Prompting our way to conformity.

Selling a vision has always been part of the job of a commercial artist. And part of that process was sketching what it’s going to look like. I imagine Da Vinci sketched out his fair share of storyboards. Here's what I'm thinking for the ceiling, it's gonna be epic.

Up until very recently, ideas were drawn out, literally. In the Mad Mean days the creative directors and writers would hash out an idea and send it off to the art department to be illustrated. By hand. And likely those initial ideas were pencil sketches on the back of a napkin. Pen and paper were the stock and trade.

When I was coming up in studios, most of us couldn't draw. Kind of like writing in cursive, drawing became something of a lost art as computers entered the scene. As the computer became central to the workflow, it took over a large part of concept illustration. We got pretty damn good at compositing highly detailed images using Photoshop, After Effects, and 3D. It took time. Days. But it got us really close to an approximate vision of what the shot would eventually look like. We could hire an illustrator for sequencing, supplement with reference images. There was always the understanding that these were sketches, and we were asking the client to imagine the rest.

In the last few years, certainly the last two, that process has been almost completely taken over by AI. We feed it references, maybe some rough positioning sketches, dial in our prompts, and with a few iterations end up with something that looks pretty great. Better than great. It looks finished. Like the frames were pulled from a final piece.

And that's the problem. We’ve shortened the imagination gap to the point that it doesn’t exist.

In the imagination gap, the client has to trust that on the other side of it, the designers were going to bring it to life, go off for a spell and come back with something incredible. That gap is where originality lives. When we get to the solution too fast, we don't make room for the unusual idea, the weird mistake that’s really a stroke of genius. When we get to the finish line too fast, we miss the scenery.

When AI gives us instant perfection, we risk prompting ourselves into conformity. Just like efficiency and craft don’t belong in the same sentence, neither does art and generative content. AI certainly has a place in production, and efficiency in commercial art is important, but as AI increasingly enters the workflow, it’s imperative as artists we resist the temptation to get to a result ASAP. Original work takes time.