Say hello to artificial intelligence, now.

If you do not embrace artificial intelligence (AI), our industry bids you goodbye.  

AI will be part of the future regardless of want.  The move will be transformational.  The shift will not take the 150 or so years the Industrial Revolution took to crush the family farms.  AI will move much quicker to infiltrate and alter.  In many ways, this is scary.  AI has proven to be a thief and a cheat, sure.  It can also prove to be a friend, an assistant, a tool.

Many know I am a professor, artist, published poet, and object designer.  I have found AI popping up in all segments of my life.  As a professor, I teach literature and creative writing. Lately, it has been as if AI is doing much of my students’ writing.  Literature, in many respects, is the subjective experience of history told through stories.  Some of the stories guess at the future.  Some of the stories consider the past. 

Each piece of literature is created at an exact moment in time.  I have an entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh edition from 1910; herein lies the magic, mystery, and NOW.  An encyclopedia is a relic of the past.  There is an AI curve to be learned, and we need to figure it out, lest real-life human experiences be buried alive.  There is no refuge from inevitability.  THAT IS WHERE THE DANGER LIES.

I love AI.  AI is my assistant in the design process.  I create to live.  That is who I am.  Yes, getting a generator to follow my creative vision is not easy.  There are layers and layers of prompts, creative decisions, and instructions required to get AI to be of use.  It can be downright frustrating at times, but I have found that AI is designing on the edge.  It takes seemingly random ideas and puts them together in a way that helps me see a potential design. 

The tools of AI allow me to realize my vision quickly as an object designer.  No, I do not use AI in the creation of my poetry.  I am selfish with that pleasure.  Human poetry echoes through time and ether, and the experience of living life cannot be faked or imitated.  AI will never feel like I feel in my body full of memories and love.

This is all to say that AI allows me to realize the rapid evolution of my concepts and ideas as I direct right before my eyes, and this velocity is a TON of FUN.  Mario Andretti is famous for saying, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”  I imagine a concept and create prompts precisely, carefully, and even precariously until I feel my vision is complete.  

I believe that in the next five years, AI will be globally present and accepted in what we sell in the wholesale markets regarding customer service, marketing, and the creation process. It’s amazing. The world is changing before our eyes. Change is scary, but change is also good, and “embrace or die” is a lesson history has taught us over and over.

Bygone times have demonstrated that those who do not grasp technology fall by the wayside. If we practice change when the future is at our doorstep, we understand how to approach the altered reality.  It does not have to be awkward, but it does have to be NOW.

We need to be cautious as we break through the membrane of AI in the future. It is requisite that we consider our environment, society, and the well-being of all life on this globe.  Humans have proven to be a disruptive force on planet Earth.  Is this bad?  Is an asteroid hitting the planet bad?  We must be intentional and realize our short-term goals will lead directly to our long-term reality.

See Also

I have titled this set of three articles in my Design Moonshine series as “One Thousand Butterflies” for two reasons.  One is the wing-flap-typhoon-theory.  The other is a wing-flap-before-our-eyes theory.  If a butterfly flaps its’ wings on the opposite side of the planet, does the pushed air create a typhoon on our side?  These three articles were designed to encourage change. This final piece expresses the inevitability of the change AI represents.  I am 100% positive that artificial intelligence can never be me.  I would not wish that on any human, object, or chatbot.  HA! 

My three “butterfly” articles have progressed: object, small changes, and now the AVALANCHE that AI represents. I discussed adding a nineteenth-century orange glass frog to a room to create change and Visual Yum! Small changes can make a significant difference in a room. These changes can be a painting, object, lamp design, or an antique orange glass frog. A one-word change in a poem can alter the poem’s meaning and appeal. 

The second article considered making changes a daily and lifelong pursuit. I love to challenge myself to make small changes. Practice reminds me that change is achievable. We all know it is inevitable. Moving forward is best accomplished in modest increments, like the simple wing flap of a butterfly. Being a creative human will shift with the advancement of AI tools. Creativity shifted with the advent of computer graphics in the 1980s. We will have to move forward, just as the butterfly does. 

The next Design Moonshine will consider creating “heirloom items” that children will fight over.  

Be the magic in design.

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