The Artificial Intelligence learning curve.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director
www.LopezMartiMiami.com/

• Your kids are doing their homework with AI.
• You are probably toying with it too.
• The learning curve, however, is an asymptote.
• Don’t know what an asymptote is?
• No need to ask ChatGPT.
• Asymptote: a curved line that approaches another line toward infinity but never gets to intersect with it.
• An asymptote is an abstraction (hold that thought for a minute, more on that below).
• A metaphor for a perennial work in progress in perpetual beta mode.
• Be prepared for an awful lot of AI pivoting, reinvention, unlearning, retraining and hyperventilating.
• See, as is often the case with new technology, the first attempt with a tool such as AI is to create “faster horses”*.
• For now, haste makes waste.
• Marshall McLuhan said: “We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror” (or something along these lines).

ARTSYFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

There are two ways to use AI:

1. To learn
2. To create

• In the first case, AI must be taken with reservations: it is indeed useful but still has the tendency to “hallucinate” (geekspeak, when AI harvests data from unvetted internet sources and spits out inaccurate information).
• It will take time for the big AI platforms to reduce this margin of error to an acceptable level.
• Whilst doctors and CPAs are relying more and more on AI, their mushy gray matter is still irreplaceable if we want intelligible diagnoses and tax returns.
• Speaking of creativity.
• Unbound from the constraints of accuracy, AI is a prodigious fire hose of happy accidents.
• Brainstorming on steroids.
• When photography was invented in the second half of the XIX century (aka the “daguerreotype”), it became a serious threat to the art world that had operated for centuries on the premise of portraying reality as faithfully as possible.
• Art’s main mission had been to capture and represent our sensory world with maximum accuracy.
• Technique was the name of the game: perspective, volume, light, detail, contrast, texture.
• Unfortunately for accomplished painters, photography achieved all this instantly and with uncanny precision.
• Henceforth, if you were a portrait artist in 1860, you had two options.
• Option 1: quit, become a bricklayer, join the Foreign Legion.
• Option 2: experiment, reinvent your craft within a new paradigm.
• In other words, create the avant-garde: impressionism, symbolism, cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, conceptualism, etc, etc, etc.
• New formats, new languages, new stimuli.
• If the progression of post figurative art can tell us anything, abstraction will be the name of the AI game.
• Abstraction as in creativity liberated from the boundaries of representational or associative qualities.
• McLuhan also said: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us”
• You might’ve already noticed that AI is facilitating the speedy creation, or should I say regurgitation, of industrial amounts of half-assed, tired tropes with very short shelf life.
• Stay positive: happy accidents will show us the way.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

• Whatever we invent with AI’s acceleration will inevitably come with tighter deadlines.
• The one thing we can always expect from new tech is that it will increase our collective level of impatience.
• Not too long ago in the ad industry, clients knew that creating a handful of reasonably well thought out creative executions demanded, say, a week.
• Thanks to technology, clients and bosses now operate on the premise that you are reachable 24/7 and can solve his or her problem in minutes, if not seconds.
• Instant gratification.
• No latency.
• Zero lag.
• I want it all and I want it now.
• Let me rephrase: I don’t know what I want but I want it now.
• Disclaimer: I am not whining about work/life balance.
• I knew what I was getting myself into when I started out in this business.
• Acceleration to keep the beast sated will be critical.
• The good news: it will necessitate more specialized labor and create more niche jobs.

*I am alluding to Henry Ford’s possibly apocryphal line: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”