090: Time to set sail and gain advantage

[Before - Session 1: AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs] Thanks, Rick!

First, kudos to all who joined this newsletter over the past couple weeks. I appreciate you inviting me into your inbox. My goal is to illuminate the business of creativity—typically within advertising, marketing, design, brands, and education. I take “business” to mean the practice, habits, mythology, and culture of idea people and their work. I’ve been writing a lot about generative AI, too. That’s the Venn diagram stew at work here, folks.

We are now entering a busier period of publishing, with tomorrow night’s launch of the “AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs” course at MCAD. (Here’s the syllabus.) When I’ve got a course in motion I publish a Sunday evening “Before” post, a Monday evening “During” and then an “After” reflection within a few days. I want you to experience the course as thoroughly as one might via an email newsletter.

As a means of setting expectations for tomorrow, and the course in general, I am ever so grateful for

Rick Webb

and his recent provocation (scroll down to “I still think AI is simultaneously stupid and evil and will destroy us all”). Rick and I worked together in Boston during the hilarious heyday of Web 1.0 when interactivity invaded advertising. We collaborated on a lot of newfangled technology. Then Rick co-founded a shop called The Barbarian Group, and wrote a very useful book on the journey: Agency - Starting a Creative Firm, which I’ve required students to purchase.

So, what will the AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs course include, and focus on? What inspired its creation?

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Dear Rick,

I love Douglas Adams, too. The older I get, the more I suspect we should file his work under non-fiction.

I am also one of those people who are so into it.

Into AI, into this latest technology which is over-hyped, misunderstood, yet surprising, helpful and enlightening. Unlike Noah, I do not use generative AI to code. But I do use it—daily, even hourly—to spar, to advance my thinking, to write and edit, and to help solve strategic and creative problems.

I can’t defend the absurdity, the hallucinations, the verbosity of ChatGPT. One of the key pillars of the course I’m teaching will be the ethics, business models, and capitalistic nuttiness of this latest tech incarnation. We have lots to be wary of.

But you’re paying for the $20 month ChatGPT plan. Have you explored Custom Instructions? You can dictate a universal default: “Always respond in fewer than [x] sentences.” And also, “I have very high expectations of you, so only respond with the most erudite and illuminating syntax.” And give it a way out, “If you don’t know, just say so.” Might help.

And I wholeheartedly agree: “sometimes the best word or phrase is no word or phrase.” But ChatGPT is the wrong tool for that result.

I have found things that are very useful for it to do.

1️⃣ Be my tireless, judgment-free research librarian

As a freelancer, I get brought into realms I am not expert in, and am tasked to respond quickly. Between ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, Claude, Seenapse, and others I can get up to speed ASAP, and far beyond mere search. I can ask and learn about historic context, competitive contrasts, cultural associations—over and over—and at 2:00 a.m. Does it take patience, and practice, to distill pattern regurgitated garbage from something truly useful? Yes. Much like your log splitter, GenAI takes some getting used to.

2️⃣ Be an Art Director’s new best friend

Remember all those junior designers on floor 18 at 101 Huntington? We’d go ask them to find and/or scan images from magazines to help build mood boards. Google Image Search replaced that role, and Dall-e3, Midjourney and Firefly have revolutionized the game. Imagine you wanted to have a nuanced chat about packaging design options for the branded faux gin and tonic your boat and storage company is going to offer new customers. This took me 26 seconds using Dall-e3, which you can access via your GPT-4 account.

3️⃣ Be the means of massively disrupting knowledge work inside corporations

Wharton Prof Ethan Mollick asked Microsoft’s Copilot to “Write a Harvard Business School case about Tesla.” An 8-word prompt. Note, he didn’t specify “use Powerpoint.” And yet, 47 seconds later, he had a reasonably decent presentation. A small, but potent example. I think you’d really appreciate Mollick’s long and winding journey exploring how and why GenAI tools will re-shape how knowledge work gets done.

4️⃣ Help people think in new and interesting ways about problems

There’s the protein-folding space. And the work Zaha Hadid Architects are doing. But for me, I am attracted to the immediate ability to:

• Summarize long, complex sources (i.e. cut/paste a webpage, or PDF)

• Ask questions of data (i.e. have GPT review an Excel file and give insights about the data)

• Provide alternative expressions across media (i.e. translate words into video, or images into text, or into different languages)

And all of the above is especially poignant if, like me, you are a person who works alone.

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Welcome to AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs.

This is an entirely new curriculum, and frankly, an entirely new set of tools and ways of thinking about art, design, and business. We've got a lot to cover, and uncover—but I have one goal for those coming along for the journey:

To gain advantage. 

The reason I'm teaching AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs is to help students gather perspectives, develop their own nuanced point of view, spend lots of time using the latest tools, and ultimately, emerge with a generative AI portfolio that helps advance their artistic and/or entrepreneurial career. 

Look for a “During” post tomorrow evening.