“My personal worry is that for a long time, we sought to diversify the voices — you know, who is telling the stories? And we tried to give agency to people from different parts of the world,“ she said. “Now we’re giving a voice to machines.”
A fantastic comparison of how Midjourney renders five terms: a person, a woman, a house, a street, and a plate of food. It comes out as stereotyped as you can imagine, but the work they put in to do the comparison really shows it in stark light.
In that dismal moment I could feel that the systems meant to process us haven’t “gone wrong” when they embarrass us. They aren’t being refined toward some higher level of seamlessness, once the technology and the data sets improve. Rather they “improve” by relocating the frictions we inevitably feel and giving it no outlet. The indifference of these systems to us and our powerlessness in the face of them in that moment becomes the indifference of society and our powerlessness to change it. In a flash, the welling irritation conveys instantly, reflexively, that solidarity must be impossible in a world where all human relations are machine-mediated.
This sentence explains more peotically what I wrote a while back: “… it will not only be “the market” which will have decided that you can no longer afford your medicin, your education, or your vacation – it will be an AI which will have endless patience to listen to your litany, but no semblence of decency to react to it.”
Work has not disappeared from the restaurant floor, but the person doing the work has changed. Instead of an employee inputting orders dictated by the customer, customers now do it themselves for free. Fauxtomation strikes again. […] But while the gap between advertising copy and reality can be risible, fauxtomation also has a more nefarious purpose. It reinforces the perception that work has no value if it is unpaid and acclimates us to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.
We are so primed for a technologically advanced future that we’re bluepilling ourselves into accepting fake automation as real. There is a man behind the curtain, and it’s us?
The largest corporations on earth ripped off generations of artists without permission or compensation to produce programs meant to rip us off even more. I believe A.I. defenders know this is unethical, which is why they distract us with fan fiction about the future.
A great essay that puts the AI wars into a power perspective – technology used to extract labour and gain regulatory capture. Haves against have-nots. As usual. A very down to earth summery for the year 2023.
A while back I calculated my computational power according to screen estate, offering the suggestion that the more I can see (up to a point) at the same time, the more function I can extract from my computers information systems. Before that I’d done a similar thing going through how many gigabytes of storage I had personal control over, the thought being that it described the circumfence of my binary domains. The more storage, the more video I could edit, the more photos I could save, and the more high resolution pirated movies I could keep on hand.
I came to think of this again the other day when I started my migration from many computers onto a home system built around a small M1 Macbook Air. It’s a humble machine which is more powerful than my sort-of-recent i9/1080Ti Windows abomination, and much more powerful than the 5.1 Mac Pro I’m still keeping around because of the RAID and I/O ports, and I’m consolidating all the storage onto a few external enclosures. Turns out, I have some fifteen drives of different capacity laying around, as well as a bunch of USB/Firewire enclosures, and just copying the stuff from one thing to another takes forever right now.
But anywho, my point being that the amount of storage I have no longer feels like a valuable metric of my productive capacity – rather the opposite since my data exists as conflicting versions in many places – and I’m satisfied with my screen real estate (well almost, I’d like a magic whiteboard covering 2×1 meters on the living room wall). So what qualities do I value in my personal computational space today?
I’m thinking that maybe it’s convenience. I’ve become older, crankier wiser, and neither my eyesight nor patience can take as much abuse as it was able to ten years ago. I want to be able to be productive rather than fiddle around with drivers in Windows and I’m more likely to take poor design as a personal affront than a technical challange.
There’s that William Morris quote that you should “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” and perhaps there’s something similar going on here, with a very wide definition of “beautiful” and “useful”. Along those lines, I caved in and bought an iPad to read books on since I tried one out and realised how much slicker the experience is than on any Android tablet I’ve tried.
It’s not that I want a frictionless life. Friction is important, it smooths out rough surfaces, gives us things to hang on to, and provides heat and sparks. But I’d like to choose my objects of friction with more consideration.
There are so many things worth doing in the world, small and grand, and there’s just so little value in putting up with stuff that doesn’t matter. Just write that stuff off and learn to live with the fomo; Smooth out all friction that doesn’t improve your grip on reality, and enjoy a better handle on life.
My first internship at RISE is coming to an end, and with that I’m going back to school for two more courses this year – before heading out for a 16 week intership somewhere (Suggestions? Hit me up!). In additon to doing full time at ITHS, I’ve been doing a bunch of courses at IxDF, and studying AI and applied design at Borås Univeristy. While at the same time trying to have a life, which has proven to be a bit stressfull.
I’m thinking a lot about what my place is in the whole “design ecology” – what do I enjoy doing, and what can I reasonably get paid for? I know that I’d like to end up in a creative team where we help each other be awesome and solve difficult problems for real people and dazzle others with out brilliance, but I have a way to go before I’m there. So I end up reading stuff written by people more clever and experienced than I, and I try to figure out what it’s all about. And since I have Some Thoughts™️ I figured I might as well post it here for others (and myself, later) to read.
It’s tempting to think that audiences are coming to our content with the basic skills needed to comprehend and interpret it. That may simply not be the case. Part of “consider[ing] your content from your user’s perspective” is understanding what reading skills the user brings to the equation and writing to accommodate them.
According to Colters article above, around half of the population of the USA has low or very low literacy skills. I spent a couple minutes searching for Swedish statistics, but could only find trend-pieces on reading habits among kids.
Design takeaway: Make sure that text in your text is easy to scan and understand. If you have reasons to be more obscure, have a clear goal and be aware of that you’re potentially excluding users. Useful tool: LIX calculator (then again, readability calculators might not be all that reliable)
And them we have colour blindness as a visual design problem which in turn causes cognitive load.
In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?
Try to imagine a vast field of one color in your mind. No other colors. No other words. No other thoughts. No connotations. No connections. No anything except for that one color. You can’t do it. You seriously CAN’T do it. The human brain does not allow you to do it. It does not work. It simply does not.
We’ve covered colour psychology very briefly at the UX Design course at ITHS, and the idea that certain colours have certain meaning irks me no end. It’s a reductionist view of how colours and perception works, and it’s just plain dumb. “Red means action” and “blue inspires confidence.” It’s like crystal therapy for the aesthetically challenged – “ooh, this mauve will inspire romance.”
The same goes for the ITHS classes we’ve had on typography, where we suddenly abandon concepts such as “testing legibility” in favour of “the golden ratio should decide line height.” I understand that you have to convince those paying you that the two days you spent fiddling with the typography weren’t wasted, but refering to some obscure magic incantation passed down from Gutenberg will bite on the ass once you’re asked “but why can’t we just get the AI to do it?”
John Denver learned the biggest lesson of all, even if he only had a few seconds to appreciate it: Let the User Beware! And, indeed, the NTSB, as per its long history of setting aside findings, human factors or otherwise, that might conflict with a verdict of pilot error, ruled that the responsibility for this crash lay with the pilot. The interface was relegated to a mere “factor.” Had John Denver fueled his aircraft in spite of evidence indicating he had sufficient fuel, had he somehow managed to thoroughly familiarize himself with the idiosyncrasies of this uniquely-assembled experimental aircraft sans manual, he would be alive and well today.
And these are the kind of stories that get retold by old-timers in the Human Computer Interface / User Centered Design / UX field. The stories that tell us that people are too often blamed for what should be blamed on poor design and the business practices that allow it.
Retold in a more modern way, the deaths caused by poor design are today more likely to be the result of dark patterns, uncaring machine learning or just general “death by a thousand cuts.”
Related book recommendation: Kate Swindler: Life and Death Design. Swindler describes some considerations of designing for people under stress. The book is a good starting place with many references to original research, but it’s a bit thin on the design aspect. Knowing the physical and psychological consequences of a flight-fight-freeze respons is good, but I’d like to have seen more process specific examples.
Despite that it’s a good primer and I’d recomend it to others who (like I) have limited experience in thinking and working with this. If we could consider stress responses as temporary handicaps which we need to take into account when designing, it would be a benefit to all.
Years in, “innovation theater”— checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts — had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects.
Ackermanns article is interesting as it’s taking to task the too-naive approach to all problems that IDEO et.al occasionally present. It struck me as I was listening to a conversation with Tim Brown the other day (one of the head honchos at IDEO), when he was somewhat contrite about having spent so many years of his professional life “designing and bringing about landfills” – and now he wants to make a better impact on the world (viz. environmental issues).
Much like Don Norman is now focusing on “design for a sustainable world,” to my ears they ignore that any ambition to take on these huge global issues will run afoul of realpolitik – it’s not because of poor design decitions that we have global warming; it’s because there are exceptionelly rich and vested interests in whose interest it is not to prioritize the public good. And I don’t know how to have a discussion about “making the world better” without at least acknowledging the power dynamics.
When the thing that propels a career, animates hobbies, and becomes a mode of communication are the all same, there are drawbacks. For one, my sense of worth and accomplishment is less diverse. When the market, the end users, my friends, or my family don’t appreciate or acknowledge when I show them I love them, it can hurt. I’ll admit it. It is easy to feel like I don’t matter. But then, I have always been sensitive. I am working on that. I am also getting a lot of opportunities to practice.
A well written essay on self-doubt and a creative career. It resonated quite a lot with how I think of myself as a human and artists, and I imagine that it’ll stay relevant now that I’m moving into UX Design. Robert writes about how he overcompensated in his work in order to increase both his financial worth and self-worth, but felt like he was faking it and failing at adulting.
Trying to identify what it is that makes you tick, and what parts of you that you should cultivate rather than prune, is a struggle for us neurotic types. I don’t expect that it’ll get easier once I start working in the design field, but I’m trying to prepare – and reading essays on similar issues is a comfort.
In the fall of 2022 I began studying UX Design at IT-högskolan. The field was new to me and I did my best to navigate the concepts, methods and nomenclatures. I wished I could talk to people who were just a bit further along than I – ask them what I should focus on, what I shouldn’t stress about, and how their careers had turned out.
I did run into a whole bunch of nice people at school, at meetups and other professional forums, but I would have liked the info available in one place, and I wish I had a map of the terrain ahead. I don’t have a mentor in the field, so finding others who are ahead of me seemed like the next best thing.
This project was born out of a hope that perhaps those that come after me can benefit from the experience of myself and my classmates. I did an open call to my class of UX22 at ITHS and asked to interview as many as possible after our first year of school. My plan is to follow this up three years after our graduation, and then three years after that – in 2027 & 2030.
Out of my class of 30 odd people, I got 11 to volunteer, and I’d like to thank them all for entrusting me with their time and thoughts. The interviews are in Swedish, but the videos have English auto-translated subs (in addition to manually translated Swedish) so I hope that they can be useful for others outside of Sweden.
The questions I asked each one were the same, but I did edit the thing for brevity and omitted some of the answers. I’ve pasted all the questions below:
Who are you and what’s your background?
Describe UX Design to someone who doesn’t know.
What distinguishes a good UX Designer?
What makes you a good UX designer?
Why did you decide to study UX Design?
What was appealing about it?
Is it still appealing?
Has your understanding of what UX Design is changed?
Describe something you’re are proud of during your first year.
What has been challenging in your first year?
If you could advise yourself before you began studying, what would you say?
What would you like to work with after graduation?
Is there anything you’d rather not work with?
Describe a typical workday in spring 2027.
How will you get there?
I hope these interviews provide some insights and encouragement to others who are just starting out on their UX design journey. It’s been interesting to speak with my classmates and document their thoughts and ambitions at this early stage of our careers. I look forward to continuing the conversation and documenting how our perspectives evolve over time.
I welcome any feedback on this project or suggestions for future iterations. Please feel free to leave a comment below or get in touch – I’d love to hear from you: email & linkedin
Thanks for joining me on this small attempt to map the unknown terrain ahead!
When I started studying UX Design in the long ago time-before-time (fall of 2022) I promised myself that I’d abandon all other projects and cut back on distracting reading – giving myself time and energy to focus on the studies. This worked well for a week or so.
Turns out there are whole books written on ethnography, design and usability, and they are rather interesting – who knew! Anyway, I quickly got bogged down with extra courses and books and podcasts and so on and so forth. I took to walking an hour and a half to school just to have time to speed-listen to at least some of the stuff that’s out there.
Some images from my Instagram which gets no love. Go follow!
One of the podcasts that I stuck to was “What is wrong with UX,” hosted by Laura Klein and Kate Rutter. It’s now defunct, but the archive is still up at usersknow.com/podcast. Since I’ve listened to all 130 or so episodes I figured that I’d put together a selection most interesting to me as a beginner in the field. The show doesn’t rely much on callbacks, so skipping episodes isn’t that big of a deal.
An assumption about you: The selected episodes were useful as a complement to my full time UX Design studies – they gave a deeper understanding of the practicalities of what I was learning in school and reading about on the side. I’m assuming that this podcast isn’t your first exposure to the field of UX Design.
A note for us non-USA people: Americans love to talk and this podcast is no exception, but after an episode or two you’ll be able to look past the dad-jokes and forced geniality, and appreciate the content. Klein and Rutter are knowledgeble and passionate about their skills, and it’s worth sticking with the show to hear what they have to say. As a side note, I can recommend Laura Kleins book UX for lean startups as well as her course in Agile methods for UX Design over at IxDF [affiliate link].
The shows listed are in order of publication, and the descriptions are their own.
C-FWOTS: Kate and Laura talk about C-FWOTs or Colossal Fucking Wastes of Time. What makes a design project a C-FWOT, and how can we avoid them?
Don’t be a UX Designer: In this episode, Kate and Laura bitch about some of the most annoying things about being a UX Designer and do everything in our power to keep you from becoming one. You’ll thank us later.
The Worst Clients: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about terrible clients (no, not by name. we’re not committing career suicide just yet.) and how we can deal with them better as UX Designers. If you work with other people as a UX Designer, this one might be helpful. If you have worked directly with clients, consider this a possible trigger warning.
6 Things We Wish We Had Known: Kate and Laura talk about the things we wish we’d learned earlier in our careers as UX Designers.
Stop Arguing with Feedback: In this episode, Kate and Laura discuss how to take the feedback you asked for a little more graciously and maybe even benefit from it. Do not, in any way, think that this is a request for you to give feedback to Kate and/or Laura. Yes, we understand the irony, and no, we’re not having any of it.
Why You Should Care about the Business Model: In this episode, Kate and Laura give five reasons why everybody, even designers and researchers, need to understand how their products and companies make money.
Collaborative Design: In this episode, Kate and Laura fight about what it means to design things collaboratively and the ways in which everybody seems to screw it up. Hint: collaborative design does not mean everybody makes every single decision together! This is not a democracy, people.
Old Research Stories: In this week’s episode, Kate and Laura reminisce about old research stories and how much better things were before. Ok, mostly they talk about what’s still true of the things they learned in old research and what’s changed.
Starting Your Own Thing: In this episode, Kate and Laura give sketchy advice about starting your own freelancing or consulting business. Reminder: you should probably not take legal advice from drunk people on the internet.
Designing Beyond the Screen: In this episode, Kate and Laura complain about screen-based designers again. They also talk about designing for multi-modal interfaces in a failed attempt to sound modern and like they haven’t been doing this since the Paleolithic Era.
Choosing the Right Deliverables: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about not wasting time making the wrong stuff. You’ll be completely unsurprised that what sorts of deliverables you should make for your team depends entirely on who you’re making stuff for and what you want out of it.
Whiteboard Challenges: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about how to be better at whiteboard challenges if you can’t avoid them entirely, which you can’t, so just deal.
Protect Your Users froom Each Other: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about how and why to protect your users from each other while they slowly lose what little faith they still had in humanity. Happy New Year.
Craft: In this episode, Kate and Laura argue about The Craft, which relates to neither witchcraft nor macrame owls, so honestly why do they even bother? Seriously though, tune in for 30 minutes of blathering about what words mean.
Should Designers Lead: In this episode, Kate and Laura discuss something (semi) topical. They argue about whether designers should lead and then of course somehow veer into what design even is anyway and it’s pretty much a typical mess.
Tips for New UX Designers: In this episode, Kate and Laura attempt to give advice to new UXers (something neither of them has been since dinosaurs roamed the earth). Laura advocates violence, surprising nobody who has ever met her.
Design Principles: In this episode, Kate and Laura take a decidedly unprincipled look at design principles. Kate proves that drinking does, in fact, affect your memory, when she completely forgets Laura’s entire work history.
Designing in Triples: Kate explains why she likes to make everything three times as hard as it needs to be. If you’re playing the What is Wrong with UX drinking game and drinking every time they mention Task Flows, then maybe don’t make any plans for after the podcast.
High Level UX Jobs: In this episode, Kate and Laura really go off the rails talking about the similarities, differences, and issues with various different higher level UX jobs, many of which they haven’t actually held in well over a decade, if at all.
If you’ve listened to the podcast and would like to suggest another episode to add to the list – or one to take away – feel free to comment below of get in touch over at Linkedin or email. And if you know of other curated lists of podcast episodes, let me know! The amount of info that’s available online is massive, and with all search engines being choked with listicles written by drunk potato AI:s and content farms, finding the good stuff is time-consuming.
The title phrase and sentiment is taken from plagiarist & internet commentator Ryan Brodericks newsletter Garbage Day, but it might as well be one of the conclusions of an Adam Curtis documentary.
My childhood friend Matilda visited us in Gothenburg over the weekend, chaperoning her son who had a ticket to the three-day festival Way out West, and we binged most of Curtis series “Can’t get you out of my mind.” I still have the last hour of the last episode to go (“brevity” isn’t a word in his vocabulary I think), but the overarching theme of the disappearance of progressive ideologies is depressing and on point. What we’re left with after the fall of the democratic middle class & militant romantics, are fandoms jockying for position and angry people longing for a past that never were.
This is a recurring theme in stuff I’m reading as well as in conversations. It’s not so much despair as resignation. Despair would imply that you have a goal but have failed to attain it. Resignation is when you realise that your goal doesn’t matter. And resignation seems to colour the zeitgeist quite thoroughly right now – the only remaining optimists are the religious fundamentalists and accelerationist of different stripes.
One of the ideas I floated to my friends after the last election (which saw a right-nationalist government take over from the previous centrists) was that we ought to start a political party which only focuses on one issue. This in itself isn’t new – there are populist parties and movements all the time – but I’m interested in what issue might give the biggest progressive leverage regardless of the political colour one has to collaborate with.
Worst case scenario: What single-issue would make such a disproportional progressive impact that it would be worth to collaborate even with the most toxic idiots of the far right? You’re sitting at the negotiating table with a bunch of wannabe nationalist socialist romatics from SD, and if they give in on one issue you’ll lend them your support. What would that issue be?
Depending on if we’re doing this locally, regionally or nationally, the issues will differ. Right now I only have two suggestions: A complete ban on private car use in the inner city of Gothenburg (a local issue) or a hard limit on the salary for public employees (with countermeasures in place for attempts to subvert this via bonuses, etc.). Both would have huge knock-on effects, which on the face of it would be progressive (citation needed).
Do you have any other suggestions for one law, policy, activity or ordinance that would have a disproportionally progressive effect regardless of which political coalition is in power? I’m all ears, let’s do this! There’s only three years left and we probably need to make some research and print some leaflets!
I’m back from a short vacation to Side (Turkey) which I spent reading and drinking beer. Also, looking at ruins. Side is an odd place where a contemporary charter tourist village has sprung up literally built on top of 2000 year old ruins. As a result, you see ancient brickabrack all over the place – they use marble columns as doorstops – which in another context would be in a museum.
Anywho. Since I’m reading a lot (mostly related to my UX studies) I’m starting to feel mentally constipated. I need to put some of the stuff into practice, or I’m going to forget it, which seems a waste of my time. So: Going forward I’ll pursue some simple ideas/projects/experiments to implement what I learn from the books (as well as the IxDF courses I’m taking on the side), but with a rule not to turn them into huge projects or guilt-tripping obligations – I’m just doing it to experiment, learn and get feedback. Sounds like fun?
Speaking of which, I’m thinking of tidying this blog up a bit. Adding some “best of” posts in the left column and maybe even have categories of some sort. I know my readership here is in the single digits, but I ought to be able to use some material to inform a professional profile – my approach to work, research, thinking, etc. If you have opinions, get in touch through mail or on Linkedin.
My thoughts feel dated even before typing them up, but it’s spring of 2023 and the world has its panties in a bunch over ChatGPT and other Natural Language Processing AI:s, and I just want to put my scratch in the goal post for future reference. There are new AI products being churned out faster than even the press-release presstechnology media outlets can keep up with. (Subsequently, some have started publishing AI-generated content)
The economic downturn – combined with the class war waged by the tech sector on its workforce – has investment money salivating at the prospect of a new boom. Subsequently, there’s much said about the coming nerd rupture and ascendance of the machine.
Noam Chomsky et.al have some objections:
It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy playing around with the tools – I pay both for Midjourney and ChatGPT API – but it feels like intelligence pareidoila (seeing patterns in random data). You can have a really interesting discussion with ChatGPT, and you can be surprised by what seems like creative insights and suggestions. But I’ve had really interesting discussions with the birds on the poster over my bed, as well as with my drunk reflection in the mirror. I provided the meaning and the interpretation – and I did so because I played the game of “let’s pretend.”
I’m in school right now, retooling myself into a UX design & research person, and AI crops up in more and more omnious tones. I talked with a couple Javascript students who felt vaguely threatened by AI and uncertain of what their value proposition was. And to my ears they were basing their fear not on anything specific, but rather a general sense of the AI is coming for us all! Which is being fuelled by writers on Medium with fiften susbscribers who need to write hyperbolic articles in order to – oh irony! – impress the AI of Google Search.
We had a guest lecturer the other week who talked about AI tools as something which we’ll have to learn to use within UX, in particular graphic / UI generators. That’s definitely a use I can see and which doesn’t cause me much consternation – I’ve been using generative software the past thirty years in different capacities, this latest breed just happen to be easier to talk to – but when people start writing about using ChatGPT as personas for user research, that’s just difficult to take seriously. That’s really giving into pareidoila, and you’re better of doing astrology or divining from entrails.
I’m not sure where I’m going with all of this. Of course I’d like to have my cake and eat it – by which I mean I’d like to seem clever and reasonable without missing an opportunity to piss on the AI parade – but in the end I think I come down on the side that the current iteration of AI will lead society down a shitty path where the first line of contact with other humans will be through our mutual AI:s, and as usual those with more resources will be able to have better tailored tools (as usual) to make the most of the world (as usual) and ensconce themselves in bubbles where they can have plausible deniability even more than today.
Because it will not only be “the market” which will have decided that you can no longer afford your medicin, your education, or your vacation – it will be an AI which will have endless patience to listen to your litany, but no semblence of decency to react to it.
— update 15 March — ChatGPT 4 has just been released, and the discussion on Hacker news is full of hot-takes on what it means and you don’t know what it means and ooh, shiny.
Since I’m fascinated by rituals, secular and otherwise, I might have taken the whole “short nails as a way to salvation” thing a bit too far. Regardless, I’m making a tract for people to hand out!
No source, looks like a Jack Chick.
My goal is to have the tracts distributed by people in the street in at least five locations across the world, and get documentation from the events. I’ll send the tracts out for free to my missionaries, and might put them up for sale if others want them. Shipping will be the expensive part, since manufacturing is dirt cheap on the Risograph, and paper is more or less free.
The content of the tract will be made up of Jack Chick style comic panels generated by Midjourney, and I still have to put together a text and the gospel itself. It would be great if I could get my homepage up before doing this, but a link to this here blog, with some project background might serve just as well (and I’ll do a writeup for the portfolio later on).
The impetus for this is just a shitpost Insta I did a while back, but since that post got very little traction I’m thinking either using Reddit (maybe /r/cults?) or some rando Discord server. It’s all about finding other people who find this kind of stuff fun, and from my informal polling among classmates, not many people share my sense of humour.
Tracts are today tied to Christian evangelism, particularly in the USA, and even here in Sweden I’ve found Chick-tracts on subways and whatnot. But my point isn’t to make fun of religious evangelism, but to confuse recipients and allow participants to get some fresh air and entertainment. It’s not elaborate enough to be design fiction, so maybe it’s a cargo-culting event – a light social prank? Anywho, let’s see how it’ll all come together, and let’s be open for unexpected results.
Actor Lewin Lloyd in Hid Dark Materials on the left, quick Midjourney v4 prompt on right
We just finished watching the first season of His dark materials – a great show based on a great adventure book – and I was struck of how the look reminded me of the moods created by some of the Midjourney prompts. And this feels new. The newness isn’t that an AI generated something in the style of a particular artist – the lawsuits for infringement have just begun – but that many scenes looked like part of the “prompt space.” My thought wasn’t that “ah, this looks like this artist/director,” but “ah, this looks like that bunch of stuff I’ve seen on Midjourney.”
Lewin Lloyd left, one minute Midjourney prompt right
This is unfair since HDM came our before Midjourney was a thing, but we’ll get more and more of this, and it will force artists not only to find something which is outside of the AI:s wheelhouse, but it will also force artists to work in secrecy to preempt trends. Imagine that you’re a director for a movie where you have a modicum of visual ambition, and you’d like to woo your audience with your cinematics. You might want to keep photos of your set & costumes a secret as long as possible, so that your superfans don’t swamp the net with AI generated fan-art. Otherwise, once your movie comes out, the look will feel old and overdone.
Of course, if you’re not relying on original visuals, this will play into part of your marketing instead; You can hold competitions for imagined scenes, most sexy action poses, or whatever. Regardless, there’s a whole new world of creative and business practices knocking on many doors, and they’re not knocking politely.
