Generative AI will “supercharge” creators across industries and content types, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said this week at the Cannes Lions Festival on the French Riviera.

“For the very first time, the creative process can be amplified in content generation, and the content generation could be in any modality — it could be text, images, 3D, videos,” Huang said in a conversation with Mark Read, CEO of WPP — the world’s largest marketing and communications services company.

At the event attended by thousands of creators, marketers and brand execs from around the world, Huang outlined the impact of AI on the $700 billion digital advertising industry. He also touched on the ways AI can enhance creators’ abilities, as well as the importance of responsible AI development.

“You can do content generation at scale, but infinite content doesn’t imply infinite creativity,” he said. “Through our thoughts, we have to direct this AI to generate content that has to be aligned to your values and your brand tone.”

The discussion followed Huang’s recent keynote at COMPUTEX, where Nvidia and WPP announced a collaboration to develop a content engine powered by generative AI and the Nvidia Omniverse platform for building and operating metaverse applications.

Nvidia has been pushing the boundaries of graphics technology for 30 years and been at the forefront of the AI revolution for a decade. This combination of expertise in graphics and AI uniquely positions the company to enable the new era of generative AI applications.

Huang said that “the biggest moment of modern AI” can be traced back to an academic contest in 2012, when a team of University of Toronto researchers led by Alex Krizhevsky showed that Nvidia GPUs could train an AI model that recognized objects better than any computer vision algorithm that came before it.

Since then, developers have taught neural networks to recognize images, videos, speech, protein structures, physics and more.

“You could learn the language of almost anything,” Huang said. “Once you learn the language, you can apply the language — and the application of language is generation.”

Generative AI models can create text, pixels, 3D objects and realistic motion, giving professionals superpowers to more quickly bring their ideas to life. Like a creative director working with a team of artists, users can direct AI models with prompts, and fine-tune the output to align with their vision.

“You have to give the machine feedback like the best creative director,” Read said.

These tools aren’t a replacement for human creativity, Huang emphasized. They augment the skills of artists and marketing professionals to help them feed demand from clients by producing content more quickly and in multiple forms tailored to different audiences.

“We will democratize content generation,” Huang said.