(Art) Official Intelligence

Got called "AI slop" in the comments recently, and I sat with that for a minute instead of just getting defensive.

Beatrix, Subtrac, Axio, none of those happened in five minutes. They were days of iteration with references built by hand in Photoshop first, real design work and real illustration and real photography before AI ever touches it. That's not a prompt, that's a process.

Give me a pair of Jordans and I'd still play like garbage on a basketball court because the shoes aren't the skill. Taste is, talent is, and the rigor of actually doing the work is. An industrial designer building aero for a car can't use AI alone because he still needs real intelligence for how things attach, for fitment and quality requirements and material decisions and color and size and the list goes on. Those are skills that only come with dedication and perseverance. The only real difference now is you can prototype and iterate faster with less resources, less time, and more output.

Look at Star Wars. Lucas had to invent tools to make the first one with practical effects and models and matte paintings, and that's literally why ILM exists. Decades later, Cameron and Spielberg and Lucas himself make films that run largely through CGI, and they are still original and still theirs. What changed wasn't the imagination behind it, it was the efficiency and the capability. Every real creative tool gets this resistance at first. Computers, the internet, digital cameras, Photoshop, all of it got written off before it became normal, so the idea that AI is coming for design jobs is lazy thinking.

What do you think a client is going to want, a process that burns more resources or one that's more efficient? Efficiency is what they will demand, but taste is why they will still hire you.

I think about the people who actually got laid off over this too, and that's real. Editors, VFX artists, whole teams out of work because a studio found a cheaper way to get the same shot. That's not nothing and it's not their fault. The movie industry is a business first and it will always chase a better return, no matter who's downstream of that decision.

But there's another side worth sitting with. What used to take thousands of hours and a studio's backing might soon be something a kid with real imagination can pull off on his own with nobody's permission. That's not much comfort if it's your job on the line right now, but for whoever is trying to break in with nothing but the idea and the drive, it's the biggest opening there's ever been. Learn the craft for real and you get dangerous with it. Stallone couldn't get hired as an actor because nobody would cast him, so he wrote his own shot and cast himself in it.

A real creative isn't the one who knows the tool. A real creative is the one with discernment, the judgment to keep or throw away and the taste to know which is which. That's the part no tool hands you.

Do I use AI? Yeah, as a tool when the need arises, not to think for me and not to do my job. I use it to reach things I wouldn't have had access to otherwise, and creativity wins this no matter what ends up in the hand holding the tool.

Words and images by: Axiom Otto