originally posted on Linkedin
A few months ago, Pentagram, one of the oldest, most well-respected design firms in the world, designed a website for the Federal Government of the United States. Paula Scher’s team came up with a handmade look for the illustrations on the website. They carefully cut out and painted shapes and images in the chosen colors. The illustrations feel simple yet sophisticated, playful yet serious enough for a government website, real in a way that might deter your mind from the fact that you’re on a website controlled by a genocidal oligarchy.
And then they fed their work into Midjourney.
I don’t think it matters here what Midjourney spewed out. What matters is that this is one of the wealthiest possible clients commissioning one of the most arts-and-crafts-inclined women in the high society of the design industry, and the best they could do was to generate half-assed illustrations with generative AI.
I don’t want to talk about the environmental impact of generative AI. It’s neither the first nor the last thing to heavily contribute to the destruction of “the only home we’ve ever known.” I don’t want to talk about machine learning or general AI: I’m glad we’re at a point where they can potentially be used to save lives. I do, however, absolutely want to discuss generative AI, especially in art, design, fashion, photography, and cinema, and how terrifying it is to think that maybe the future generations create nothing but AI prompts.
Before I start this rent I want to recommend josh (The Nuke)’s video titled You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) I will have other materials at the end of this, and I love them all and they are all directly or indirectly about eating the generative AI and feeding the artists, but none of it is quite as beautiful or quite as eloquent as this one.
I’ve been wanting to write this for a while now, and then, on January 15, I logged into Mastodon to write a post about how funny Drake’s lawsuit was and saw the news I never thought I’d get during my lifetime: David Lynch was dead. I’ve thought about the possible deaths of probably everyone I know except David Lynch. I wasn’t the only one. Very few men in the public eye have moved as respectably as he did. He got everything right. He changed the possibilities of what we could see in the movie theatre and on the small screen. An artist in the truest sense there could be. For the days following his death, every social media timeline I was on (except this one) flooded with tributes in a way I’d never seen before. From people like me who lived half a planet away in a society very different from his, to people like Kyle MacLachlan who owe their career to the man, we were, more than anything else, grateful for the art, the words, the presence. I was not planning to use him as a device to prove a point here, but I will now. I think we owe him to at least keep this thing he loved so much alive. Lynch, on the surface, was the intersection of painting, crafts, music, writing, and cinema. He was also the unified deep water all those things surfaced from.
Kyle MacLachlan gave an interview about Lynch a few days after he died. Here’s what stuck with me:
“When David was a kid, his mother wouldn’t let him use coloring books because she thought they would kill his creativity. I think of that as the David Lynch origin story. He was given a world without lines and went about making his own.”
His origin story. So that’s what I want us to think about when hiring someone who will write a Midjourney prompt and get a puke of stolen ideas. I want you to think about what world you’re building by prioritizing those people instead of the artists who devote their lives to expressing a unique experience, an intimate piece of themselves every time they present you their work. Those are the ones who have transcended – those who have gone deep into the ocean to bring you the biggest, brightest fish. What they present is their culture, their childhood memories, their most detriment traumas and their most triumphant healings, their love and hate, their grandma’s food and the posters in their teenage room, their first kiss and first breakup, and all their heartbreaks, all the music they’ve listened to and all the movies they watched, stitched together into a piece that feels, as Twitter would say, like touching grass.
I do believe that all art is affected by what came before, but I also believe that it’s always original. There is a reason why two academic painters with the same decades of experience will not paint the same still life the same way. Even when matching all other parameters – the object, the light, the distance, the angle – you can never really match the personality, and therefore never get the same result. Think about what a blessing it is to see those individual perspectives. There is a subreddit called r/redditgetsdrawn, where, if you are brave enough to post your photo, random people will draw you for free. Try it out and realize that even the ones you think are badly drawn have the person’s unique view of you, and maybe it will make you as emotional as it did me.
Why does it matter though, you might ask. Why do we need to care about personality? And I think even if you don’t give two fucks about how personal a piece you’re looking at is, you might care about its quality. That’s a loaded word – quality. Bliss Foster, who is the guy to follow for fashion content, has a YouTube video dissecting that word, searching for its meaning, and trying to understand what produces it. After doing that for about forty minutes, he arrives at the simplest definition, which I cried listening to: The only thing that produces quality is care. A Hermes Birkin is the epitome of a high-quality product not necessarily because they use perfect leather or high-quality threads. It’s because the people making them put decades of experience and truly thousands of dollars worth of care in the process.
The Twin Peaks return isn’t a high-quality piece of television art because the actors are famous, or because they spent a shit ton of money on visual effects. Many of the effects, in fact, might seem too cheap and janky. It is high-quality because it is the amalgamation of Lynch’s craziest, most novel, most disturbing, most thought-provoking ideas. It’s high-quality because Lynch put as much care into it as if it was his newborn child. In one interview my BFF Jim Jarmusch says:
“I think the masterpiece that took the last few years in American cinema is really Twin Peaks: The Return. Eighteen hours of incomprehensible T.V. It wasn’t easy for him, and, by the way, no one will finance David Lynch’s feature films — so, what the fuck, I don’t get it.”
Let it sink in that Lynch died with possibly millions of ideas that you will not get to witness and that your kids will not get to witness because the world increasingly prioritizes the surface (Emilia Pérez has 13 Oscar nominations this year smh).
I want you to understand that’s what you’re losing by using generative AI, even in a setting as commercial as your business: Quality and personality. And if real artists (I will never consider AI prompt writers neither artists nor designers nor musicians) can’t get a living wage by creating that art – eventually we’ll lose access to it altogether. And then what will we have left? Or do we only care about saving money now? Will anything work? Are we back to worshipping the David Ogilvy way of advertising? He must, indeed, die. Here’s Why ‘David Ogilvy’ must die by David Baldwin.
A lot more I could say here, but really the only reason I went on this rant was so that I could give you a list of things that will either help navigate the increasingly dark www, or will explain this matter way better than I can. You can find the list below and if you get to it, feel free to suggest others.
All of this is to say that I hope Lynch rests in the sunlight and gets to bring all his ideas to life. I also hope we keep his memory alive by continuing to transcend, to catch the big fish, and to reward those who do.
Archives (for inspiration & public work you can use freely):
Public domain image archive
Public work by Cosmos
Internet Archive
Flickr Archive spreadsheet
Casual Archivist: sources
Free image stocks (so that you can’t justify skimping on paying a photographer):
Unsplash.com – Photos, illustrations, 3D renders
Pexels.com – Photos, videos
Kaboompics.com – Photos/photoshoots
Wikimedia Commons – Images, sounds, videos
Pixabay.com – Photos, videos, illustrations, vectors, music, sound effects, GIFs
Gumroad is a website where people upload all sorts of assets, often free to use.
Nightshade is a tool to act against AI models stealing your art.
Recommended reading/watching list:
josh (The Nuke) – You are a better writer than AI (Yes, you)
David Lynch – Catching the Big Fish
Tilda Swinton on the State of Cinema
David Foster Wallace – David Lynch Keeps His Head
Ayan Artan – in defense of pretension.
David Baldwin – Why ‘David Ogilvy’ must die
Bliss Foster – What does “High Quality” Mean in High Fashion?
Elizabeth Goodspeed on what happens when we treat the past like a stock library
JakeDontDraw – How AI Tricked the World's Largest Painting Competition
Drew Gooden – YouTube is obsessed with AI