“Flora” For Creative Professionals

With just a few words, AI models can be prompted to create a story, an image, or even a short film. But according to Weber Wong, these models are all “made by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.” In other words, they’re not built for actual creative professionals. That’s something Wong is hoping to change with Flora, a new startup where he’s founder and CEO. Flora launched, complete with a manifesto declaring that “AI creative tools should be more than toys for generating AI slop” and describing Wong and his team as “obsessed with building a power tool that will profoundly shape the future of creative work.” The manifesto positions Flora as something different from existing AI tools, which “make it easy to create, but lack creative control,” and from existing creative software, which gives users “control, but are unintuitive & time-consuming.”