AI Playground (Alpha)

🪄 Alpha functionality: This functionality is still being developed and is expected to change over time. Right now we only enable it for a limited number of customers. If you're interested, reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more details and eligibility requirements.

---

Welcome to AI Playground!

AI Playground is our home on Smartly.io for what we call “AI Assists” — AI-based creative tools to help you with your creative production. It's currently in alpha, so select customers are being added by the Creative AI Product Lab team. If you're not currently in the alpha, contact your CSM.

While we work on integrating AI Assists into other parts of Smartly.io (e.g. generation on feeds/catalogs, template editor, producer…), you can use AI Playground to play with AI assists on single assets and get comfortable with it.

To find AI Playground, go to navigation and look for the star.

AI Assists & How-Tos

Currently, we have a few AI Assists available. Here’s how to use each:

• Scene Generation (+ background removal): remove and regenerate the background of an image. To use this:
  • Upload an image. We recommend using an image with a clear foreground object, usually a product or person.
  • Wait up to a minute for us to process the image and remove the background
  • Review your image with the background removed. If the background removal doesn’t work well, try a different image. We’re working on allowing background removal redos. If it does work well, move to the next step.
  • Write your prompt. We recommend first describing the foreground object, then describing the background in some detail. Example prompts:
    • Shoe on a rock in nature
    • Soap bottle with a blue studio background
    • Model standing in a garden, high quality photography
  • Press generate and wait for the outputs to load. Download the ones you like, or change the prompt (or image!) and try again.

• Text Generation: generate or iterate on copy. Under the surface, we send your top-performing Meta copy so it learns your brand voice. To use this:
  • If you want to iterate on text, paste it in. If you want to generate from scratch, leave the input blank.
  • Write your prompt. Example prompts:
    • Translate to French
    • Generate reasons to buy our T-shirts with a winter holiday theme. Keep the language professional and direct, and keep word count under 10.
    • Add emojis
    • Make variations
    • Shorten to 10 words or less, focusing on the value proposition of quality
  • Press “generate”, wait up to a minute to see your results, and copy + paste your favorites.

• Auto-Crop: Crop assets to desired aspect ratios, while keeping key objects on focus. To use this:
  • Upload an image. This is most useful on lifestyle images with lots going on!
  • Input the aspect ratios that you want to crop to. Try inputting multiple! 16x9,9x16,1.5x1,1000x1000, etc. You can use "x" or ":" to describe ratios.
  • Input the key object(s) to focus on. This tells the AI where to look. You could also put "na" if you want to see where the AI thinks is the most "interesting" place to crop.

If you see a generation error, try again immediately. Sometimes the AI messes up on the first go -- we're working on a fix for this. If after another try it still does not work, try again a few minutes later. 

A few improvements are in the works:

• More control over background removal
• More control over scene generation (use your own styles/backgrounds)
• Text Generation Improvements: brand voice, governance
• Potentially more (e.g. video AI?! stay tuned!)

Alpha Information

The alpha begins October 2023 and will run through ~end of year. The purpose of the alpha is primarily to test and get comfortable with AI before you get access to Generation on Feeds.

We recommend the following stages during the alpha:

1. Play around with AI Assists
2. Optionally, run an A/B test to prove that AI generations can lift performance (e.g. generated background vs. original background vs. removed background)
3. Optionally, request a larger scale managed generation. We cannot guarantee to fulfill this request, but will keep you in mind. You can submit the request here and also let your CSM + product team know that you have. We’ll get back to you if we can handle it within Q4 2023. We plan to open up many more spots ~Q1 2024. Learn more here!
4. Let us know your feedback! What would you like AI to do for you, and what would you like the experience to be? How can the platform be better? Feel free to share feedback to your CSM, or even via support. We’d love to improve with you!

Please note that you have credit for a few hundred generations. We don’t expect anyone to hit this when generating on single assets, but if you do, you’ll see a message on the AI Playground page, and you can request more credits with your CSM.

Happy generating!