I've been a creative person all my life. It wasn't a choice, or a decision, or some weird twist of fate, it was simply who I am. And it has been a never-ending struggle my entire life. Countless hours of hard work, often alone, frustrated, thousands of crumbled balls of failure after failure - and then something finally works. And then computers. Photoshop. Freehand. Director. Video editing. 3d software. Dreamweaver. HTML. Flash. A seemingly never-ending stream of changes, updates, revisions, and the rug dangerously close to being pulled out from under you at every turn. That's been my career. And all along that course I've stayed on top of it all as best I could. Some things I mastered, some things mastered me. But I never stopped trying to stay out in front of the wave. Less it consume me like it did so many others around me.
And then the monster that is AI came along. And at first we all had a good laugh at the sheer lunacy of the slop it generated. Well, some of you had a good laugh. I wasn't laughing. I've been through this too many times to laugh. It reminded me of the Blackberry people I knew laughing when the iPhone was announced. They didn't laugh for long. And your response to these statements might be different if you are in a different field. I'm sure those of you in HVAC repair, or medical, or many other fields are not as impacted, or even aware, of what is happening. But us creatives are aware. And, in many ways, we are the canary in the coal mine. For all of you.
Let's remember a man named Earl. Earl isn't a real person, but rather a convenient narrative construction that I've created to combine a half-dozen or so people that are real into one person for the sake of this story. Earl was about the age I am now back in the early nineties. Most of Earl's career in advertising and design was done on paper, film, and type-setting machines. And then along came computers and desktop publishing. It was the new fangled shiny thing and no one really understood it. Earl shrugged. It wouldn't impact him, he knew everything there was to know about the business. Earl would be fine. Earl was not fine. Earl didn't know it yet, but Earl's career was over. Probably a lot earlier than he had imagined. Not all of the Earl's took this news well.
I refuse to be Earl. So, once again, I dabble. I try to learn. I try to stay up-to-date. And I resist the forces that seemingly want me to incorporate more and more AI into my work. All the programs I use now have it integrated. My Wife's company has announced that it is now an AI focused company and that all employees must now get AI certifications. It is getting increasingly difficult to stay away from it, at least in my line of work. There are entire Eve Online related YouTube channels being generated by AI, and if you haven't seen those yet - oh boy. Content machines. Churning. Increasingly the rewards over on JUST are being slowly dominated by AI content, and while the platform continues to have rules against the use of AI - the edges are slowly melting around it.
None of this is an excuse. I continue to explore my creativity as best I can. I play around with AI here and there to see what it can do. Every so often it does something that is actually helpful to me. Like lay out a 3d space, or generate a reference I couldn't find somewhere else. Or provide some music behind some words I've written. And I have enjoyed creating some music over the past year. I never anticipated being able to bring that side of myself to life. But I'm not pretending to be a musician. I'm just doing that for fun. Even if I'm the only one who thinks it is fun.
I have no idea where this is all leading. You can find a lot of people out there saying a lot of things. Things are changing though. I can't do much of anything now that someone, somewhere, won't yell at me for doing it.
I'm struggling to make sense of it all. Just like you are, or you will be soon.
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