AI for Creative Production is a practical, non-technical guide that helps digital creators, filmmakers, musicians, and writers embrace AI as a tool or collaborator-not a replacement. Beginning with a clear foundation in how modern AI works and its ethical implications, the book offers a hype-free perspective, showing where AI is genuinely useful and where it's not. It breaks AI into three accessible categories. Starting with Utility AI, tools that help organize and enhance your work, identify the best shots, select image elements, transcribe and search videos, clean audio, and summarize text. You'll then explore Generative AI, learning to create new text, images, video, and audio with creative control. GenAI doesn't have to replace your work; you'll discover tips for better prompting, tools for retouching, and fresh methods for brainstorming and ideation. Finally, you'll uncover the potential of Automation AI to help edit videos, process photos, and build scripts that streamline your creative workflows. Packed with hands-on examples using accessible tools like Firefly, Runway, Sora, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and ElevenLabs, this book equips you to integrate AI into your practice with clarity and confidence. By the end, you'll know how to get the best from AI while preserving the unique value of human creativity in an AI-driven world.
Artificial intelligence is one of the most divisive technologies of our time, especially for creatives. If you believe the hype, it’ll replace all filmmakers and photographers within a couple of years, and nobody will ever create anything by hand again. But hype rarely translates to reality.
Instead, in this book, you’ll see how AI has the potential to help creatives become more creative. It is true that AI will perform some tasks that creatives might have once been given, but clients who don’t see the value of a human would have already been using templates and presets. When it comes to jobs that require creativity, humans still win.
A creative person can, if they wish, augment their capabilities by using the right AI tools and avoiding others. A common refrain I hear among creatives is to describe a tool as “good AI” or “machine learning, but not AI,” but this distinction can be better expressed asUtility AI orAutomation AI versusGenerative AI (more on this inChapter 1):
Some tasks are boring, tedious, or even impossible for a human to do well. Today,Utility AI tools can help you perform a task, or, if it’s more predictable,Automation AI can do it for you. Few creatives want to select pixels one by one or trace outlines frame by frame, and even if an AI tool isn’t perfect, a human can often benefit from its help. Some jobs can be automated or made easier; others are best done by hand. It’s up to you.
Even thoughGenerative AI attracts most of the hate, that doesn’t mean it’s all bad; it depends on how you use it. While copyright and ethical concerns are real (seeChapter 2), remember that in the development process, while you’re coming up with ideas, almost anything goes. Hollywood directors use soundtracks from other movies while they edit new ones, and mood boards at every level are filled with other people’s work. This isn’t a new concept, and if you do it right, it’s possible to use Generative AI to help develop ideas while humans create the finished product.
To help you make sense of the huge number of tools and apps employing AI-powered features, I’ve taken a broad view here, testing as many web-based services and locally run apps as possible. While I have included step-by-step instructions for some of the better-hidden features in desktop apps, for easy-to-use websites, I’ve focused mostly on results.
As this is a book primarily for non-technical creatives, most of the solutions examined here are public-facing apps and services. Enthusiasts and developers may wish to explore the world of open source models, but most designers aren’t coders, and you won
