Can you be skeptical of something you use daily?

This is going to be a fun one, outside of photography I am actually a software developer as my day to day profession. Part of my job over the last couple of years really has been working out how AI fit's into how I do my work, if it will take my job eventually, and can I take any of the learnings and apply them to help with the creative side of my life.

As far as the existential thought of will it take away developer jobs? Yes and no, I think if anything the way I look at where my job fits is changing and being good at software is just a part of the pie of things I can do rather than the whole pie.

For example, my current job is at an agency and at the very core of it we're paid for our ideas. It just so happens I like having ideas and then being able to build and show them (I was very happy when a client noticed a small animation I put into a recent build). On top of that I am pretty handy with a camera in hand so recorded some B roll around the office we're using to advertise for new rolls and will use for other parts of our media as well. Like I said, parts of the pie.

I think how you think about and leverage AI is going to be incredibly relevant, especially in the next few years. Early adopters of a tool, especially those who work out how it can work for them are usually the winners. How many YouTube creators have amassed huge followings because they were early adopters?

Now lets talk contradictions because thats in the title right, so we need a payoff. I don't like quite a lot of things around AI, especially around the sense of where the bleeding edge of it is. It feels a little like early on when cryptocurrency was being sold as the future but the only think it was really good at was being used to launder money and make scams a little easier to cover up. The dream we're being sold is you can just text a few things to a magical server and it runs off and builds you a six figure business while you sleep, when in reality a large use currently is making variants of copy written work, scamming, and lying on the internet about things.

But on the flip side of that I do find that with a capable set of hands hovering over the keyboard and a good idea of where you want to end up on something there can be astonishing outcomes that just wouldn't be possible in the same time frame a few years ago. But I hope you like working out how to talk to it while getting patted on the back for pointing out it's mistakes.

If we bring it back to the creativity side of things I really do think this is where we see the most about of discourse and nuance for the what's possible vs whats needed conversation.

Do I want AI to help make my images less noisy without turning to mush? Yes, but do I think it's cool that images I take will get cut up, sliced apart and put back together in some strange lego with a few taps on a keyboard? Absolutely not (Fun fact it happed to one of my images a a couple years ago.) It wasn't a huge change to the image but it very much was something that confused me because I recognised so much of the image just not the additions.

Creativity also seems to be a big thing we talk about as something AI is coming for and it feels like it's the thing I want to do myself while the robot handles all my spreadsheets. I think it't been the big push for places because creativity is viewed as a commodity by a lot of people.

So have I fit AI into a slot of my creative pie to help out? Short answer is yes, long answer? Yes but I am tinkering a lot with the process and trying setups and experimenting and I think it's getting there but there is a lot more of my software job that comes into play when I am trying to tinker with a setup. Here is my top level view of how I like to use it. It's a brainstorming collaborator, I will bounce ideas, flesh out a thought into a paragraph of what a new article could be. An assistant to work on technical things letting me sit in the creative side.

Some good examples of this was getting it to look through my retrospectives for things I have touched on or may have brought up a similar thought that could be further pulled on as an idea for future articles (we found 4). Also while I have been working on my first digital product The Scroll Stopping Photo Guide I have been using it to speed run the build of the website to get it up and launched. I literally was running it while writing content for the articles of the guide, it also leaves me with more time to tweak animations just for humans.

That's not to say these examples are one message and it runs off and builds it. I think the conversation to finalise what build tools and tech stack I wanted for the website took ages. But when you have a tool that can make fixing or changing things super easy, that is where the good use comes in. I got it to tweak some colours based on accessibility contrast ratio so I am confident people can read the site. Building out and fine tuning pieces that contribute to SEO, search ability and all the other things that can be done if you know what you're doing but if you don't then you're in for a bad time...

So from this long winded back and forth that you've gone through where do we conclude this thought? Well, yeah it's alright. You can use it for a few good things, plenty of sketchy things, it's making a lot of things really chaotic and has a lot of problems it seems to be running ahead of from a legal and sometimes moral standpoint. But all in all I don't think it's going anywhere, It's the argument that if you made something on a computer you weren't a real artist, it's just a tool. Take what you need from it and leave the rest. I wrote a piece about the difference between skill and taste which I feel like is where this piece has come from as I have been pulling this thread a lot of late.

See you next month,

Tom