DDL Looming, Is AI Office Work the Antidote for Creators?

Recently, AI Office has become a hot topic. Making reports, creating PPTs, organizing data, generating weekly summaries... the tedious daily tasks of corporate drones finally seem to have a solution.

However, at first glance, these office functions seem to have nothing to do with animation creation?

AI office software cannot come up with ideas for creators, cannot design storyboards, cannot painlessly improve color sense, and certainly cannot remotely control a digital pen to automatically draw what the user has in mind.

But besides their core creative work, professional creators often have to handle various administrative tasks as well.

Collecting materials before creation, coordinating schedules with clients, archiving materials for long-term projects, delivery processes after creation, format adjustments, post-mortem summaries...

It is precisely these often-overlooked non-creative tasks that most easily distract creators and drag down efficiency.

Every creator hopes for a personal assistant to help them handle the administrative work outside of creation.

This expectation can be realized with the newly launched Doubao Work.

Compared to everyday conversation, Doubao Work can not only answer questions, but also understand work goals, autonomously break down tasks, and call upon local computer, documents, spreadsheets, web pages and other tools to continuously execute and complete tasks, upgrading from "answering questions" to "professional office work."

After an in-depth trial, Donghua Xueshu Pa believes that this AI, which does not create, can indeed become a close steward for creators, providing the assistance creators most need.

01 Creation Preparation: Encyclopedia + Universal Tool​

The assistance provided by Doubao Work can be divided into two categories: Creation Preparation and Creation Publication.

In their work, professional creators often need to face fields they previously knew nothing about.

Although ideally, in-depth study before creation would be best, projects usually do not allow such ample time. Creators need to establish a 0-to-1 understanding of a completely new domain in a short time.

"Gather information → Filter information → Process information → Extract information" — these routine steps of preparing for a new work, while tedious for humans, are exactly what Doubao Work excels at.

It can not only extract key information from various websites and books, but also list information sources for easy manual verification, avoiding the dangerous AI hallucinations when searching for references.

During the search, you can call upon the Side Workbench, operating the browser while chatting with Doubao to avoid frequent switching that breaks your train of thought; you can also monitor Doubao's operation path in real time, adding questions and adjusting direction at any time.

Once the material is ready, give a new instruction to Doubao, and the collected material can be directly converted into a specified format, downloadable file within the workbench, saving the trouble of copy-pasting and secondary saving. The generated file is not just "for show" but a universal document that can be edited and modified block by block.

Some multimedia materials — such as audio and video, which take too long to watch by oneself, can be handed over to Doubao Work to summarize key points. After a quick overview, you can ask follow-up questions about interesting segments and establish connections with other documents in the work project.

When facing some highly difficult professional literature — such as scanned ancient books or foreign-language documents, Doubao can perform accurate OCR and also provide collation references from different versions, making it easier to find materials for creation.

Of course, knowledge is constantly updated, and creators need continuous input. But faced with massive amounts of information, manually searching and organizing every day not only wastes time but also makes it difficult to see everything at once and pick out the key points.

At this point you can set up scheduled tasks to regularly and directionally gather information and generate news reports in a fixed format.

For example, creating an animation related to the perfume industry, with a protagonist who is an industry professional while the creator is a total outsider. To highlight the protagonist's professionalism, you not only need to use the above functions to understand the basics of the perfume industry, but also need to continuously supplement the latest industry developments.

First, find the scheduled task in Doubao's sidebar, then set the task topic, specific requirements, push time, etc. in detail. After that, just open your computer and wait for the daily automatic push of news.

Another common scenario: I have already prepared plenty of materials, but I don't have time to read them.

Massive piles of e-books and reference images gather dust in the hard drive; various tutorials are "bookmarked as learned." When you actually need them, you don't know where to start.

Doubao Work can read local documents, enabling speed reading, comparison, extraction, and summarization, truly putting long-idle materials to use.

For project-specific materials, users can organize them into a folder locally, then upload to Doubao Work to generate a corresponding project folder; or directly create a new project in the Doubao Work interface, gathering all materials and conversations under that theme for easy future follow-up and reference.

As creative resumes and project experience accumulate, many insights, knowledge, and experiences become a creator's valuable asset. Condensing these accumulations into a skill that matches one's work habits can make personal experience visible, tangible, and traceable.

It not only makes replicable daily workflow tasks easier but also helps users self-examine, self-insight, summarize their creative style and strengths from past experience, and design improvement methods for future goals and current shortcomings.

Yecao (Liu Shuliang), the founder of Donghua Xueshu Pa, recently came up with a brainwave and tried "creating a personalized skill unique to oneself."

The point is not just to let AI understand the knowledge in texts, but more importantly, to let it learn one's own way of thinking, academic stance, and even speaking habits. The goal of creating this skill is to discuss academic issues in the ACG field with AI, even to argue with oneself, thereby inspiring more ideas.

He fed his own books, papers, and column articles to Doubao to read, and repeatedly debugged during use, finally obtaining a phased skill product. This skill can not only help him organize his academic thoughts, but also provide a preliminary academic guide for animation students.

02 Creation Publication: Leave the Post-Drawing Matters to It​

After struggling to complete a work, the publication stage finally arrives.

But the data may be disappointing, making one fall into self-doubt and data anxiety.

Many creators don't know how to, and are ashamed of, promoting themselves to the outside world, firmly believing that "good wine needs no bush" — that as long as they bury themselves in creation, they will be discovered one day.

But in the era of information explosion, getting good works in front of an audience is not easy. Therefore, promoting and showcasing oneself generously, and learning some communication skills, is both a practical consideration and a responsibility to one's own work.

Through Doubao Work's Connector feature, creators can more smoothly interface with the outside world. Whether it's task division with collaborators or communication with clients, Doubao can directly search for information and process tasks within commonly used tools; and through Work Partners and Work Squads, users can select one or multiple Agents of different professional directions based on actual needs to collaboratively analyze problems, break down steps, and complete deliveries.

Settling a complete set of working SOPs and handing them to Doubao Work to complete automatically can save creators a lot of mental effort.

And the combination of Skill and Virtual Desktop offers more practical possibilities.

Under "Work Task" mode, Doubao can operate Windows computers through the new "Doubao Virtual Desktop," and of course can also execute various skills to complete complex tasks. Sometimes a deadline is imminent, and you wish one device could do the work of two. Doubao Virtual Desktop can automatically process files that require complex processing according to user instructions, saving users' time.

For example, a foreign-language video urgently needs subtitles. If you follow the traditional method of extracting, proofreading, creating subtitles, and then adding them to the video for export, it may be too late.

At this point, you can select "Operate Computer" from the skill panel, upload the video, and instruct Doubao to operate CapCut to automatically recognize and translate subtitles, finally obtaining a finished video with subtitles.

Doubao Virtual Desktop can operate applications, browse the web, and complete cross-software tasks in an environment that does not interfere with the user; it will not take over the mouse, keyboard, or interrupt current work. Through the virtual desktop, users can view Doubao's operation process in real time, and pause or take over tasks at any time when needed, just as if there's an extra self operating another device.

In addition, Doubao Work can also implement some seemingly trivial but very practical small functions, such as adding watermarks to works with one click, converting document, image, audio/video formats, changing output resolution... it can be called a comprehensive collection of technical mini-tools. Combining various skills can evolve more practical functions, allowing creators to achieve twice the results with half the effort.

Creation is a career that requires long-term dedication. On this long path of cultivation, every minute of time and mental effort is precious.

Today's era is developing rapidly, with technology and industries changing quickly. But the core competitive edge of creators — creativity — will not fade with the changing times.

There is no shortcut to accumulating creative ability. The times require creators to update their skills faster and adapt to new ways of creation, which undoubtedly adds anxiety, but there is a solution —

Convenient new tools can help creators reallocate time and energy, take on more repetitive and tedious tasks, allowing creators to devote their limited mental energy to the parts that truly need creativity; they can also help creators review the past, summarize experience, and examine themselves, precipitating core competitiveness that is not shaken by the times, achieving personal long-term development.

Doubao Work will not overstep its role; it is like the "auto-battle" mode in games, executing specific instructions given by the user, freeing up the creator's hands, and returning the core creative part of deploying strategies to humans.

The times are changing, technology is advancing, and creative modes are evolving, but humanity's pursuit of better art and more convenient ways of production and living will never stop.