The main trend is that it’s time to finally stop being ashamed of AI. Freelancers should not be ashamed of using it, and clients should make it a mandatory condition for completing their orders. This is an incredibly timely thought! And it can be implemented in different ways to solve various tasks. Here are a couple of interesting platforms whose ideas can be copied for this purpose.
The essence of the project
Hive3 offers creative individuals the opportunity to unleash their potential—by creating artistic objects for brand commissions using AI and competing against each other for cash prizes.
Creators can produce photographs of products and lifestyle situations, photo and video advertisements, reels, and other types of social media ads, logos, and packaging designs.
The startup promises to announce new competitions every week. Cash prizes will be awarded to participants who finish in the top three positions in each competition. However, any participant can attract the attention of the brand that announced the competition with their work—and receive an order from them outside the competition framework.
Recently, the startup announced the opening of the first season of competitions, which will include 30 contests on various topics from different brands.
The total prize pool for the season will amount to $250,000. The prize fund for one competition will be around $5,000 to $7,000. At the end of the season, a playoff will be held between the winners of individual competitions, which will determine the absolute champion of the season. The prize fund for the final will be around $100,000, which will also be distributed among the top three winners.
Currently, the platform is hosting a contest to create an advertising campaign for a cookie brand with a prize pool of $5,000. This competition will take place from November 3 to November 7.
The startup says that each season will consist of 25–50 competitions and last 6–12 months. Winners in each competition and in the final will be determined in some way by the results of audience voting and the opinion of a professional jury.
Hive3 is the first product released by the startup Forum3, which set out to “reimagine the brand-building process, allowing the community of its users and fans to become co-owners and co-participants in this process.”
Forum3 received its first investment of $10 million last December, and in July it began beta testing of the Hive3 platform and held its first competitions in closed mode. Recently, the platform was opened for public access, and the contest to create an advertising campaign for cookies became the first public competition.
What’s interesting
Somehow, it has become accepted that true creativity is when people create something from scratch with their hands, suffering and struggling in the process. It’s like in the army — it doesn’t matter what the soldier does, the main thing is that he’s got to toil 😉 This is often seen in startups too, where every programmer-founder prefers to write their platform from scratch — because that’s the only way to create a “real” product.
This also leads to a somewhat disdainful attitude towards creative objects created entirely or partly with AI — as if it’s “cheating” and not “real” creativity.
However, this attitude will inevitably change as AI becomes more firmly and deeply integrated into our lives. After all, we don’t insist that an engineer must calculate manually or draw by hand if there are calculators and engineering software available. Therefore, the best engineers eventually became not those who could calculate or draw better than others but those who came up with the best engineering solutions.
The same will happen in more creative professions. The best visual creators, for example, will not be those who are better at the technique of drawing, photography, or video shooting — but those who can come up with the best story. In doing so, they can delegate the technical work for its implementation to AI — and no one should judge them for this 😉
This could lead to a massive paradigm shift! Currently, one cannot become a great artist in the classical sense without the ability to draw. That means great artists are a subset of those who can draw. But are these two skills really connected?!
With the help of AI, a great artist could be someone who can’t draw, a great musician someone who doesn’t know how to read music, or, horror of horrors, even lacks a musical ear. Some might see this as sacrilege. But it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for people to express themselves!
And for clients, this offers a completely different speed of fulfilling creative orders. Because creating a creative object from scratch requires a certain amount of time and effort, and with AI — much less.
Hive3 claims that brand partners of the competitions will be able to get results even within 36 hours. This is probably the minimum duration of a competition, but in any case, the declared maximum duration of a competition will not exceed one week. However, obtaining a fully-fledged, well-thought-out and technically high-quality result in just a few days without the help of AI is simply impossible.
By the way, clients will receive not only higher speed but also a much greater number of options to choose from. After all, if creating something without guaranteed payment requires a lot of time and effort, the creator will think twice before deciding to participate in such a competition. But if all it takes is to come up with a good idea and then outsource the execution to an AI machine, it’s much simpler, and why not participate.
Currently, everyone fears that AI will destroy creativity. But no! AI will merely separate the geniuses from the craftsmen. Because craftsmen currently get by only on their technical skills. And AI will give geniuses indispensable tools that they can use to create their brilliant works faster and with better technical quality.
The main trend is that it’s time to stop being ashamed of AI 😉 Some need to stop being embarrassed to use it. Others need to stop being embarrassed to commission it. If some are geniuses, and others need exactly them.
Where to run
It may seem that the words about “stop being ashamed of AI” are just general words that, moreover, cannot be applied to business tasks. But that’s not the case.
Take, for example, the startup Gushwork, which I wrote about in July. They created a marketplace of freelancers to whom companies can entrust parts of their business processes. Its feature is that they clearly state – “you delegate your tasks to live people, who perform them using AI tools.” This allows them to perform your tasks faster, with higher quality, and with fewer errors.
The startup even allocates funds for freelancers to learn and subscribe to AI tools, which it deducts from their earnings on its platform. Gushwork was only founded this year, but it has already raised its first investment of $2.1 million.
Another cool example is the startup 11x. They are creating a marketplace for digital employees for companies. Its feature is that the startup itself creates basic AI machines with certain competencies such as “salesperson,” “recruiter,” or “customer service representative,” and other people can create employees based on them that are tailored to solve specific tasks and participate in specific business processes. The startup was founded last year, and in the summer, it raised its first investment of $2 million.
Hive3, in essence, is also a marketplace but for fulfilling customers’ creative tasks. It fully integrates a gamification mechanism that ensures better results in shorter time frames due to the competitive effect.
The general direction of movement is the creation of platforms for outsourcing company tasks that can and should be performed using AI tools.
The main thing is that the role of AI should not be swept under the carpet, but rather emphasized. Thereby attracting new categories of people proud of their ability to use AI to such marketplaces and thus raising the bar for the speed and quality of the marketplace itself.
So, what topic shall we create such a marketplace in? What business model will we use—subscription, competitions, one-off jobs?
And the idea itself is so timely—it would be a sin not to engage in it 😉
About the company
Hive3
Website: hive3.ai
Last funding round: $10M, December 9, 2022
Total investments: $10M, rounds: 1