Long live creative careers. An AI preamble
The technology will kill us. But as long as we don't have a one-world government, there's no point in trying to stop it. Today's proposed solutions are uncreative prohibition; supposed attempts at harm reduction that increase harm, the panic to shut it down is a short-sighted mistake, especially in a world where China exists.
Everyone wants to know the future, but there's never been a time in history when you're more likely to be wrong about what's coming. My view is that what we currently call AI will lead to catastrophe, and not necessarily the rogue robot kind. But none of us know how or when.
As a result I've started to see the "end-times" conversation as less interesting, even unproductive. I want our children's children to have a chance at a livable world, but trying to put AI back in the bag is a delusion. When it comes to the increasingly passionate data center debate, my only response is that it's mostly propaganda. Hopefully these trillon-dollar companies will build their own power plants, and hopefully they'll be nuclear. (I'm more likely to get up in arms about wind and solar farms.)
Go live on the homestead, make everything by hand. Grow food, sell artisanal wares. You can do that, but it's for your comfort. Are you Amish? A peasant in a poor country? No? Well then, it's a hobby. Hobbies are great, but they don't do a thing to change the trajectory of a world fueled by AI.
A few years ago I'd have said we have to refuse and sabotage it, ignore anyone droning on about inevitability. Then I actually dove in and started using the tools, and that view changed. Today I see no difference in harmful potential, or likely outcome. What I see differently now is how we can steer; not how to avoid a crash, but lessen the impact.
I don't think you can theorize about AI futures from the ivory tower of academia or bubbles of frontier lab leadership. I think you have to be at ground zero with this transformative and obliterating technology, burning tokens, offloading your legacy brain to the robot, getting consumed by the companies that resemble next-level casinos. Otherwise you can't truly know what this thing is, and what can and will be done with it, because you can't feel it happening. And despite the "slop" discourse on social media, an awful lot can be done with it.
Modern animation is run by rigs, particle systems, simulations, assets following procedural rules, and this process pre-dates AI by decades. Armies of men or alien ships, oceans rising and falling, entire atmospheres and worlds beneath them residing in code. Rest assured, no one drew that by hand. Is it less human now than it was when people sat in the dark for hours watching it render?
I care about what happens to this world. Being a parent, how can you not? But the time for the conversation about how to stop it was many years ago. Instead I've chosen to engage, and I think you should too.
Current works, in the age of intelligence
Takeaways, not case studies
A quote-making app
I'll never work in this town again
Senior Creative Leadership: parts of the job I've been known for
Portfolio
Traditionally the work is strategy, art, copy, and production. I'm comfortable leading, but also like being a role player, building, and tinkering. Directed big teams and projects, worked with Fortune 50s as well as Mom-and-Pops. Some of the results that survived have won awards. I've never been to Cannes, (but have been to Venice.) Taught interaction and experience design courses early in my career, which was formative.
I can craft a campaign or digital product direction, and keep the work from getting diluted as teams expand and stakeholders increase. The goal is always happy customers, but that never happens without fighting to maintain some part of what everyone loved from the start.
UX, IxD, UI, CX, HCD, FML: The industry has sub-classifications for the various X-disciplines, but I tend to see it as all one thing: The most pleasing and generous form of an idea that can survive real-world use. We live in interesting times, as designers strain to avoid being perceived as users of AI tools and design conventions—sometimes to a fault!
I work comfortably in the space between idea and execution. Apps,campaign platforms, prototypes, new tools, and odd hybrids. I love where the world is going with the new tools and how quickly ideas can be sketched, and I even love the idea of outsiders going for it and getting it wrong.