I must admit, it took me long to write this one, mostly for the secondhand embarassement suffered after a casual daily scroll of Linkedin.
The amount of people "preaching" expertise by sharing a prompt, or a half-baked sci-fi video is just too much. As much as making me feel embarassed by proxy.
There's a lot of naivetè as well in the creative landscape. Too much push from big companies towards AI influencers, to "spread the word". The truth is that very few tools out there can really come close to what a professional control could look like.
And that is because AI is hard. Proprietary tools take you 80% there, but it's the extra 20% that really makes the difference. And that 20% is really, really steep. Also really rewarding.
But today I don't want to talk about that. It is just a venting intro, and a call for criteria when chosing an expert.
Today I want to talk about something else.
It's simpler than that
I'm not going to hide the promise of the title much longer. I'm not in the hype business, even if it plays against my reach probably.
Do you know what is the most overlooked piece of the puzzle? Structured data. In creative environments, it is really difficult to have useful structures, and that's because creativity itself can be chaotic. But machines thrive on structure. So the efforts should go towards finding and improving a data structure that can be useful for your activity. That is where the gains, the actual personalization can happen.
This is the part that's actually a lot of self awareness. Because proprietary tools push a way of working over you. And you should empower you own way of working. That's something that they won't give you.
For a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And that can attempt against your own judgement and cognitive sovereignty.
What does that even mean?
If you work on an agency or for a brand, and have volumes of work, then you're sitting on a cultural heritage.
That is what made you different. And machines could be trained to make you reach those results faster. But in order to do that you need to get out of the consumer tools, and dive under the tip of the iceberg. Get into what machine learning is, what open source models can do, and much more.
So what is the prompt?
Well, that's the thing. There's no prompt. There's no magic recipe, because each company, each brand, each agency is different, even if they fundamentally do the same.
There is method. And the first thing to apply method is to understand what is behind the technology. What is behind the vendors, behind the tools. What are the alternatives. What other resources we can use.
It's like learning a new language. It gives you the way to express yourself. Your own ideas. Otherwise the tools use you, and not the other way around.
I can help you with that, write me if you're curious.
The bonus track
Talking about cognitive sovereignty, the other thing that is on the line is your own taste. Models, when used massively, push a specific aesthetic, even if you can't tell on a first glance. And that is reflected back to you. Clients start to want what they see, and what they see is the same that everybody else is doing. Specially what anyone can do.
So their request will disservice them if you cater them blindly. Instead, there's some hand holding to be done, creating a new visual culture in order to save them from uniformity.
Tough times to be a professional. Good times to consolidate processes.
