ChatGPT’s launch less than two years ago heralded the new age of artificial intelligence transforming business around the world. Since then, AI’s rapid adoption has revolutionized how organizations interact with customers, reshaping marketing, content creation, and other communication functions.

However, as AI becomes more integrated into everyday work, concerns are growing around making sure we preserve a human touch. Zoetica founder Kami Huyse feels that AI should accentuate our humanity, so she just launched the new monthly Smart AI Secrets series which supports leveraging AI for authentic and impactful communication.

Her series covers three main areas: How other communicators are using AI in a human-centric way (or failing to do so), the best AI tools to use in your AI kitchen, and AI recipes to improve your communications workflow.

In this first installment, she shares two interesting examples of how AI can blend real and computer-generated images of people for maximum impact, talks about an exciting and affordable new AI tool, and shares her favorite new AI recipe. 

How Others are Using AI

Starburst candy’s new campaign (tagline “Different every time”) features four videos – Study Different, Work Different, Stream Different, and Homework Different – that leverage generative AI in a playful and delightfully engaging way.

“Why I liked this advertising campaign is because they used real actors,” says Kami. “They took those real people and they overlaid AI types of tools with that, and that made this much more interesting.” She adds, “I just thought it was really brilliant because it definitely kept the human aspect involved.”

Kami believes that communications professionals and consultants working in the earned media space can learn from examples like Starburst. “I feel that what we can do with these is think about how can we apply this to what we do in our work, like how can we take real events and real people and actually lay over some really fun AI to kind of just really pop out a new idea.”

Campaign Use of AI: Brand Ukraine Example 

AI can also be used for impactful campaigns like that by NGO Brand Ukraine featuring a digital Olympic team composed of Ukrainian athletes who died in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Avatars of six athletes from boxing, cycling, fencing, weightlifting, swimming, and football (soccer) are shown in the video titled “The Revived.”

While these athletes' avatars were created from photos and video recordings provided by their relatives, Kami describes the campaign as “very heavy” and admits feeling it’s “a little scary because you can bring people back to life who… aren't with us anymore, and I'm not sure how I really 100% feel about that.”

But, she also recognizes that “some actors…as they're aging, they're actually selling the rights to their voices and their likenesses for AI recreation, so I know this is going to happen a lot, like the estates of of dead celebrities are going to sell their rights to be able to put them in movies and whatever.”

AI Tool for Your Brand “Kitchen”

On the practical side, Kami recommends checking out Fooocus for possible inclusion in your AI toolkit. Fooocus is an image generating software with both free and paid options. The software is open source, making it attractive to many users.

Kami especially likes its ‘Face Swapping’ functionality, noting that, “you can create an image in this thing, take your face or anybody's face… and upload it into this, and it will face swap out whatever was generated for that person's face, so it's really powerful.”

For communicators who aren’t sure which AI image generator to use, she recommends checking out Future Tools founder Matt Wolfe’s AI Image Model Comparison Figma board.

A Fun AI Recipe

Kami shares an AI recipe for creating good-quality images of yourself, using Instagram. “This is really, really cool, and I've been able to create a lot of really interesting photos with this…and I think that you could too,” she says. 

Here are the basic steps, which she describes in greater detail in her livestream.

1. Log on to your Instagram account on your phone.

2. Go to the “Ask Meta AI or Search” area.

3. Type in “Create a photo of me” into the search bar.

4. Share a photo of yourself.

5. Type “/imagine” and enter what you want Instagram to picture you as], so for example, type “/imagine me speaking on stage at a conference.”

6. Instagram will generate the requested image. 

To learn more about AI and how it can improve your day-to-day work, make sure to get a copy of Kami’s AI Recipe and Tools and sign up for her weekly email featuring the latest Smart Social Tips! 

Watch the full livestream