I’ve been working on collecting my own thoughts about AI into an essay for a few weeks now, but I have to admit that Pentagram designer Giorgia Lupi already captured much of what I was going to say in this article for the New York Times. (On one hand: Darn it. On the other hand, darn it all, I’m still going to write the essay if only because I need to for myself.)
Lupi’s article is a beautifully illustrated and cogently written essay on the creative process, which she elegantly argues AI can’t duplicate. The link should get you access, even if you don’t have a subscription to the Times.
Lupi says:
Human experience is complex and particular. Creative work means contemplating and translating that complexity rather than flattening it into the simplest answer. This is true whether you are making a data visualization, a brand or a story. The impulse to optimize for the obvious and to stop at the simplest answer is what I believe we have to resist.
And later, after documenting what AI is useful for and what her team won’t use it for:
A.I. may be (mostly) accurate, but it’s not considerate. The greatest contributions to humanity — art, inventions, even products — show evidence of people who got lost in a problem and came out the other side with an idea they would not have found otherwise. That does not happen by taking a shortcut to the center. It happens in the detours.
As is often the case with the Times, this article is filled with great animations and illustrations. My favourite below:
