One of my favourite moments in horror cinema...

Just ran into this beauty while procrastinating chores. This moment adds incredible credibility to The Hell Priest. They aren’t here for just anyone and using a proxy won’t protect you from their explorations.

Design / Devil Poster

I will be honest, I think the 6.3/10 rating for Devil on IMDB is generous. The film has a pretty silly premise (what if you were trapped in an elevator but, like, with THE DEVIL!!?)….

Which then insists upon a pretty silly execution but worst of all, it seems to have no understanding of what a building security guard’s job and day look like, positioning what are almost universally contracted workers as THE GUYS IN CHARGE THAT KNOW WHAT’S WHAT. It’s just not great. I don’t publicly denigrate other people’s hard work (as a general rule), but I have to mention this in the context of the fact that this meh film has not one, but TWO, absolutely banging posters, from agency Bemis Balkind - since acquired by Insync Marketing. Like, so good….

My personal favourite is first, with the button, but the drama of the elevator must also be given its moment.

Neither poster require their strapline, although film posters often have better straplines than brands - see: Alien: In space no one can hear you scream.

Generative AI? That's a no from me, dawg

GenAI is theft.

That used to be the start of this post. Then this happened.

What a world…

This reporting fills me with abject horror and dread for the world we live in.

Where those without values of their own care nothing for the values of others, nor for the value of others.

So, it is more than theft. It is theft and destruction…sometimes of rare and irreplaceable books. Even when pulled from PDFs, online repositories, etc… for any form of writing, be it creative or otherwise, some argue fair use, but copyright law and the good ol’ Berne convention are pretty clear. It doesn’t matter where you put it, it’s still copyrighted. Anthropic even lost a lawsuit. Because they are thieves. They thieved. They done thefted. It was for $1.5 billion which, at their current revenue of around $82M a day, is just a little over 18 days of revenue.

18 days.

Art, writing, music…

There is nothing to generate from without stealing. Steal - and, being directed to steal - is what these tool systems do and have been instructed to do.

This is not in dispute, but in case search engines feel challenging:

Environmentally, GenAI is disastrous.

And, of course, jobs…

Artistically, GenAi is devoid. Just as ‘content’ isn’t writing, even though writing can be content.

When I started this post, this also hadn’t happened yet:

What a world.

Our richest man sued a state (and thankfully lost, this parenthesis is an update) because they don’t want his AI to make non-consensual deepfake porn. Oh, and of course child porn…its specialty, I guess? In fairness, apparently, xAI is suing a user over this…one user.

I am opposed to the use of GenAI in the arts, full stop.

AI ads gross me out. AI ‘graphic design’ is particularly shit and has apparently taken over the ‘flyer’ space.

I don’t want to patronize it. It saddens me to see the shortcut to a thing. Creativity is not an outcome, it is a process. A craft. I do feel disdain for its use.

Apologists will hem and haw its place. Are there use cases where these toolsets and LLMs are valuable?

Of course.

Research? Potentially invaluable, already. (But, interestingly, is there any compensation for those that published the research that trained the AI that makes billions for others and nothing for those with the talent to have done the research? It’s a fair question, although you can also go back 20 years when Google and, then, Facebook, murdered journalism (like the vampires of old, they were invited in…) to see similar patterns. It’s a playbook.)

Security? Indubitably. Agentic models can detect hackers and hacker agents faster than any human.

Writing to your local politician where you need a bunch of precedent to help your argument? DEFO.

Medicine? Apparently, yes. Especially in early cancer detection.

But art?

I won’t argue the aesthetics of the things…I think of the hellish visions of many horror GenAI accounts and yeah, they can look amazing. But the “I created X in what would take a real artist Y time” is a fallacy. It’s like saying, I stole this bread faster than a baker could bake it.

The writing is still relatively shit, but that will also advance over time. I look at advertising copy and as it has mostly descended to crap, that’s what AI has learned on, but these models are stealing from the greatest writers in history. They have been directed and supplied by people who think that’s okay. Maybe you think that’s okay. I don’t think that’s okay.

Having something isn’t making something. I have experimented with GenAI. I work in a world where AI tools are very useful. I think of Canva using AI on an uploaded ad or video to resize it for 23 different formats. That’s amazing for production time. It makes a lot of sense for what Dave Trott would refer to as the applied arts. But, for the ‘pure arts’? For music? For writing? Dance? Theatre?

That’s a no for me.

Art, as Ethan Hawke says, in the following lovely excerpt, is sustenance.

Agree to Disagree

agreegegious
/əˈɡriː.dʒəs/
adjective

When one concurs with someone (typically, ranked above them in a professional setting) in a way that allows a decision that is extremely bad in a way that is very noticeable.

_agreegegious error: ‘It was an agreegegious error for the team to tell their client that he was right, when all the research and common knowledge of the target indicated that he was wrong.’

Glazing Saddles

Glazy
/glā′zē/
adjective

Not willing to work or be energetic and offering compliments and praise to encourage others to work instead

Glaziness
/ˈgleɪ.zi.nəs/
noun

The state or quality of being lazy, so you increasingly compliment other people’s work, encouraging them to complete your tasks.

(Example: “My kid is so glazy, he insists the toast is ‘better’ when I make it.”)

Tsundoku

I hate to be that white guy that would love a tattoo in an Asian dialect, but IF I WERE, the Japanese word Tsundoku calls to me…

Tsundoku: the act of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up unread.

“The term combines tsunde-oku (to pile things up for later) and dokusho (reading). It originated as Japanese slang during the Meiji era (1868–1912).”

It is often used to describe books on a shelf that are waiting to be read, though the pile itself is a key part of the phenomenon

Although, of course, the final true directive of fan fave hashira, Kyōjurō Rengoku, “Set your heart ablaze!” would probably be up there, too.

We hardly knew ye…

Canxiety

Canxiety

Noun

a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome, caused by the government of the United States and affecting Canadian sovereignty, economic stability and safety.

Tracking Reads

When Pinterest arrived, I had to use it to figure out applications for clients in digital marketing. For myself, i couldn’t see much use. It’s a lot of busy work - activities that lead nowhere. It reminded me of a much prettier version of early Netscape days, carefully curating and organizing bookmarks in a pre-Google era because to close a window was to forever lose that one Geocities page that you really needed.

I did use it to track what I was reading. That seemed like an application that was interesting. I did this from 2014-2017 and then stopped.

Reads, 2014-2017

My problem, at least, I see it as a problem, is I have a hard time remembering when I read the things I read…from what I can best recall, since then, I have read the following…

Reads I can recall, 2018-2022

This is a mixture of my own selections and reading to my children…I am pretty sure there’s a bunch of business and non-fiction missing, but this is my best recollection.

I tend to experience inertia as I switch books. I find it difficult to emerge from a great read and just jump into the next one, but if I don’t, I tend to stop reading for a while and analysis paralysis sets in and I can’t decide what’s next, which is why I adopted a reading system. I have recently amended it to include genres I don’t normally seek out, like mystery, crime, romance, you name it. So, here’s the new roster:

Genre fiction, something really tasty (horror, sci-fi)
More literary fiction
Non-fiction
Business / brain improvement / instructional
Different Genre
Graphic novels (I’d like to return to reading more of these)

These are my ramblings on reading as I seek to once again keep track of the words that traverse the space between these ears.

un callejón sin salida

A passageway with no exit…. I love to capture moments that capture me…although, I can’t always recall exactly why they did…

This is Black Sunshine

I was listening to White Zombie’s BLACK SUNSHINE and wondered…what if the spoken word piece by Iggy Pop had been the copy in an old Ford Mustang print ad… so I found one and made this…. This… is Black Sunshine... (I made this)

Here’s the original piece. I love the original because (having worked in automotive advertising and digital quite a bit) it is clearly a dealer network piece with the approved master brand asset comped in.

Altering the Deal

A little something I wrote for Medium, where I discuss design iterations through the lens of Star Wars because, why not?

Excerpt:

“Episode I alters Star Wars in a way that reminded me of my work life, leading creative departments in general and (a lot of) digital product design, specifically. It updated the mythology in the way that you might update a digital product with a new feature to improve it and it did it in such a way as to change what had come before by implication. THE PHANTOM MENACE iterated on a feature of the original trilogy story that improved the related components of that story in the way designers build and improve the features of digital products and experiences.”

Article: https://dylangerard.medium.com/altering-the-deal-635d7cad0bef