Frédéric Raillard on [Ai]magination: “We want to keep humans at the core”

The co-founder and CEO of FRED & FARID lifts the lid on the agency’s new AI production studio, designed to “enhance the qualities of creatives”.

Quite a few years back, I asked Frédéric Raillard and Farid Mokart – the co-founders of FRED & FARID – to be the cover stars of a magazine I worked for at the time. I wanted something spectacular. “Leave it to us,” they said. 

The image they created was a moody picture of them standing beside a guillotine in swirling mist. I used the headline “Sharp New Talents”. The guillotine was real. I can only imagine the amount of production effort that went into that photo. Today, thanks to AI, they could probably conjure it up with a couple of prompts.

I mentioned this to Frédéric himself, as he now runs Fred & Farid’s new AI production studio, [Ai]magination. He’s 100% passionate about the project, but admits that AI depressed him at first.

“When I started experimenting with ChatGTP, I asked it to imagine a dialogue between an old Porsche 911 and a new Tesla. And it came up with a really good dialogue! So I thought, ‘OK, what’s the point of us continuing?’”

As he was living in LA at the time, he shared his experience with a friend, the film director Tony Kaye. “I sent him a GTP dialogue between him and the studio about his film American History X. He said, ‘This is so accurate, where did you get this?’ So then I was really depressed. It was like, game over for creatives, the world won’t need us anymore

From an exhibition to a studio

The turnaround came when he went to an exhibition of AI art curated by his colleague Feng Huang, who is President and co-founded Fred & Farid Shanghai. “You know how some Chinese people are with technology? They embrace it. So while I was complaining and crying, Feng had already organised an exhibition with a hundred AI artists!”

Frédéric says he was “blown away” by the quality of the work. The exhibition was called [Ai]magination. Frédéric decided to copyright the name and turn the one-off exhibition into a studio inside the agency.

“The AI-generated pictures were really interesting, but as soon as the artist tried to add a logo, there was a complete misunderstanding of the brand platform and a brand’s needs…So we had on the one hand a group of amazing AI artists with a limited experience of branding, and on the other a bunch of creatives who were cautious about using AI.”

Why not bring them together? To kick off the adventure, Frédéric sought internal recruits from the agency’s four offices: Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai. At first Paris and New York were hesitant, while the tech-friendly China and California were all in. “At the beginning we had 16 people working in Shanghai and LA. A lot of agencies were talking about AI – but not many of them were doing it. We decided to take the opposite approach: do a lot, experiment a lot, but shut up about it.”

Falling barriers

Until now. Currently [Ai]magination has around 35 people across all FRED & FARID offices and has already worked with a number of clients, including LVMH, L’Oréal, Valentino, Ferrero, Heineken and Fox Studios, to name a few. It also offers its skills to other networks, notably McCann Worldgroup.

“It turned out to be harder to turn an AI artist into an advertising guy than the other way around,” reveals Frédéric. “Understanding advertising and branding is a complex process. It takes ten years.” On the other hand, excellent prompters surfaced internally pretty quickly. “I thought art directors would be the first to jump in. But you know what? Copywriters jumped in too. Because prompts are words! Some of our best prompters are copywriters.” 

After the initial paranoia, is the advertising world beginning to accept AI? “There’s still a lot of fear. You have some scary punchlines coming out of Silicon Valley, like Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) saying that AI will take 95% of  marketing jobs. And of course there’s a lot of resistance in the production world.”

But the genie is out of the bottle. “Once you see your competitor using AI, that’s when you start to become more flexible.”

Frédéric says that as [Ai]magination was a pioneer, it’s had time to monitor attitudes. “Marketing departments are super excited about AI, because they have so many new avenues to explore. Purchasing departments love it because it’s faster, cheaper and more sustainable – even though it burns a lot of energy, it still has a lower footprint than overseas travel. Only the legal department is cautious.”

That’s because of the intellectual property issues posed by AI. Frédéric feels the legal resistance will soon diminish. “A single AI image has so many sources; there’s no real maternity or paternity of images anymore. And when there’s eight million prompters on the planet, there won’t be enough lawyers to handle them all.”

To use AI…or not

Still, he advises brands to think hard about when it’s appropriate to use AI. Does it clash with their values? “Take Nike, for example. It’s all about human beings transcending themselves through sport. So Nike would never have a bunch of AI athletes on the screen. On the other hand, if they want to make an ad with a soccer team playing aliens on Mars…fine!”

He also questions the ethical implications of a skincare brand using an AI-generated face to promote the benefits of anti-aging cream. Brands and agencies are navigating a hazardous new landscape.

The team at [Ai]magination spent a full year producing images and films in order to hone their expertise. “I was the slacker of the gang, and I even generated more than 10,000 images.” The result was hundreds of thousands of images curated into a showreel of 4,000 assets, uploaded on the [Ai]magination website (aimagination.com). “Then we were ready to talk to the world about what we were doing.”

The studio has a human-centric philosophy. “We want to use AI to enhance the qualities of creative people. We don’t want to replace them. Some companies want to automatise everything. We want to keep humans at the core. Emotion, beauty, intuition, sensibility, consciousness, imperfection…all these remain central.”

There have been a few suggestions that AI is a fad or a bubble, a bit like the “metaverse” a couple of years ago. Frédéric would disagree. “The more I use AI, the more it gives me vertigo. This isn’t a disruption. It isn’t even a revolution. This is a change of civilization.”