There was a time when any sign you saw was hand drawn. As a child of the 1970s, I remember my daycare bus driving us past a billboard where a man was up there painting it by hand. Lettering on doors and windows would also be hand painted.

Today, digital printing, vinyl cutters and other technologies now do most of these tasks.

Even for the non-artistic, there used to be folks who had excellent handwriting, and others (such as me!) that had unreadable sloppy handwriting.

But on a typewriter, both types of folks could produce the same legible result.

I took drafting in high school. We would sit at a drafting table with a built-in straight edge (ruler) and do everything with a pencil and other tools. Lettering was done by hand.

Then C.A.D. software happened.

Your talent no longer impresses me

There was a time when drawing a perfect circle or straight line was a true talent, but today, anyone at a computer can quickly create a perfect circle or perfectly straight line. While there are people that can still manage to do this without computer assistance, they are just doing it “the hard way.” We are no longer appreciating the result — by we might appreciate the effort. A human that can calculate values in their head is impressive, but no one is impressed if you use a calculator to generate the same result.

This is what I think of when it comes to A.I. As a hobbyist musician, getting into keyboards and MIDI allowed me to perfectly “quantize” my playing so my notes were perfect. Only the best keyboard players could play like that, but my late-1980s synthesizer setup let me do it, and I have awful timing. I still can’t play anything “live” and make it sound good – that remains a domain of the truly talented.

Typing in a prompt and generating a photo or drawing is just modern equivalent of using a computer to draw a straight line or circle. The artists and photographers are just using a new tool that can do some of their work without the actual work.

And the funny thing is, these artists using graphics tablets and drawing software on a computer used those tools to replace the artists that were doing everything with paint and pencils.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you go back and look at the very early drawing programs (say, MacPaint in 1984) and compare them to what artists use today, that is a huge leap in “what the computer is doing for you.”

Is A.I. really any different? It is yet another “huge leap.”

This text was generated 100% by a human*. Feel free to be impressed.

Until next time…

* Except for spell checking. Remember dictionaries? Yeah, good times.