Episode 80: AI Is Here

 AI’s growing presence isn’t the result of perfection or widespread readiness—it’s the outcome of rapid integration into nearly every aspect of modern life.

This shift raises a difficult question for creatives: when a tool can generate endless concepts on demand, does it provide meaningful leverage, or does it risk diluting what gives creative work its value? There’s a tension between efficiency and originality, where “time-saving” can quietly become “taste-erasing” as starting points, metaphors, and perspectives are increasingly sourced from systems built on patterns and averages. 

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Transcript

AI Is Here And Inevitable

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In an interview recently, I was asked my thoughts on AI. For me, the question has way too many moving parts. It brings up thoughts of environmental impact, humans plugged in matrix style, and the morally questionable tech bro billionaires we support by using their tools. But my out loud answer was AI is here. Let's do this. AI is here. Not because it's particularly good or because as a culture we're ready for it. But because it's being deployed and inserted into every corner of our lives, and we've become dependent on it. AI is here and inevitable. And for us creative types, our relationship with it could be described as complicated at best. AI is being sold as a time-saving device for creatives, because it can generate dozens of concepts, plot ideas, or metaphors, serving as a starting point for creative projects. But our metaphors and starting points are what make our voice unique, and outsourcing our opinion, taste, and ideas to a machine that relies on averages is a recipe not only for dullness, but for abject failure. We're using AI to skip the very thing that makes us and our work valuable. As a teacher, I saw this habit forming before AI even took hold. Students skipping steps, skipping the work and wanting to go straight to the computer as if there were an answer inside of the box. No interest in drawing skills or hand eye coordination, no observation skills, no patience for practice, wanting to go straight to results. They wanted answers. But design is not math. For any one design problem, there are a million possible answers. The job is to find your answer. This is how we form an opinion, our core, the place where we stand and will not be moved from. Then we can begin to create a body of work and ultimately a reputation. Without that work, we as people are made weak and shakeable, with no center. And as creators, our contribution to society is quite frankly made less. This was best put by a university design chair who attended one of my live workshops. A few weeks after our time together, he wrote to me and said, I wanted to study with you because I thought I wanted to be a better designer. But now I realize I had to become a better person first. AI doesn't just skip step one. It makes it possible to skip all the steps. In my own moments of weakness, I have gone looking for creative solutions from ChatGPT, only to receive answers my mom could come up with I should have just asked my mom. The struggle is not an obstacle to be avoided. The struggle is the work. Without it, you don't have creativity. You have selection, a menu of limited options to choose from. Creativity doesn't start with nothing. It starts with everything you have inside of you. It doesn't come from a computer or an art school degree, but how much fun and life and freedom you can allow yourself, what wrong turns you're willing to make, and how much failure you can invite. You develop taste by falling and adjusting. These all develop your skills and seasoning and spine and resilience. The result carries your fingerprint and is part of you. Prompting AI starts with everything outside of you. It reacts instead of initiates. It works with the past, what's worked before, a law of averages and the lowest common denominator. It has no concept of the wrongest answer. AI has no puns or malaprops. It cannot misspell words and find something precious within. It can never feck perfection or understand that the things that made you weird as a kid make you great today. It picks what looks right based on existing patterns and algorithms. The result is assembled, not discovered. To poorly paraphrase the poet Gertrude Stein, there's no aha there. The bottom line is if you didn't wrestle it into existence, it's not really yours. Like dime store holiday decorations, if you didn't make it yourself, you picked it. And now you and your lack of taste and desire for easy make you replaceable. I'm not against AI, if it delivers the as advertised promise of curing disease or accelerating science, or if it can solve real human problems, hey, I'm in. For us creatives, if it can make our lives easier, you know, do our bookkeeping, be our legal defense, be a creative resource, and order a really great dirty chai latte, then bravo. AI is not the enemy. But thinking that it holds a promise of creativity in it is. The loss of human struggle, craft, and authorship is too. Using it to bypass learning, personal evolution, and avoid effort is not progress. It's erosion. Listen, it's always best to ride the horse in the direction it's going. So AI is here. Use it. Learn what it can do for you, but don't let it lead you away from yourself. It may have answers, but it does not have your answers because you are irreplaceable. As for me, I'll continue to go deeper and more personal into the work, searching for authorship and a mark that I can own. Hey, I hope you will join me for my coming webinar Irreplaceable AI and you. To find out more or to sign up, go to James Victory dot com and I'll see you there.