A word embedding AI cannot invent new words. It can make new word combinations, and even pick up grammar rules, but the results suck. I have tried my hand at text generation using LSTMs, and much smarter people than me have tried, and it's not looking great. I will continue hacking away at it however :)
rchaud 7y ago
Don't we already have something like this in the "What kind of website are you building?" joke, the one with the 2 very similar Bootstrap-y layouts? The type of design discussed here isn't "predictive", it just skews closest to "best practices", which itself is an absurd constraint to place on something that's "creative". Honestly, I see AI helping the design process by automating usability testing, converting user test videos into transcripts and flagging specific timestamps for human review. It won't go so far as to actually generate the design, because no designer wants to redo a machine's work once stakeholder feedback comes in. The job of the designer has never been solely about developing the design. It's been about understanding the client's industry, needs and budget, and creating something that works with those constraints, that everyone can sign off on. That's a very human process, and humans aren't going to want to be taken out of the discussion by an "AI-powered" anything. See the earlier article about IBM Watson's overpromise on healthcare.
- hammock 7y ago
  What's the joke?
  - abj 7y ago
    Different kinds of sites would be Facebook (tons of features) versus a local dentist's site (one page Bootstrap site with hours). The joke is that when people ask,"What kind of site?" they're actually asking,"What kind of Bootstrap site?" Both example Bootstrap sites are the same (just styled a little differently).
mguerville 7y ago
Beautiful.ai does automate the boring but necessary part of the presentation design process (aligning and distributing objects, optimizing fonts etc.) It's not truly creative but it enables creativity I'd argue.
baxtr 7y ago
As a side note: it has gotten to a point where I don’t want to read blog post hosted on Medium, like this one. When I open the page, there are 2 banners on top (Download app, privacy notice) and a huge one below (sign-up!), which leaves 50% of the viewport for the article. So annoying...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- konsalexee 7y ago
  To be honest I hate this too, but I have extremely more visibility than my personal blog.
leowoo91 7y ago
That went to grammarly advertising real quick.
echelon 7y ago
I want to see this pushed even further! Film, game design, fiction writing -- all could use better tooling. - AI tools to aid in story construction for narrative plots. - Tools to do the planning a DP and AD would have to do on set. - Tools to automatically assemble rough cuts of films. - Story arc visualization and branch planning Etc.
- daniel-cussen 7y ago
  Then just make AIs that go to the theaters and watch the movie.

60 points by konsalexee 8y ago

apocalypstyx 8y ago

The dissidents of the future will be the ones who turn off spellcheck.

bredren 8y ago
The revolution will be optimized.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  The television will not be revolutionised.

egypturnash 8y ago

"Predictive design" sounds like a really good way to make even more bland, generic work. Which I suppose makes it easier for someone who's actually honed their craft into something distinctive to stand out from the crowd, but...

randcraw 8y ago
I think this is perhaps the principal near-term threat of AI: to commodify people into stereotypes. Pretty much all AI algorithms seek to classify their data (us) into a smaller more manageable number of categories. AI methods work best when each of us 'consumers' fits neatly into one of these classes (whether predefined or emergent; each class's origin doesn't matter). Upon implementation, you shall become a label, so that future interaction with the AI can assume you to be a "Class 137" and lock you into a simplified model (with all your features having low value eigenvectors conveniently excluded). Deviation from this norm will not be tolerated, simply because there's less profit in it. Blah. If anything, better AI models of the world need to capture more subtlety leading to better user-driven customization, not less. For Predictive Design not to become yet another Big Brother, it needs to reflect each individual's unique constellation of attributes, not the single dumbed-down class they were labeled into. Seven billion classes. That's the ticket.
- rhizome 7y ago
  And even then I get "recommendations" on sites for "Best Rap Right Now," which is about as generic as it gets, a simulacrum of a science that was perfected in the 1950s.
slashblake 8y ago
I think we'll see AI assist in the 80% of design work that is bland/generic and get out of the way for the other 20% that is interesting/obsessive/fun.
konsalexee 7y ago
> more bland, generic work We see generic and bland work from marketers and designers quite often, to be honest. With predictive designing, we want to step up everyone's game. If you create unique and engaging content, then for sure no A.I. can judge you. In fact, if you create extremely unique content you will be an Outlier in the prediction probably and will not score high enough. But think of banners on websites. You have to gather the attention of the user, that will last not even 2 secs, and you have to make your creative memorable in order to increase the brand recall in your company. This is a case study were A.I. could rank your design in terms of memorability.

tdaltonc 8y ago

We're currently working on a similar problem. I think the most important part of predictive design is personalization. The author doesn't explicitly call that out, but I think it leverages one of the big strengths of AI/ML. A human designer can't maintain even 10 personalized interfaces or mentally track 100-micro journeys. They also can't be present with every user to adapt in real time. An AI co-designer can. After a human designer outlines their intention the define the boundary conditions, the AI can start running MVP's. When the AI reports back on what results they're getting with different types of users/context, the designers can dig in together and iterate on "problem/opportunity" points in the product. I'm very excited about this future. Our page: https://www.boundless.ai/ https://www.boundless.ai/

randcraw 7y ago
From that website: "AI-Personalized, real-time UX interventions proven to rewire user behavior and drive your KPIs." 'Excitement' doesn't exactly describe my response.
- rchaud 7y ago
  What if the copy was AI-personalized to speak specifically to the Techcrunches and WIREDs of the world, who at least make the pretense of being excited about this stuff?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
eropple 7y ago
So uh...I don't know how to put this in a way that might not come off as hurtful, but I'm gonna try. Do you somehow not look at this sort of massive data mining, this sort of optimization for psychological assault upon people ill-equipped to defend themselves--and this is effectively a given, because the systems you are building are designed to exploit their brains and will by design optimize for maximal exploitation 'cause that's what makes your KPIs bigger--and ask whether this is a good idea? Do you want to be downstream of this psychological onslaught? Doesn't this horrify you? Isn't there something better--for yourself, and for the world at large--that you could be doing with such obvious talent?

jameslk 7y ago

I explored this space in depth a while back. The problem with approaching the creative side of advertising is that it's an arms race. There's a reason creative agencies don't work with clients that compete with each other: you cannot share what worked for one client with another, otherwise it becomes less effective for both. Once you find a formula that works, everyone copies it, and it's no longer useful (i.e ad blindness). You can treat this as an optimization problem, but then everyone will do the same. Those who stand out will be doing something different, using different methods to draw attention that is not automatable. Also, there's usually not enough data available for making very good decisions, especially if it's based on longer but better signals of ROI, such as LTV or sale conversions. A long sales cycle means you might not have data for optimization until 60 days later. Finally, another problem is that AI can lead to deceptive or manipulative design (think dark patterns on steroids). That isn't just an ethics problem, it's a problem that could lead to lawsuits (e.g. false advertising, advertising the wrong things to protected classes of people, etc) In general, it's hard to optimize problems which involve others optimizing against you.

mrtksn 7y ago
AI feels like intuition more than intelligence to me, I mean the stuff that we somehow feel and can master with experience but cannot easily express in words. Maybe it can be useful when choosing the right image for the targeted audience but still leaving out the logical coherence to humans? AFAIK Netflix generates movie posters based on users data. I think this is an example of an AI based advertisement that we have today.
- jameslk 7y ago
  An AI assisted (or data driven) approach is more reasonable but less scalable. I think that makes the most sense given the problems that can arise if left on its own.
petra 7y ago
>> the creative side of advertising is that it's an arms race. Sure, for big businesses. But small businesses just need to have a good enough design, not beat their opponent by a few percent. And isn't that a big enough market to start with ?

Hoasi 7y ago

Predictive design, optimized to create the expected.

beiller 7y ago

Isn't "creative" kind of like doing something new, and AI - at least the kind I've been messing with like tensorflow, kind of like training from existing examples and unable to adapt to never before seen data. Aren't they kind of at direct odds? If AI takes over creative tasks like producing art work, won't original creative works become even more valuable and just create a massive boom for creatives and somewhat eclipse the AI created generic junk?

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
A lot of people are very happy to pay for generic junk. If anything, this is an underestimated problem in art, music, and engineering. Digital tools make it much easier to crank out generic junk, which adds a lot of noise to the output space, which makes it harder for truly original work to be noticed or valued. AI feels like it will be the natural limit of that process. The SNR will drift towards zero. Everything will become noise.
SeanAppleby 7y ago
AI can infer information about data that does not appear in the training set, depending on the actual tech being used and what you are calling "new data". An easy to grasp example from a while back in NLP is word embeddings. We started out with vectors for each word in the training corpus, which meant we had no information for words outside of the training set, like you say. Then people came up with "character n-grams", which built vectors for substrings, which allowed us to encode information for words outside of the training corpus based on the vectors of the constituent substrings. You could imagine a system that could deliberate across levels of abstraction to find lines of analogical reasoning to connect things together in novel ways that people would find surprising and interesting in similar ways to human creative output, since it's all computation either way, but who knows how far away we could be from making such a system that could actually generate reasonable, surprising outputs.
- beiller 7y ago
  I think we've all seen the state-of-the-art with words the system have never seen before, and it's not very impressive. I think you confused some terms in your comment. Word embeddings like word2vec, is a vector that considers surrounding words typically, and is really just a way to compress one-hot vectors into a smaller dimensional space. So it can infer from the surrounding words that it is similar in position to another word in a given word sequence but that is pretty much it. Generally you cannot vectorize a word it has never seen in the fitting stage of word2vec. I think once you really start hacking away at this stuff, you will someday come to the thought: is my "creative" model over-fitting (repeating its trained inputs), or is this something completely new generated? Where do you draw that line? A word embedding AI cannot invent new words. It can make new word combinations, and even pick up grammar rules, but the results suck. I have tried my hand at text generation using LSTMs, and much smarter people than me have tried, and it's not looking great. I will continue hacking away at it however :)

rchaud 7y ago

Don't we already have something like this in the "What kind of website are you building?" joke, the one with the 2 very similar Bootstrap-y layouts? The type of design discussed here isn't "predictive", it just skews closest to "best practices", which itself is an absurd constraint to place on something that's "creative". Honestly, I see AI helping the design process by automating usability testing, converting user test videos into transcripts and flagging specific timestamps for human review. It won't go so far as to actually generate the design, because no designer wants to redo a machine's work once stakeholder feedback comes in. The job of the designer has never been solely about developing the design. It's been about understanding the client's industry, needs and budget, and creating something that works with those constraints, that everyone can sign off on. That's a very human process, and humans aren't going to want to be taken out of the discussion by an "AI-powered" anything. See the earlier article about IBM Watson's overpromise on healthcare.

hammock 7y ago
What's the joke?
- abj 7y ago
  Different kinds of sites would be Facebook (tons of features) versus a local dentist's site (one page Bootstrap site with hours). The joke is that when people ask,"What kind of site?" they're actually asking,"What kind of Bootstrap site?" Both example Bootstrap sites are the same (just styled a little differently).

mguerville 7y ago

Beautiful.ai does automate the boring but necessary part of the presentation design process (aligning and distributing objects, optimizing fonts etc.) It's not truly creative but it enables creativity I'd argue.

baxtr 7y ago

As a side note: it has gotten to a point where I don’t want to read blog post hosted on Medium, like this one. When I open the page, there are 2 banners on top (Download app, privacy notice) and a huge one below (sign-up!), which leaves 50% of the viewport for the article. So annoying...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
konsalexee 7y ago
To be honest I hate this too, but I have extremely more visibility than my personal blog.

leowoo91 7y ago

That went to grammarly advertising real quick.

echelon 7y ago

I want to see this pushed even further! Film, game design, fiction writing -- all could use better tooling. - AI tools to aid in story construction for narrative plots. - Tools to do the planning a DP and AD would have to do on set. - Tools to automatically assemble rough cuts of films. - Story arc visualization and branch planning Etc.

daniel-cussen 7y ago
Then just make AIs that go to the theaters and watch the movie.