Rather than beginning with sketches and ideas, then iterating on those to produce a more finalised image or vision, Bradley says his boss will just keep prompting an AI for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team will have to backwards engineer the whole thing to make it work.
“He doesn't know that the important thing isn't just the end result, it's the journey and the questions you answer along the way”.
Mitch says that over the 18 months they worked with the company, its CEO had transformed from someone mildly positive about AI to emphasising to workers that “AI was the future”. “In particular, he was of the belief that developers who are able to use AI to accelerate their process are going to win out in the future. I have seen this sentiment in other places worded as ‘an AI won't replace you, but a programmer who knows how to use AI will’. He didn’t believe that 18 months ago, but he absolutely believes it now”.
It is interesting how much AI is being viewed by management at my own workplace (though not by the actual academics on the ground) as something that is going to greatly improve productivity, and something that we all need to be utilising. I'm using AI to generate reports that will be read only by AI.
There is zero downside to going "I guess we're doing AI now" and - take it from me - nothing but ridicule and scorn for saying the emperor has no clothes. Not only that but everyone's bullshit AI is priced at 'your first hit is free' and why wouldn't you want to reduce your overhead? Why is Apple lagging in AI? Yeah Bloomberg been doin' that shit since 2018 or before but that's because it's all sentiment markers for the HFT bots. If we can move the act of reading and writing useless bullshit info onto a bunch of LLMs yay, I guess? This has been the year where I have finally accepted that most of the planet are morons. This does not stop them from having opinions, and it does not stop them from thinking their opinions are non-moronic. I guess we're full circle; fuckin' 2008 Spielberg was up front and center claiming there was no CGI in Crystal Skull and then we open on this: Meanwhile back here in the present era the OBVIOUS AI monkeys and OBVIOUS AI backgrounds in White Lotus are relegated to conspiracy theories. I mean... that shit looks fake as a screencap. How are both the foreground and background some weird non-denominational Lensbaby soft focus? Easy - shit's been painted over with an unsharp mask to make it less obviously AI garbage. And the whole show does this on the reg - "oops! guess we must have accidentally dropped focus in three planes at once!" and nobody is picking up on it for the same fucking reason everyone thinks we're reading our TV for reasons other than "nobody is paying for sound mixers anymore." So sure. Let's pretend that nothing has changed, that we're now generating robot reports for robot readers while pretending that an AI summary of random bullshit is as useful as an actual link.I'm using AI to generate reports that will be read only by AI.
