Generative AI is for going deep, not wide

Last month, I shipped out to Las Vegas to attend this year’s Adobe Summit. A few of my colleagues handled more overarching recaps of the event. As for me, I’m stuck on one particular theme that clearly stands out. Naturally, that’s generative AI.

Groan. Eye roll. Stick with me.

Let’s start with this: Adobe, just like Microsoft, Google, and other tech giants, appears to be making great strides toward integrating generative AI capabilities directly in to its tools. This is kind of a duh revelation, but, in my estimation at least, it is the easier-said-than-done development needed to mainstream AI for, well, for people like myself.

Put another way, at this exact juncture, generative AI has almost no bearing on my day-to-day professional life. There are a few reasons for that, but the biggest is quite practical. To use ChatGPT or Midjourney, I have to leave Adobe Experience Manager, or Figma, or Microsoft Word, or whatever application I’m actually using at that moment, put in my prompt and cross my fingers. If all of that goes well, I have to save the image or copy and paste the text, and by the time I’ve round-tripped back to the tool I was actually using when all of this started, well, I haven’t really saved myself much, if any, time. And that’s not even broaching the topic of ethics or legality or brand safety as we weigh up generative AI’s utility in its current form.

Anyway, Adobe seems deadset on changing this calculus. Almost every session I attended featured some showcase of these tools going native in a way that goes well beyond Firefly finding its way in to a few more Creative Cloud applications. If you, like me, are tasked with managing brand consistency while also enabling dizzyingly voluminous scale, then Adobe’s introduction of Custom Models, which will allow Adobe’s AI to be trained on your brand, is the biggest deal of all. Not only will AI be native to Adobe’s tools, but it will also know me and my brand.

Not coincidentally, this is where this starts to get exciting on the day-to-day level. And that is because the real power of generative AI, as showcased over and over out in Vegas, is in the endless remixing of what you already have on hand - your logo and color palette and visual style and owned assets and so on.

Do the math. You don’t actually need very many raw materials to get to hundreds of thousands or even millions of combinations. In fact, you probably have the basic ingredients to get there right now. What you don’t have - at least not yet - is a machine to help you rapidly assemble and re-assemble all million of those combinations in a matter of minutes.

We humans are constrained by the laws of time and space. Not so for generative AI. It does some very strange things when given an almost blank canvas - its six-fingered men and casually told lies belying its lack of humanity. But when given some guardrails, its potential to do what those of us who are corporeally challenged can not seems likely to be cause for celebration. And, wonderfully, that capability does seem to be at our fingertips now.

Sure, generative AI still has a role to play in other parts of the creative process. It can certainly serve as a built-in riffing partner when you are ideating. But, at least to me, it’ll be a much more exciting though slightly less magical development when it can instead be handed a fully-formed idea and give it legs that stretch from social to email to website to out-of-home advertising and beyond.

In this context, it seems almost silly to worry about the machines taking jobs. What they’re really coming for is a job none of us has the time or spirit to do. We can go wide - maybe wider than ever before - coming up with a winning idea, safe in the knowledge that once we’ve stumbled upon just such a thing, the machines will be able to help us go deep.

“It’s that process that is the magic”

“Any idiot can have an idea.”

A trusted mentor/colleague/friend blurted this out in a meeting some time ago. He’s Italian, so the bombast of sentiment coupled with his distinctive accent must have made it that much more likely to be seared in my memory. Anyway, I can’t remember what we were discussing specifically, but I know that the general context was the ceaseless drumbeat of “input” you receive when you work on brand identity and in experience design.

It’s part of the deal when you create. You have to be brave enough to go through the act itself and then courageous enough after to hear what everyone else thinks about your brainchild. Some of what you hear will be valuable. A lot of it will not be. Even the good stuff might not be good in the way that someone articulates it to you. Sifting through it all and (hopefully) ending up somewhere even better is part of the work.

Last week, a very old interview with Steve Jobs crossed my LinkedIn feed and brought idiots and their ideas back to the top of my mind. You’ll grasp why in the first minute or so of the clip.

As a culture, we tend to celebrate ideas - that spark or moment of divine inspiration that started everything off. Who doesn’t love a good origin story that explains and imbues with deeper meaning subsequent exploits and achievements in a way that makes it all seem meant to be.

What both Jobs and my friend are saying in their own way is that ideas are wildly overrated. An idea is worth absolutely nothing without the ability to make it real and make it good. There are a lot of people who understand this either because they’ve actually made an idea real themselves or because they’ve worked with and respect people who can. But there are a lot of other people who think, as Jobs says, “that the idea is 90 percent of the work.”

Later on in the interview, Jobs speaks with the perspective of someone who has made an idea real before. “It’s that process that is the magic,” he says.

He’s right, of course. The big idea is vastly more simple to grasp and relate to, but there’s really no “magic” in the idea. That only comes when you close your mouth and roll up your sleeves.

If it’s a device, just wait for Apple

In just a few days, you or me or anyone can pre-order the new Vision Pro from Apple. By the time the Super Bowl is being played, people will be walking around wearing them.

Look, it seems to me that Apple is a different company under Tim Cook than it was under Steve Jobs. It is hegemonic, not an upstart. It’s not quite as groundbreaking. Even for a brand with premium pricing, the Vision Pro has an - ahem - eye-watering price tag ($3,500 compared to, say, $600-$700 for the Oculus). And the marketing for it leans on product features and appeals to authority that probably offends Jobs-ian purists.

As a final caveat, I’m not an expert in this stuff. I’m sure Apple has had some flops that I am forgetting, and I have always been skeptical of VR/AR headsets. People have been talking about this stuff for literally decades and it has not come to fruition in the way forecasted.

But if I had to guess, I would guess that we’re entering a new era of computing - yet another ushered in by Apple.

Late last year, I watched the film BlackBerry, which is great for a lot of reasons, most especially for giving us a bald Glenn Howerton doing a CEO version of Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The film climaxes with the announcement of an iPhone, which, of course, destroyed Research in Motion’s market share in quite short order. RIM made many mistakes on the road to oblivion, and, at least according to the film, arrogance was its biggest sin.

But, you know, this stuff is also hard. The first-mover’s advantage, if indeed it is an advantage at all, just buys you time. And Apple seems to put pressure on the market like no other - not just from a time-based perspective, but also in the seeming inevitability of it shifting the paradigm.

I’m reminded of this every time I have to turn on the television in my basement and am disappointed to see the Roku interface pop up. No touchpad. No easy connection to my AirPods. Might have to sign in to a streaming service I’ve signed in to scores of times already. Roku was a nice bit of technology when it first arrived, but as usual Apple did the trick of making it simultaneously less conspicuous in my life and also more integral. It won’t surprise me if the Vision Pro turns out the same way.