Radical Hot-Take on AI

 

Veo makes a moment in my handmade journal come to life. I make the art and the photograph with my sensibilities, and AI takes me higher in under a minute.

Did not see this coming. Or I did. I've seen this pattern before, anyway.

I'm of sufficient age to have lived through the Digital Revolution in the early 1990s. I was an old-school graphic designer in New York when the consumer Macintosh hit the field hard. I went from pasting up waxed galleys of linotype output onto cyan-blue layout grids to Photoshop v.2 image editing and Quark page layouts overnight.

Back then, the designers and graphic artists were shitting their pants over the new Digital Tools and what they would mean to their business. Oh, how the dinosaurs roared over how inferior the digital results were to their hand-inked logos or what-have-you. I once had a nasty phone call with one of these hand-inkers who was asking me to pay him double to revise one of his babies per the client's requests. He said he'd need to be paid double because he'd have to start over from scratch to change the logo's color and size.

I let him know that his world was over, that the new digital tools, like Adobe Illustrator at the time, were making infinite client revisions in mere moments. His methods were an instant anachronism, gone the way of the buggy whip.

I bought my first Mac system around then, after one of my publishing colleagues said it would pay for itself in two months. He was right. That was over thirty years ago, and I see the same pattern happening now with AI.

There is much hand-wringing and vitriol towards AI and its ramifications for humanity and culture. It's wrong, they shout, it's evil, as they hand-paint their "NO AI" t-shirts with blood-red paint.

Not at all.

AI is powerful, more powerful than any other tool ever given to humanity in history thus far. Many atrocities will be committed with it by people with misguided intentions. Its ability to convincingly create realities is as terrifying as the atom bomb, no doubt.

But AI is in no way negative in and of itself. It is nothing more than a set of revolutionary expansions of digital tools. Artists are getting their mitts on to it, as slowly happened in design and photography 30 years ago, and they are creating (yes, creating) art more phenomenal than any human ever has. It is Super Human, with vast new frontiers opening into what can and will be done with it.

AI is not "Artificial Intelligence"; it is "Augmented Intelligence." It assists the genuine artist in making their art with as much nuance, meaning, and beauty as a mortal human ever has. This is a brand new day for humanity, honestly. A new day of Greater Powers.