This imaging revolution will be different than the last one
In 1985 the Aldus Corporation released PageMaker 1.0, and started a revolution. If you were alive and aware at the time, you might remember that, for the next decade or so, the world was littered with awful design — not from professionals, but from “desktop publishers.” Flush with an undeserved sense of expertise, these people covered telephone poles with fliers sporting half a Font menu’s worth of typefaces; they pumped out corporate newsletters with impenetrable arrays of columns stuffed with justified text; they produced ads in local newspapers that lacked balance, coherence or anything that might help the eye understand how to navigate the design.
At the same time, audio production and darkroom work saw similar changes. What these new tools provided were digital equivalents of the analog tools that professionals had been using for decades (or in the case of design and type, for centuries). The new tools were faster and easier to use and, because they lacked any manual dexterity requirement, they usually produced output that was as good or better than what a skilled craftsman could manage with old-school techniques. In a very few instances, they allowed for the creation of elements that could not have been produced with analog tools. (Video and cinema production were seeing similar advancement, but at this time their process was still too expensive to make it down to the desktop level.)
The personal computer was still a new and, for most people, intimidating technology. Those who were comfortable “using computers” were the first ones to be comfortable using these new digital tools and so these people eagerly became the early adopters without stopping to think about whether use of a tool equates to proficiency in a craft. It doesn’t, of course, and after about a decade the real designers had caught up, learned the tools, and the world at large realized it was better to hire a professional designer than a “desktop publisher.”
AI is bringing about huge changes to everything from imaging and audio production to film and video. This media production revolution is different than the last one, though, because AI tools are not merely digital versions of previous tools. There have never been analog or digital tools that can simply do what you ask them to — your paintbrush doesn’t speak English. This means that, unlike with digital tools, you don’t have to have any expertise to produce quality work with AI tools. Yes, it takes some practice to learn how to efficiently write a prompt for an image generator, but that will become less significant as the technology progresses and, in the meantime, what you lack in practice you can make up for with glut — keep generating images until you get a winner.
“But,” you might say, “these AI tools are just that — tools. They have to be guided by expertise.” In certain instances that’s true but because of the way these tools are trained they have a tremendous amount of expertise built-in. That’s the other big difference with this revolution — these tools come with aesthetics. Yes, they can generate a lot of bad images, but they’re also capable of producing incredibly well-composed, well-rendered images with tasteful use of light, shadow, and color, and this predilection for good images will only improve with time. What these tools mean, in terms of media production, is the end of the expert. Because of AI, the word “specialist” will become an archaic term.
Having a skillset go obsolete is nothing new. Even within the realm of digital imaging there have been huge leaps and changes. Photoshop didn’t get layers until version 3. Before then, if you wanted to perform any compositing, you had to know your CHOPS — CHannel OPerationS. The CHOPS skillset was so significant that commercial plug-ins were sold to try to automate it. Then, in a single update, Adobe obviated any need for that particular expertise.
AI stands poised to completely level the playing field for media generation, eliminating entire disciplines. So should you be panicking? Only if you lack creativity.
Like Photoshop, a few years later, PageMaker and the newly-affordable laser-printing tools of the 80s also sounded a death knell for entire disciplines. Cutting rubyliths, photographing halftones, stripping (not that kind) and many other precision crafts went away, but many others developed. Whatever you think of it, grunge typography and design would not have happened without digital tools. On the audio side: rap required beat boxes and drum machines. Will AI similarly create new disciplines and new areas of expertise? It’s hard to imagine what those might be, but painters in the 19th century felt the same way — at first.
When listening to photographers expressing moral outrage at the injustice of AI technology, it’s hard not to hear the echoes of 19th-century painters who were certain that photography would bring about the end of art. They, of course, made their living largely off of painting portraits and so recognized that the market for portrait painting had mostly come to an end. Without question, many of them did lose work and so bailed out to other professions. The ones who recognized that cameras couldn’t do everything went on to create impressionism, cubism and abstract expressionism.
Without question, many CEOs will choose to put shareholder value over the well-being of their employees and so will choose to turn paying work over to an AI. (They’re the ones who will take your job away — not a piece of software.) But as for the future of image making, AI will only lead us forward as those who have the wherewithal to do so will figure out how to discover and make media we’ve never seen before. These people will legitimize AIs as fine art tools, just as cameras were eventually recognized as such.
This revolution will not be like the last one, because it enables more people. And the results will not be like the last, because we’ve never seen image making power like this in the hands of so many.
