AIways the hard way?
In the era of AI we’re told the end is nigh for creative craft, but is it not the same as it always was?
MØRNING. For this week’s newsletter, we asked none other than @dankartdirectormemes if its time to surrender our creativity to AI. We needed a healthy dose of reality you see, in order to help gauge an appropriate response to this increasingly powerful set of tools. Are we being faced with mild inconvenience or total Armageddon? Luckily for us, there’s a thing or two we can learn from our past mistakes…
Let me disclaim, in advance, that these are musings on a subject that I have intentionally kept contained to my own experiences and awareness as an Art Director; for both sanity, brevity and for the sake of remaining humorous in the face of much doom-mongering around a subject that will have likely evolved again by the time this hits your screen. With that said, are we all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
For years, and I mean several years, I painstakingly realised my nebulous creative ideas with Photoshop. I pored over every layer, cobbled together scanned images from books and magazines, hurriedly saved images from some fanatic’s Blogspot or LiveJournal (RIP, you two) and then faffed with layers to try to match the damned lighting as best as I could, all in order to come as close to what a photographer could bring to life a few days later.
The copy had to explain the idea clearly to the client, but as you might have guessed, words aren’t every visual person’s strong suit. So I hacked through Thesaurus dot-com in order to make myself sound more cleverer (or “intelligent” for the highfalutin…). I’d emerge sounding like a pretentious tit, but that, in some cases, meant I was on the right path.
The purported ease with which the above tasks are now undertaken by Big Mean Artificial Intelligence™(a working title for OpenAI and its peers) is both staggering and so relentlessly headlined, that I feel we are prematurely scaring ourselves into a paralysis, instead of being truly, y’know, creative and working out a relationship with our new overlord that might lead us to a more work-life balanced state than ever before.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it gives you A.I, make it your bitch.
True creativity requires one to harness the tools of the age to your own benefit, and to the means of your own expression. You are not the horse or its cart, you are the rider. Not the car, but its driver. Survival in this new age of automation requires you to stay abreast of the technologies that come to darken your door. Know your enemy. Eat or be eaten, etc etc. Just don’t go all Sucker-berg and befriend the fucking thing, or worse, dating one. I mean, everyone should have their limits…
At the time of writing this, ChatGPT and its bigger art-schooled sibling Sora, are spoiling the average-Joe’s mind with levels of creativity normally reserved for ‘professionals’, and/or people with crippling art school debt. A 35mm-style photograph of Trump and Putin chugging a beer-bong, Voldemort daggering at Notting Hill carnival, some overtly horny re-rendering of Lara Croft holding a video-game controller in front of a retro TV. I can’t verify if any of these ideas were realised by someone who normally has to create for real clientele, like a luxury brand, a FMCG, MLG, SLG, BBDO or whatever other acronym springs to mind, but I suspect most of this tidal wave of digital effluence is made by idle hands and copycat minds outside of “our industry”.
You see, if you’ve spent years crafting and selling your creativity, this car-boot-sale level of output shouldn’t be a viable threat. The artificial intelligence machine gets out what is put in, and more often than not, it’s being fed sugar, crisps and caffeine. At this rate ChatGPT is going to have a coronary before it has sentience.
Hot takes along the pithy lines of “A.I. will just do the shoot for us” represent narrow and defeatist attitudes in the face of inconvenience. In many ways it simply cannot replace the physical process and huge effort required to actually put these systems in place: quality control, viable high-resolution for Out Of Home ads, meeting print specifications and troubleshooting, all mean that the human version of image making is still very much alive and desirable when it comes to the crunch. Knowledge, a good eye, and skill can still exist a little while longer in the automated world.
The driving down of budgets also isn’t AI’s direct fault, as brands (and studios, too) were doing this long before. Who knew that capitalism could be so greedy?
In a disconnected-from-real-life state of mind, we can pretend that an artist was definitely going to be paid for their hard work at the pitching stage, because sure, that sounds lovely and ethical of us.
What isn’t really said out loud, is how AD’s and their ilk, have been scraping illustrators and photographers websites and Instagrams loooong before this new wave of prompt-based moral panic. It’s an indelicate ecosystem to create new work for the creative industries. Manipulating existing images, changing colours, editing things in and out – all with the great aim of getting something over the line, which in turn unlocks the money to pay a real creative person to make something new, again.
“Won’t somebody please think of the children?”
I do, sincerely, offer my sympathies to the junior creative class, however. The less experienced are the ones who will miss out on learning a real craft, and at a normal pace. The trial and error that they should be afforded under the wing of an elder will in many cases, be long-gone.
I spent a lot of my early twenties working out how to be good at my job. Part of that process was being ridiculed and reprimanded by my boss: for my uninspired choice of logo placement (shock!) and the way I would crop a picture ‘shit’ (horror!). I would be offered a few minutes outside of his ego, where he would sit and show me how to do it ‘properly’ (or his way, which is basically the same thing) and it would progress my work from then on. To be without that guidance, left staring blankly at a prompt box trying to guess how to make a good image, simply breaks my not-yet-even-middle-aged heart.
In my community outreach (being paid by an arts university to speak) I have been required to stand up and explain my professional journey, and broadly speaking, the learning process outlined in the previous paragraph doesn’t sound romantic to the yoof of today, it is lonnnnng, it is hard and it doesn’t pay fuck all (it never did, and funnily enough it was less than now!) Graduate-age creatives have grown up with ‘everything’ at their fingertips, search results for every query, slick YouTube tutorials replace curmudgeonly old creatives, Instagram ‘archive’ accounts teach them a filtered history of their chosen discipline – but it offers little to no happenstance, less stumbles into weird blogs, books or movies without them being on somebody’s ‘Must See’ list.
So whilst the former paragraph might read like the rambling of an out of touch old person, it does beg the question of whether the romanticisation of our ‘craft’ is a dying thing anyway? Will these juniors embrace the new tech to leapfrog their elders, only to create an entirely homogenous visual language where references are ubiquitous, the outputs largely indistinguishable from one another? Haven’t we been suffering that for the last decade, anyway? Instagram fucked it for most of us, and our industry. It started as a tool and ended as a bit of a dumping ground, or graveyard, for assets. What comes next is, to some extent, in our gift – we can rally against it with Insta Stories full of hyperbole whilst it continues to bulldoze ahead, or we can open our arms to the Armageddon, and maybe carve out some mental peace while we’re at it.
Until next time readers!
Words and cover image by @dankartdirectormemes. Edited by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.
Great read. BIG MEAN ARTIFICIAL is 'surviving' off a steady diet of crisps and coke