BIG QUESTIONS
Does artificial intelligence dumb us down?
As humans continue puzzling out the trade-offs with AI, it’s worth pondering whether it’s turning us all into mindless clickbots. Compare these two scenarios and decide for yourself:
You’re on one of your daily trips through the online information jungle – exploring, feeding your curiosity, and seeing where it leads you. You’re fully engrossed and learning as you click to and fro.
Now imagine that instead of being self-directed, you have a guide telling you where to go, narrating the entire journey, and giving you fully formed ideas.
When you hand over the discovery and synthesis to someone else and let your brain get chauffeured around, you don’t really digest information. It’s still informative, but it engages far less of your noggin. It might make us more efficient, but it also lulls us into adopting homogenized thinking as our own. And we’re left unchanged by it.
Will we notice?
DESIGN WE ❤️
Fockups design mockups
Designers spend a lot of time in a rarefied world of ultra high resolution pixels and ample white space. From the dizzying heights of our standing desks, it’s easy for us to forget that our designs often reside in a world that is gritty, subject to weathering, abuse and neglect. When we mock up our designs to sell to a client, we instinctively choose environments that are as unrealistically clean as our designs. Maybe that’s why we love Fockups, a collection of design mockups that are based in reality as it is, not as we would like it to be.
So the next time you’re mocking up your beautiful app home screen for a client to review, try being honest—drop it onto a backdrop of a dude holding a phone whilst sitting on the throne.
BEEP BOOP
““Flow” has been found: Brain scans of Philly jazz musicians reveal secrets to reaching creative flow —by reducing activity in the frontal lobes involved in executive function, you relax conscious control over other parts of the brain. Let goooo Luke!
“Apolytus” is a word meaning, “The moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin.” It’s just one of the many unique and wonderful terms defined in “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.” (NYT Best Seller)
Welp, coffee sure is popular: 67% of adults had a cup o’ joe in the past day — the highest quantities in the past 20 years. Gulp.
World Wide Wasteland: There are 6,000,000 articles about how to winterize your home – most of them crap.
13 ways to contact Facebook support.
SPECIAL FEATURE
Yes, search is changing. No, AI isn’t taking over
There’s an avalanche of low-quality AI-generated content going up on the internet right now as brands try to use this shiny new tool to drive clicks. But Google has been at war with crappy “spray and pray” content since 2011, and their new updates are punishing brands for spewing it. With an aim to reduce unhelpful content by 40%, Google has de-indexed some sites and tightened up its spam policies — effectively elevating content from known (human) authors who are experts in their field and demonstrate that expertise through content.
Net net: the same rules still apply:
- Hire humans to write unique content that has a point of view
- Quality over quantity
- Be prudent in how you use AI
- Focus on quality KPIs: social shares, backlinks, and content interactions
WORD TO THE WISE
“When we are grounded in our own truth, when we have the courage to lead from a place of integrity and purpose, we become a source of strength and guidance for others. We inspire those around us to be their best selves, to bring their own unique gifts and talents to the table.”
—Karl Backus, Creative Director, author, professor
WHAT CLIENTS WANT
Here’s to the lazy ones
Cheeky cereal brand Surreal claims to do the impossible: they make healthy breakfast cereal that tastes freakin’ awesome (so they say). They also make hilariously bad and unabashedly lazy advertising. Typos, screenshots, and cringe-worthy Microsoft Word art appear to suggest that the designer was a cat walking across a keyboard. The slovenly incompetence comes across as hilarious, surprisingly relatable and completely disarming. How refreshing!
ICEBREAKER
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve done with ChatGPT so far?
Todd: I asked for a rowing workout to prepare for a 1,000 meter race that’s happening in 6 days. It came back to me with a solid and sophisticated, well-structured workout with a warm up, interval piece, technique piece, power piece, and a cool down.
Melissa: I asked it to write an author bio for me – then ended up arguing with it that I wrote my book, One Pound Twelve Ounces, not Melissa Harris Perry. For some reason the AI machine just couldn’t believe that I wrote a book.
John: Probably the most interesting thing I’ve done with ChatGPT so far is to ignore it completely. Let’s see how long I can get away with this strategy. ?
Laura: For a fintech client with a complicated product and not much branding work done, I asked it to tell me why X type of customer would need my client’s product and what specific emotions and scenarios they would hope to experience with it. Got some really solid insights that helped me write benefit-driven copy.
Sarah: I’m with John on this one. I have yet to so much as type a single prompt into ChatGPT. Call me old fashioned. Or maybe just old. But it all just gives me the ick.
Marielle: I used ChatGPT to quickly write a hilarious limerick for my son on his birthday. He took one look and with a deadpan tone, said, “you used ChatGPT for this.
FALLACIES, PARADOXES & THEORIES…OH MY
The Prometheus Complex
Just as the Greek titan Prometheus defied the gods to give humanity knowledge and power, humans are on a quest to defy the gods and perfect an AI that transcends human limitations. By imbuing machines with an intelligence superior even to our own, we raise ethical, moral, and existential questions and invite unintended consequences. This is the modern manifestation of the Prometheus Complex – the dreaming of the impossible dreams.
