I’ve been watching for a while now the evolution of job ads around the use of generative AI for creative production. It’s almost always for the purposes of marketing, which comes as no surprise, of course. Though you do very occasionally run across “content factory” manager jobs, or positions directly tied to social media management.

This one below is by a company called Polywood that seems to make outdoor furniture out of recycled plastic, looking for an “AI Imaging Artist,” and it squarely falls into the marketing category above. Though, I think it’s also noteworthy because it seems to be one of the few that tries to bridge that gap between marketing and product/conception – which I think is exactly the right direction for integrating this kind of work. I’ll see if I can’t pluck a few choice snippets from the LinkedIn ad. It kicks off with this:

Create images people won’t believe aren’t real.

Create what doesn’t exist. Inspire what comes next.

Personally, I like real wood (and spent the better part of this summer making picnic tables). But the job ad still keeps me reading, which is honestly kind of rare these days:

Working alongside our Creative team, you’ll create realistic outdoor environments, visualize products before they’re manufactured, develop localized lifestyle scenes, and bring creative concepts to life for product launches, advertising, email campaigns, social media, e-commerce, and more.

Every image you create will need to do more than look beautiful. It must accurately represent our products, reflect our brand, and help customers imagine life with POLYWOOD furniture.

I’m not sure just how advanced they mean with regards to “visualize products before they’re manufactured,” but this is personally something I think is highly worth leaning into. Find some way to rapidly create and float out publicly theoretical/conceptual designs created using some kind of gen AI pipeline, and when they’re able to generate ___ level of market proof and public interest, you create new products based around that.

Reminds me of another company, Arcade AI, that lets users design jewelry and other types of product categories with an AI assistant, and at time of purchase, the physical manufacture of the (presumably one-off?) design you created with the tool gets routed to a vetted human artisan or production shop. I think this is kind of a cool direction?