Fingerprints


I'm afraid we're losing our fingerprints.


I love using, experimenting and making myself more efficient with AI. And I love being creative with AI - but only where AI is in the early stages of creativity, part of the brainstorming, refinement, and iterations. The final result, I try to make fully my own. (Admittedly, in the early and still novel days, I was regularly generating images and just using them as-is but this was before developing a more discerning eye for AI. Since then, I use AI as a launching pad not as the final product.)


What worries me though, is how much I'm seeing AI get used right out of the box in our everyday lives. Posters on community bulletin boards. Homework assignments from elementary schools. User groups promoting meet ups. 


What used to be a rich tapestry of people's individual tastes - from the poorly designed posters with clashing colors and excessive use of Comic Sans, to hand-drawn photocopies, to really well made amateur designs - is now a lot of incredibly nice looking noise. And I get that some people don't want to design, can't design, just want to make it easier - but, we're losing the charm, we're losing the imperfections, we're losing their fingerprints.


The tech demo videos that I've watched over the years were once filled with poorly recorded voiceovers featuring a diverse range of accents. Now, I'm hearing more and more crisp and polished speaking voices devoid of all our humanity. It sounds great, but the voices don't tell any story: you don't hear excitement, you don't hear the shyness, you don't hear the confidence, or the struggle. Listening to a voice over gives you a glimpse into the narrator's personal history.


This all reminds me of a Forbes article from 2017 about the 'Brandless' company, focused on launching a number of products in well-designed but super-generic packaging. Rather than a typical 'Heinz' label, bottles simply said 'Ketchup' along with all the most relevant information consumers were looking for. The writer, Ryan Erskine, pointed out that humans are pattern-recognition machines and brands serve as shortcuts for our brains to make quicker decisions. His argument was, by moving away from traditional branding Brandless would become like the generic store brands. Without a brand they'd fail as a mental shortcut for "quality," and instead become a shortcut for "savings" (he goes on to explain the difficulty in convincing consumers to switch their brand preferences to save a few cents).


When I see AI as the first and final step of the creative process, I start worrying how all the little creative parts of our day-to-day lives that we take for granted will become generic. Beautiful, well designed, but generic. And our pattern-recognizing brains will wander the fingerprintless walls of noisy mazes.


So, please...

Step 1: Brainstorm with AI,

Step 2: Improve and refine with AI,

Step 3: Leave your own visible and lasting fingerprints. 

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