My web presence

Sunday 23 June 2024

"AI for the rest of us", Part V

While I described opportunities AI gave in prompt engineering and text processing (ending at previous post here), I tried for fun to create a billboard from an advert I saw in TX or CA 20 or 30 yrs ago: it was Home Depot's "got wood?", after the wildly famous "got milk?" campaign from the Milk Board. 
Showing folks  sporting white 'mustaches' from drinking milk too eagerly, it was the dawn of the photoshop era: milk was traced into mustaches or smiles... "and no milk was spilled in the production of the advert".

Just for fun chatting with a friend, I enter this text in Copilot, Microsoft's handy AI tool that come with their Edge browser:

"show me a Home Depot billboard saying "Got wood?" and showing the midriff of a man w a tool belt and hammer handle at an angle"

This is what it produced in a jiffy:

Click to enlarge

 Not only that, it helpfully suggested "change to a woman with power tools":

Click to enlarge

Blatant sexism aside, this raises all sorts of red flags for me with friends in the art & design space! Sure anyone could Photoshop a pic they took or scraped off the internet, but what about the Home Depot design, future photo shoots, or showing a billboard it is not?

Did the era of word processing usher in the end of printing? No it didn't, as more paper and ink were used afterwards  by pushing usage to the masses! Did Photoshopping and digital cameras  kill the design  world? Likewise it democratised the creative process! 

But the key is that human creativity was preserved, even enhanced with tools. This short exercise, as well as others posted in my blog here and on my Medium channel here, show the danger in letting machines take over the creative process... and eventually replace the creators! Let me close with showing this is just the beginning, when moving from the  static to the dynamic. Feel free to comment below.




Update: this will be my last post as I quit socials and move onto the next phase of my life. Thanks for your reading and bringing hits over ½M in 15 yrs this Sept., averaging 5K hits per month... and topping 15K when I posted my AI explorations!

Click to enlarge




No comments:

Post a Comment

Please send me a copy of your prospectus to