There Is No Magic Button

It's also not an issue unique to the AI era. There has always been a perception that designers have a magic button that will do exactly the thing you want easily. It’s been a bane of computer work since there has been computer work. Sometimes I think it’s because design is mysterious. Or maybe computers are mysterious. There are so many buttons on a keyboard, come on, isn’t one of them the magic button? Hiding under PGDN perhaps? I get why people think that because the marketing for every single piece of software and app out there today is all about productivity and it’s going to save you SO MUCH TIME. Sometimes they do. More often than not, a computer is just a different medium to do work on. 

Do the computers and design software of today save us time over the old paste-ups? Yes and no. Certainly, typesetting became much faster. Research is faster. Elements of the design process became easier. But some of that saved time got reinvested into playing around more with the overall design and layout. When you could move anything anywhere on the page at a whim, you spent more time doing just that. The rest of it went to revisions 🫠.

Maybe I am cranky because I recently had to sign some paperwork through my bank and we went through three days of emails because the Docusign digital process was confusing with its emails and access codes. Productivity for whom? Where was the magic button for that?

Our digital retoucher (in the days when you had a retoucher) told me a story about a photograph someone brought in to him. It was an image of two people standing near a tree. Apparently, a woman had been standing behind the tree, and they asked if he could remove the tree so that they could see the woman. He had to explain how she wasn’t magically going to be revealed by removing the tree from the image. She is not there. In some sense, requests still have to follow some version of physics.

Again, people reinvested any time they saved using Photoshop to do one thing with the gillions more things that you could retouch and tweak and fix in Photoshop. The available options became more complex rather than save time.

I watched the new all-AI Coca-Cola holiday ad. I’m guessing they built their own engine and fed it all the holiday stuff they’ve ever done before. Nothing was inexpensive or easy or quick about that part of the process. And when they hit their “magic button” – which was probably weeks of prompting and refining and possibly adding in some CGI – what came out is the average of every Coca-Cola holiday ad that’s you've ever seen.

Ted Chiang wrote a great piece in The New Yorker about why AI won’t make art. And the reason is that choices > averages. AI (Machine Learning) is built to give you an average answer based on your inputs. It is a prediction engine. But it’s never really quite anything new because it only has access to the past. And what makes art interesting is that artists are making a million choices that could be anchored in the past, present or future – real or imagined. 

AI can give you speed and quantity, at a significant cost. Sometimes what you need is averages. What AI can’t do is make choices or have taste. Sorry folks, still no magic button. An interesting question to ask yourself at the start of a project – do you need averages, choices or taste?