Generative AI is a super pencil

I acknowledge that there are concerns with generative AI, but I believe that it has the potential to change our practice in radical ways, hopefully for the better. And a huge part of that is because it changes our relationship to creativity. It changes our potential.

Over the past year, I’ve found myself exploring generative AI deeply across all the available outputs and formats. At this point, I’ve tested hundreds of generative AI apps, and made over 10,000 images in Midjourney. (I’m going to try not to think about the hours committed.) Of course, most of the things I’ve shared and taught have been image-based because that reflects the maturity of the landscape. But it also aligned with something deep in me and my graphic design training — relishing in the possibilities.

Along this journey, one of the things I discovered and didn’t expect was a heightened sense of creativity and flow. I was a skeptic at the beginning, so I definitely didn’t embark on this journey expecting to find it. However, my curiosity (and this blog) opened up a relationship with a new tool that I didn’t see coming. It didn’t happen immediately. Perhaps in a huge part to the fact that I was focused on understanding it for my own sense of self in this changing world, but also because I was considering the implications for the practice that I’ve dedicated my recent career to supporting.

At the beginning, it was clunky and I made ugly and uninteresting things. (I joke in workshops that you’re going to make things that look like an undergrad project that you’re embarrassed by, and that’s okay.) My prompts were limited, and I was focused on generating from a single prompt.

Sometimes, I’d get something that was much better than I expected and I could logically see how that was going to change the way we approached specific creation or production processes. Occasionally, I’d create something really compelling that I didn’t expect and that acted as a spark. A catalyst to learn more, to dig deeper. To get lost in making. And I did.