What You Need To Know About DAM and AI

To say artificial intelligence (AI) is a popular topic these days is quite the understatement. Just about every newsletter, industry, and organization is talking about what’s happening in the world of AI — and for good reason. AI is advancing at a rapid pace and holds a ton of potential for those who know how to harness its power in productive and thoughtful ways.

In this post, we explore the role of AI in digital asset management (DAM). We’ll also take a look at how our DAM solution, Acquia DAM, uses AI to automate and streamline critical areas within the digital content lifecycle. That said, how you leverage AI in the creation and management of content matters too. You’ll need a whole new toolkit of strategies and best practices to ensure you get the most out of AI for DAM — and we’re here to help. 

Tips for managing AI-generated content

As you know, content creation is no longer a strictly human endeavor. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E are gaining popularity and making it easier for organizations to outsource content creation to AI technologies. But there’s a catch: When content creation changes, so must the way we manage it.  

Keep legal sensitivities in mind

AI is opening up new complexities and ambiguities to navigate with copyright and intellectual property (IP) laws. Do you need to credit AI alongside human creators? Are you responsible when AI plagiarizes copyrighted content? How does AI impact image rights and licensing? We answer questions like these in a guest CMSWire article, but our point is that the legalities around AI-generated content are complicated. When using AI, make sure you know the laws, proceed with caution, and involve a legal professional in content approval and guideline creation — which leads us to our next point.  

Update your brand guidelines

Brand guidelines support brand consistency and define a framework for how people can and cannot use your visual, verbal, and written assets. With the widespread use of AI and its evolving legal parameters, organizations must reexamine their brand guidelines and clearly define if, when, how, by whom, and in what capacity AI-generated content is approved and appropriate for use.

Create new metadata fields

When leveraging AI-generated content in a DAM system, you need to create new metadata fields to ensure you can uphold your brand guidelines, mitigate legal risks, analyze performance, properly credit AI and content creators, troubleshoot issues, and more. 

Examples of AI-inspired metadata fields: 

• Generated by: There are dozens of generative AI tools. Did DALL-E, ChatGPT, Gemini, Midjourney, or another AI tool produce the asset? 
• Prompt: What text prompt was used to generate an asset? This will help others recreate similar content following the prompts that work well and fit a desired brand style. 
• Series number: If you enter the same prompt more than once, AI tools will produce a unique asset each time. Therefore, you need an identifier to differentiate assets that came from the exact same prompt. 
• Fact-checked (Y/N): AI isn’t always accurate. It can plagiarize, invent information, and pose other legal risks. Implementing the right checks and balances will protect your organization.
• Contributors: Who wrote the prompt? Who created text, designs, photos, or other content that AI used to create an asset? You may need to give these people credit or use this information during an audit.

Analyze and track

Just like with any content, you need to know if your AI-generated assets are delivering results and engaging customers in positive ways. And if you’re using AI to increase the volume and velocity of content produced, then it’s even more important to be able to quickly analyze performance at scale, as well as have automated systems in place to help manage what content remains in use or is pulled from circulation.

Using AI in DAM technology

In addition to knowing how to manage AI-generated content in your DAM system, you should know how AI can help manage your assets throughout the content lifecycle. At Acquia, we’re at the forefront of these developments, offering a range of AI capabilities to help you with everything from metadata management to asset discovery, content production, and more.

Organizing and finding assets

Metadata is the information that tells you what a file is and how it should be used. It is the foundation of a DAM platform. Without it, you would not be able to organize, find, use, or effectively manage assets within a DAM system.

If you survey a group of DAM system admins, you’re bound to hear a few comments about the time and effort it takes to manage metadata. A lot of metadata is sourced from other systems or is embedded in the file itself, but there’s also a fair amount of metadata (much of it descriptive) that people need to come up with on their own. Thanks to AI capabilities focused on descriptive metadata, Acquia DAM can take on some of this metadata creation and tagging for you.

Using image recognition AI, Acquia DAM can “see” an asset and automatically tag it with keywords and a description at upload. This AI capability works for any image (including layered Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator files), as well as PDFs. It creates metadata by reviewing an asset and identifying objects, subject matter, and attributes in it, including colors, demographics, emotions, categorizations (e.g., indoors versus outdoors), industries (e.g., travel or apparel), and more.

In addition to pre-built Clarifai image recognition models that Acquia DAM leverages, you can train custom AI models to use your product names, brand terminology, and other business-specific words your teams use to find content.

Just remember that while AI for metadata is incredibly helpful — and allows you to work 100 times faster than manual processing — it’s still a good idea to add your own metadata enhancements and check that AI-generated metadata is accurate and true to your brand. As humanlike as AI seems, it still needs you (the actual human) to oversee, administer, check, and build upon the work it does.

Multilingual support

Meet the unique geographical and language needs of your business — without extra work. Acquia DAM’s AI-powered metadata automation is available in 53 different languages. Now your teams can find and understand how to use content in their preferred language.

Discover other images

Think about the last time you shopped online. Based on what you looked at on a brand’s website, you were likely presented with other product recommendations to consider. Acquia DAM provides a similar experience, but without the buyer's remorse. 

Let’s say you search and find an image in Acquia DAM. It’s a pretty good option, but it’s not quite what you’re looking for. Using the same image recognition AI we talked about earlier, Acquia DAM will present you with alternative image options that are similar to images you viewed. This takes pressure off your metadata, enabling discovery of images without every possible term being applied as metadata. In other words, you don’t need perfect metadata to find images — they find you!

Improve SEO and web accessibility

While search engine optimization (SEO) is often thought of in terms of text-based content like blogs and web pages, images also play an important role in boosting your search engine ranking and website visibility. When you leverage AI in Acquia DAM to generate an alt text description, you’re improving your accessibility to people using screen readers and SEO by providing search engines with more complete and robust information. 

Support creative workflows

Much of the AI we provide in our DAM solution is made possible through Clarifai, but we also leverage ChatGPT by OpenAI to provide AI assistance within our creative collaboration tool, Workflow. What this means is that anyone reviewing a proof within Workflow can ask our AI assistant a question. In seconds, they’ll get an answer that’s delivered in a conversational tone and informed by a wide range of internet data. As you can imagine, there are many applications for this.

Just think about everything that’s discussed when a team is reviewing a creative deliverable – there’s a lot. Collaboration with actual teammates remains important, but it wouldn't hurt to ask an AI assistant for a little help on copy suggestions and revisions, grammar checks, design ideas, visual thought-starters, and more. It’s like having a friendly sidekick with nothing but time to assist! 

Ready to get the most out of AI for DAM?

AI has the potential to forever change the way you create and manage your content. Knowing how to harness its power to automate time-consuming tasks, streamline your workflows, and improve the effectiveness of your content efforts is a determining factor in the success of your DAM practices. Make no mistake — AI has arrived. Are you getting the most out of it?  

To learn more about AI for DAM or to see Acquia DAM’s AI capabilities in action, schedule a live demo today. 

Note: This article was originally published in 2023 and has been updated to remain current.