How to leverage generative AI to help create your storytelling concepts and brand experience concepts

AI is one of the most promising tools available for businesses today, but it’s important to understand how to use it, and its limitations.

One thing AI isn’t good at is the distinction between fact and fiction, or to quote the open.ai website, “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts”. 

But when it comes to storytelling, this isn’t something we need to worry about. In fact, as long as you’re using it to help create the shape of your stories, generative AI can be a fantastic productivity aid.

In this article, we’re going to focus on how you can squeeze the best results from generative AI, and how AI can help you build brand experiences and digital stories for your customers.

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The best uses of generative AI (like ChatGPT and MidJourney)

In addition to the headline-grabbing, text-generating ChatGPT, there are other generative AI tools you can use. As this field continues to develop, we can expect more exciting competitors to enter the market. Image generation tools like MidJourney, DALL-E 2, and images.ai are already available. These can quickly create images that illustrate key concepts or characters. Over time, the role of generative AI may evolve, but right now it has quite well-defined value sources for creative projects.

The ‘sweet spot’ for using generative AI for brand storytelling includes:

Ideation - AI is good at the basics of concept ideation, or coming up with a rough idea. By interacting with a tool like ChatGPT, you can overcome your writer’s block and start to shape rough concepts. Outputs will need a lot of editing work to become finished stories, but they can help you fill out the overall shape.

Consensus research - AI uses vast amounts of public data, so it can give a general taste of what people think, or how they feel about certain issues. A simple prompt is often best to start, for example, “Can you identify the greatest concerns for logistics firms operating cross-border between the EU and APAC regions?” Then, do your own research to zoom in on specifics.

Image generation - Generative AI like MidJourney or images.ai can generate images based on your prompts. Perfect for quickly coming up with placeholder images, defining persona images, and for time-consuming tasks like storyboarding.

Audience research - Although generative AI can be inaccurate when it comes to specifics, you can still use it as the starting point for general audience research. With carefully crafted prompts, you can start to extract insights about the concerns, dreams, and challenges of your target audience/s.

Persona interaction - Using a tool like Charisma, you can build virtual characters you can talk to. This can bring your personas to life, and help understand their perspective better.

Tips for AI/ChatGPT prompts

To get the best results, you should work on refining your prompts. These dictate the shape of what is produced. As a rule, you should aim to be really specific about what you want.

Every AI prompt should:

Identify the scope – say what you want the AI to produce. Give clear parameters (like word count and type of writing), simple instructions, and refine from there.

Identify the audience – tell the AI which audience it is for. This can make a huge difference to the output.

Stipulate special features – make sure to include any special features you want to include, like mentioning the CEO, certain words, or avoiding certain topics.

An example prompt might be:

“Can you create a brand story for {company name}? It must be relatable to a GenZ audience, using familiar language for that audience, and shorter length of 500 words, and must include a reference to our CEO, {name}.” From this you can get a starting point for your storytelling, and you can ask the AI to refine it further before moving to the ‘human editing’ phase.

Using AI for customer insights

Generative AI is one of the most exciting technologies released to the general public, but AI also has strong value for machine learning-based data analytics. This can also be harnessed to improve your brand storytelling.

Machine learning can trawl through vast amounts of data and find correlations that you would never think of. This can identify entirely new opportunities, including new target customer groups or timely trend data that can help prioritize messaging and campaigns. 

You can use ChatGPT as an analytics tool, just by asking the right questions - but this may not be as accurate as an AI trained on your own (reliable) data.

Using AI for brand experiences in the near future

We’re just a short step away from AI that can generate video content from a prompt or other input. Tools like MidJourney and NeRFs are already available, generating 3D content from just a few 2D images and prompts. Some others, like Meta’s MCC and AutoRF can (almost) do it with a single image.

This may make it easier in the future to create customized content using source material like raw video or images. 

It’s even possible that AI will, one day, create customized, on-demand video content for each person using publicly available data, or data from your CRM.

Seize the advantage

Generative AI becomes more sophisticated with each passing day. As its capabilities grow, more businesses are realizing the potential for accelerating innovation and creativity.

It’s essential that you don’t get left so far behind that you can’t catch up. The advantages of new technology are the greatest for those who use them to carve out a niche. By starting to experiment with generative AI like ChatGPT today, you can uncover unique hyper-efficient processes for your business and leap ahead of your competitors.

FAQs

How do you make AI generate a story? To get a generative AI to create a story, you need to give it the right instructions. AI is a tool, and it needs a human to help it know what it needs to do. So, start by defining all the same variables as a human writer needs: audience, setting, tone, language, word count, essential ingredients, story type, and anything else that your story needs like key characters.

‍What is the best tool for AI storytelling? There are several generative AI tools available for storytelling, including ones that can write entire novels for you. A short list includes ChatGPT, NovelAI, Sassbook AI, DeepStory, InferKit, Tome, and Rytr.

What are the business values of AI? There are 3 areas of business value from generative AI: engaging with insights/data via conversation, extending knowledge with intelligent suggestions, and complex automations that apply inductive logic to make decisions that aren’t predefined.

How are businesses using generative AI? Businesses are using generative AI in many different ways, from producing large amounts of medium-quality content, to generating stories and characters that reflect their brand. Some fashion companies are already using generative AI to create virtual models that are more representative.

How can AI help brands? AI can help brands in many ways, especially for creating a connection with their customers. With AI, they can understand their customers better, optimize customer service, and identify new opportunities for sales and marketing.