When I was at school, I was oddly serious about school projects.
I had a mild obsession with making them look like professional books or brochures. We didn’t have a computer, but I steered my parents into getting a proportional-spacing typewriter and used that (which dates this), and a photocopier to change sizing of chunks of text.
I also scraped together enough cash to get a DeVilbiss Super 63A airbrush, an old second-hand compressor, and rigged a system that let me use the compressed air at my homemade homework desk. That airbrush was brilliant.
At one stage I also had a book by Michael English out on semi-permanent loan from the local library (again, that dates all this).
We still talk about “airbrushing” in the context of people photos, but airbrushes aren’t a thing any more. I still have mine, somewhere, as a nostalgic item, but there’s no need for it now. It’s been that way for a very long time. It takes a lot of skill, a lot of practice, to be good at using one, and nobody needs to take all that time to learn. You have to develop an eye for what it’s really doing, because even more than the use of the actual tool, the main element in the process is masking what you don’t want painted.
Funnily enough, that exact skill turned out to be needed for Photoshop, which is the main reason airbrushes aren’t common any more.
Life moved on, I stopped using an airbrush to create art, and had digital tools.
Something about the way what we’re calling “AI” has emerged feels familiar, and I think it’s because of that.
There’s no doubt that, in a certain way, using Photoshop is easier than using an airbrush. It’s cleaner and faster, and easier to see what you’re doing. Changing colours is instant, and there’s an infinite inexhaustible supply of them. You don’t have to wash anything. Masking doesn’t get used up or get messy, and doesn’t come unstuck or stick too hard and spoil the surface. You can be precise in a way that’s difficult with paper or film and a surgical scalpel.
Plus there are just ever more things you can do with a pixel image that simply aren’t possible with actual physical art.
Photoshop itself is changing with AI tools, now.
What was difficult with physical tools became sort of less difficult with digital, but as the possibilities expanded there was more to it. I’m not sure, overall, there has been less skill learning to use Photoshop, but it’s been wider. More abstract, more cerebral and less about craftsmanship. It’s early days, but some of that is starting to become unglued, now, and it’s moving towards a situation where we ask the software, in words, to produce the effect we want. De-skilling again, right?
Meanwhile, I’ve moved ahead recently on several software projects that I had stalled over for a long time because I didn’t have the knowledge I felt I needed. I can do my day job, obviously, and I know the tools and language, the frameworks I need, how it all hangs together, but breaking fresh ground is different.
But I have a new colleague called ChatGPT, and that makes the difference. They’re often incorrect in the detail, but they know so much that it’s like having an experienced person at hand to ask, and when it’s not quite right it’s usually a clue where to look. So I’ve created whole new things in systems I was completely unfamiliar with, and they work, in far less time than if I had to learn properly. De-skilling, right?
What happens when everything is like this? Are we heading for a future where there is no skill that makes a difference? One where anybody can simply ask for something to be done and machines will do it?
Where’s the satisfaction of mastery … where’s the chance of a high-paying or fulfilling job, in that world?
It might be that this time really is different, and the machines are about to hollow out the world of work and creation for humans, and we’ll be left with doing things only for fun or for the cachet of “hand-made”.
But my airbrush nostalgia makes me think otherwise.
It depends what we’re doing things FOR.
I’m wistful for the feeling I got from loading up ink or gouache into my DeVilbiss and wisping it just right over artboard. But I didn’t learn to do that for its own sake, the feeling is a retrospective thing.
What I wanted was the result. I had ideas and visions, and learning to use the tools was the only way to realise them.
When other, better, tools arrived, I moved on without a backward glance, because the results were what it was all about. Anything that gave me a better chance of achieving what was in my head was a good thing, whatever the cost in forgone accomplishment. I have slowly realised that not everybody has the same needs, the same ideas.
If you want to create something, you’ll use whatever tool there is that gives you the best result.
If you just think the tool is cool, or the skill enviable, you’ll have a completely different attitude.
Generative AI isn’t all wonderful. It makes the bar for putting something “creative” out into the world so low that real creativity is, as it looks right now, in danger of being swamped in an exponential form of Sturgeon’s Law. That annoys me as much as anyone.
But I do think that long-term fewer of us should feel threatened by it than are worried.
If you feel that AI is coming to undermine what you do, you may be right if what you value for yourself and what sets you apart is the mechanics of what you do. Specific knowledge and specific skills have always been in danger from progress, and machines may just be making a leap that threatens all of that.
But if it’s your ideas, your vision … even your taste … that is really your driver, I think we have a lot longer before machines can encroach on that. If you’ve gained your knowledge or your skill because of what you feel needs to be done, rather than for its own sake, it’s actually not hard to give it up as long as you hang on to the reason for it.
Yes, in future we may be asking machines to do what we used to do ourselves. That feels unsettling, because anybody could do it.
Anybody won’t do it, though. They never do.
Only the people who have a need. Which has always been a minority, and never included a machine.