Hi there,

Some of us take easier to AI than others. Some are slogging along, trying to make the most of the new tech and demands that follow. Others seem to have a suspiciously intricate understanding of the machine mind.

Karen X. Cheng (hold for applause) is in the latter camp, but not for the reasons you'd think. Cheng is as successful as she is because she knows when to call the bots, and when not to. 

This is the kind of outlook that many creative leaders could stand to learn from: An AI creative model that acknowledges but doesn't depend on AI.

1. Karen X. Cheng's 4 tips for AI in creative: Connect your own tastebuds, get weird with it, don't burn yourself out, if you can't ideate, enhance
2. This week in AI: Smash the following barriers
3. Meme of the week: Damning with faint praise
4. From the community: AI influencers; TikTok's chatfluencer
5. Join the fun: Share your top three; give a look to our book

Karen X. Cheng's 4 tips for AI in creative ✍️

Cheng was kind enough to share her creative process with us during her keynote at our Infinite Canvas summit, leading to a flurry of questions and breathless enthusiasm from our host.

From that, we sussed out a model any creative leader can follow to become adept with, but not reliant on AI tooling as they shape the tech's role within their teams.

1. Connect your projects to your own tastes. 😋 No, I'm not trying to get you killed. While your proclivity for avant-garde-post-vegan-nu-wave should probably stay with your personal projects, there's something to be said for actively trying to find the correlation between the ask and your own preferences. Learn to love the brief.

2. Balance effort and impact. ⚖️ Are you burning your eyes out trying to get something usable out of AI for project Y? Don't. Don't let the hype machine's demand for AI ubiquity convince you that a project must be completed with AI. If it's not helping, it's not helping.

3. Enhance existing work with AI. 💪 Likewise, don't feel obligated to use AI exclusively on the ground floor of a project. If you're hitting a production wall, bring AI back around when it comes time to edit or enhance what you've already got.

4. Treat prompting like chemistry. ⚗️ A safe chemistry, where the only risk is looking silly to the tiny person who lives inside Midjourney. As Karen has learned, there's great utility to a no-bad-ideas approach. The most ridiculous experiments can sometimes be the most rewarding.

>> Read the blog

>> Watch the keynote

This Week in AI

Creative barriers to AI adoption (smash 'em) 👊

Expertise gaps, skeptical outlook, integration struggles... there's any number of reasons the AI revolution isn't sweeping your creative team just yet.

This week, we give you the keys to the digital kingdom.

>> Read the blog

While it may not be feasible to make every project fit your personal post-modern-primitive-mumblecore aesthetic, we hope this week's edition gave you substantial inspiration to find a happy medium.

That is to say, settle on corporate blue and make the logo bigger.

✨ Stay super,