Now that I work with AI daily, one responsibility stands out clearly: not to master the tools, but to reflect on how we relate to this technology as humans. I often see too much focus on the tool itself and the (amazing) results. But I choose to start from a different place — my (human) experience and knowledge — to think critically about AI first.
Humans have clear goals, like being loved and appreciated. AI doesn’t have those goals. We learn by observing, making relations, and placing things in context. We quickly build meaning from what’s around us. We have intuition, flexibility, and speed. That’s why we can understand what’s between the lines. AI simply can’t do that as it only learns from language, aka the lines themselves.
Genuine creativity
Creativity often starts with an idea, a vision, an urge to explore the new. With AI you see a prompt window and often you just type something out of curiosity, see the results, improve, but stay on that path which came up in the spur of a moment, not based on a creative idea or vision. The tool begins to lead the creative process, not you.
AI speeds things up fast. It’s easy to fall into the trap of working harder just to keep up. While actually it is better to spend more time on the genuine creative part, using the time saved by the tool for production effort.
We can use that extra time to think critically about what we truly want to build. Before using the tool, we need to understand the challenge — and have a vision to solve it. In this article by Adobe it is mentioned as; “The future belongs to those who think and feel”, both foundations of genuine creativity.
Mastery
Mastery is one of the reasons why people come to work and develop themselves, next to purpose and autonomy (Daniel Pink – Drive). We spent our lives mastering topics that interest us, getting better with time.
When I started with the Graphic Design school, my first years were manual drawing of everything I created. After a couple of years, most of the output came from the computer and its graphical applications like Photoshop and Illustrator. However, I knew the characteristics and challenges as I have put in all that effort mastering them from my own capabilities.
Now, AI is taking over part of that mastery. It’s faster, sometimes better, but we risk losing our own mastery and accepting artificial output as the standard. We just know what’s good or bad, because we’ve mastered it ourselves. But what if we loose this over time, and will not understand quality as we do not master quality ourselves any longer? This question is something that intrigues me. Will Artificial Intelligence actually make humans more ignorant?
Human touch vs AI mass-production
We prefer custom-made products by a local artisan, over something being mass-produced. Even if mass production is cheaper and easier, we take real pride in something custom and special. It’s an object we share real stories about, not just its features or price.
Generative AI still feels mass-produced, even when each output is unique. For the time being, we (still) see something is AI generated as we miss that authentic human touch. Simply put, the ‘life’ just isn’t there!
It is my hope that human craftsmanship remains to be that edge we will always appreciate and see as original, no matter how much the generative models will improve.
Reconsider our relationship with work
Our society is set up for work — but work isn’t the goal. I loved the response from a French woman on TV, protesting a raise of their pension age: “The French only work to life, definitely we don’t life to work. We just enjoy life too much”. True that..!
With AI entering our workspace, can we live more and work less? If AI makes our work output even faster, why should we focus to produce even more in a work-week. Why not work less, say 3-days a week, for four hours a day? In that case, humans can pursue more meaningful effort into society and supporting other humans, rather than spending more time with technology and tools. Technology would serve our true potential.
The AI space is going too fast for us humans to keep up, but we can stay tuned by focusing more deeply on our original skills. We have unique features by being who we are and by what we learn as human beings. To emphasize in the same way AI is being promoted, we stand apart by being f-ing human!
Resources
- DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (book – Daniel Pink) https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/
- Becoming Irreplaceable in the Age of AI (LinkedIn learning) (https://www.linkedin.com/learning/irreplaceable-the-art-of-standing-out-in-the-age-of-ai/developing-an-ai-mindset?autoSkip=true&resume=false&u=156424649)
- From idea to interface: A designer’s guide to AI-powered prototyping (article) https://adobe.design/stories/leading-design/from-idea-to-interface-a-designer-s-guide-to-ai-powered-prototyping?utm_source=tldrdesign
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