The first thing that I teach in my Advertising Creativity course at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information is “How to sketch anything”. Sketching has always been an important skill to drive creative thinking, and in the age of AI, it has become a critical skill to bend the machine to your will.
I’ve spent the past three hours trying to generate this image of a model kit plastic sprue with “My Five Words for AI Users”: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Precision, Comms, and Speed.
After two hours of just entering prompts into ChatGPT and not getting exactly what I wanted, I sighed and sketched out the layout on my iPad.
I uploaded the sketch to ChatGPT, and specified which shape and word should be paired together (eg. brain = Critical Thinking, cog = Creativity). Finally, I got what I wanted! There were two additional parts at the bottom but it was ok, they made the visual look more complete.
I then iterated the prompts further to change the plastic’s texture, add lighting and shadows, and add a wood table as a backdrop.
So now, you can see why I emphasise these five words as essential Gen AI skills:
Creativity: The ability to bring together different ideas to solve problems in interesting new ways.
Comms: The image must deliver the message cleanly and clearly.
Critical thinking: “Is this good enough? What must I do next?”
Speed: What is the fastest route to get the optimum result?
Precision: The future is no longer fuzzy. We must be able to deliver precise results. In this case, I used my sketch to direct ChatGPT to give me a precise layout, then I used my prompts to finetune the image’s detail and style.
The other images I generated before I used my sketch as a reference:
