LTP 137: Copilots not Replacements 1

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• Bart Busschots (host) – @bbusschots – Flickr

In this solo show Bart shares some recent experiences engaging with creative professionals, and how those experiences have helped clarify some of his thinking on whether or not AI bots can replace photographic creative professionals. As you might well deduce from the title, he doesn’t think so, but do you agree with his reasoning?

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Reminder – you can submit questions for future Q & A shows at http://lets-talk.ie/photoq

A bunch of apparently unrelated things have me thinking a lot about the intersection creativity and AI recently, which of course means I've been thinking about AI and photography again. The more I think about it, the more I realise Microsoft’s Satya Nadella seems to have the right idea on all this, and that Microsoft’s Copilot branding for their AI agents is spot on. The AIs aren't going to replace creatives, they're going offer us a helping hand to do our thing even better.

Backstory — Engaging with Creative Professionals

For various reasons, I’ve found myself engaging with more creative professionals in the last half a year or so than I have in ages. As an IT professional I’m used to people engaging my creativity to solve their problems, and that has certainly given me a lot of experience in the art of translating from normie-speak to my particular jargon. Not to mention the art of engaging with customers to try understand what they’re really trying to achieve. I like to think I do that quite well, but in all my years I’ve rarely been the normie engaging someone else’s experience, creativity, and expertise, until recently! And, I’ve found it to be a rewarding and enlightening experience.

Story 1 — Professional Audio

In the second half of last year I engaged a professional audio production agency for the first time. If you’ve listened to any of the recent shows you’ve heard the result of that engagement. Having spent many years on my wish-list, I now have a Bartificer Creations audio tag to sonically brand these shows, and a short little sonic icon to brand any and all audio work I do, on these shows and elsewhere. The tag is what you hear on the Let's Talk podcasts announcing that they're Bartificer Creations. I've chosen to include it as the very first thing you hear, even before the theme tune. And the sonic icon is the short little Intel-inside-like two-tone audio jingle you hear at the very end, after the closing theme. The sonic icon’s two tones invoke the sound of the words “let’s talk”.

I simply adore these, so I’m gonna give a big shout-out to the wonderful creative professionals responsible for these two pieces of custom sonic branding — they are by Defacto Sound, the company behind Twenty Thousand Hertz, the amazing podcast all about our sonic universe. They mentioned at the end of one of their shows that one of the ways you could support the podcast is to employ the company for some audio work. So I reached out to them last summer, and a long, enjoyable, and very fruitful creative collaboration began. It took months to get from my conceptual idea to the few seconds of audio they delivered around Christmas time. But they're just perfect. They're exactly what I really wanted, rather than what I thought I wanted. They're not something even the most impressive AI I can imagine could have done for me. Why? Because I could never have created a prompts to get to there from where I was at the start of the process. I needed the engagement with skilled, creative, experts to discover what I really wanted as opposed to why my inexpert brain thought I wanted!

The creative process kicked off with a broad-ranging conversation with two of Defacto Sound’s creatives. We talked about my podcasts, what I’m hoping to achieve with them. What my aspirations are for the shows. Why I do things the way I do, what I hoped people felt when listening, and so on. We talked about my brand in general — was I happy with my logos, the mic one and the bracketed <b> one? I was, so why? What was it about them I liked? Did I like my current theme tunes? How were they created? What had I asked the composer for? Why did I like them?

BTW — a big shout-out to that composer, Brendan Finan, and old college friend, and an Irish music teacher, composer, and author. Bren produced the original single theme that both Let's Talk shows shared for many year, and the newer individual themes you've been enjoying for the past year or two.

We talked about my personality, how do I like people to think about me? How much or how little do I like leaning into my Irish identity? They'd done their research up front and had noted the greens all over my visual branding, and the use of the orange from the Irish tricolour as my accent colour.

Finally, we talked about my taste in music.

We decided to start with the longer tag, then, when that was figured out we’d find some aspect of the tag to key the shorter icon off.

The key concepts we settled on were that the feel needed to be friendly, approachable, a little modern, but traditional enough to feel un-intimidating. I preferred the idea of keying off real instruments, but was open to going a little more synthetic if the feel was right. Finally, I agreed it was OK to lean in a towards Irish themes, but not to let that dominate, and absolutely no Paddy-whackery (the kind of OTT stereotypes some in America love but I find offensive and obnoxious)!

Then they went off for a few weeks and worked up some ideas. They came back to me with six initial ideas accompanied by a slide deck explaining their thinking behind each one and relating them to different aspects of our conversations. The expectations were clear, this was a starting point, not a final menu. The idea was for my detailed feedback to fuel a second round of hopefully near-final options.

As expected, none of these first six concepts were close to perfect, but three in particular contained ideas that spoke to me. Those three little sparks fed into the second round which produced two near-perfect options. We'd focused down to the idea of a chaotic start cohering into a harmony to represent the shows' focus on bringing understanding and clarity to the audience, to the little two-tone that became the icon, and to a voice and phrasing I liked for the vocal track. And yes, the instrumentation of the two-tone is Apple-inspired

I neither know nor care whether or not the Defacto Sound team used AI to help them with their execution of the work. I just care about the quality of the final product!

Like I say, I have no idea whether or not they actually did use AI in late 2024, but I doubt they won’t be by using it in some form for similar work in 2029. But so what‽ That’s not what made them so valuable to me, the value came from the decidedly human interactions that helped me discover and express my deeper desires for the project. To get from what I thought I wanted to what I really wanted.

Story 2 — a Suite of Logos

Way back when I first started to muse about starting my own shows on some of the other shows I was then appearing on, a listener who happened to be a graphic designer donated an engagement to develop a logo for the show to help get me going. That’s where the green mic logo still used today comes from! Thank you Gérard Moonen!

When I decided to start branding all my creative endeavours under the single Bartificer Creations brand I reached out to Gérard again (and despite trying desperately let me pay him for his work, he insisted on donating his services again — you rock Gérard ). The result of this engagement was the green and orange lower-case b wrapped in chevrons logo I still use today. I adore both of Gerard’s logos — they fit me perfectly

Presumably because I love the logo so much, I started to use the core part of the logo (the bit without the words) for other things that were not really related to Bartificer Creations — I was starting to dilute the brand and associate it with more and and more things. Late last year I decided it was time to stop doing that, and instead to expand the logo into a suite of related logos I could use in different contexts.

Specifically, I wanted to add three additional logos for:

1. The holding company that I set up for really dull and boring adult reasons that I chose to name Bartificer Holdings.
2. Me, the person.
3. And myself and my better half, Wing, as a couple.

Being graphics rather than audio I felt a little more on my home soil for this project, so what I figured that since what thought I wanted was probably a lot closer to what I really wanted this time, I didn't need to spend big money this time with a graphics agency en-par with Defacto Sound (my creative budget was running too low for that ). At the very least I knew I'd need much less translation from normie-speak to graphics jargon, so I went for a simpler option and engaged and old acquaintance who does graphics work on the side, and who I know has a good eye for graphics and is much more skilled than I am with graphics editing tools.

The brief this time was to keep the colours, the font, and the basic concept of letters wrapped in some kind of punctuation marks from the original logo, and develop three similar but different new logos. I was even pretty sure I knew which punctuation characters I wanted to use — curly braces for myself and Wing as a couple, square braces for the boring corporate identity, and round brackets for myself, the well rounded individual.

Again, the process started with a conversation that was all about the why and the desired feel of the logos. It was about communicating deeply human things between humans again.

In this case — a really good AI would have made things worse, because I was suffering a little from the infamous Dunning-Kruger effect — I had a little knowledge! I thought I knew exactly what I wanted, and I would have been able to express those requirement in prompts to an AI, and I could have gotten what I thought I wanted relatively easily. Thankfully I was self-aware enough not to try that!

As you might expect, by adding another human with more experience and expertise into the mix we ended up with better designs for all three logos. None are a million miles off my original idea, but all are noticeably better than what I had visualised in my own head at the start.

I'd assumed that with the exception of the corporate logo, I'd want to stick with lower-case letters, and I thought I'd play around with shared vertices — I would have reversed an upper-case Bs in BH and have it share one side of an upper-case H, and I'd have gone with two back-to-back lower-case bs, with the left one mirrored, for personal logo. Finally, I'd have stacked a lower-case b over a lower-case w for the couple's logo.

I wasn't totally wrong in my thinking though — I was correct to think square braces for a formal corporate identity, curly braces for a union of two humans, and round braces for me, the person. The final logos do indeed have that structure.

So, what did engaging with another, more experienced, human bring into the mix? Ultimately, three important tweaks that make the final logos dramatically better than my naïve original plans:

1. Despite what I thought, upper-case was more appropriate than lower in most cases. The lower-case which worked great with the chevrons in the original logo was not a fundamental properly of the look — it was just what worked best with that particular letter-brace combination. Varying the case between logos would not break the unified feel of the set, and could actually add some nice variation.
2. Letter pairs really don't need to be the same size as each other, and definitely don't need to share the same baseline. Allowing for variations in size and baseline results in much more human-feeling logos!
3. Adding an ampersand to the letters for a couple really adds a sense of union.
4. The overall concept of brackets and braces can be stretch to include geometric shapes, and can even be rotated.

The end result — three superb logos to compliment the original!

Starting withe the corporate logo — much to my surprise, lower case letters proved to be much better, even in the rigid square braces. Even more to my surprise, varying the letter size and baseline was not just OK, it really brought the logo to life!

Moving on to the couple's logo, the addition of that ampersand really did elevate things to another level. This time, the letters are the same size, while the ampersand is smaller, and I love how that reflects our equality within our union.

Finally, the logo I was initially more sure about proved to be the last one to come together. The rounded braces left and right were just not working. The resulting logo was too rectangular to fit with the rest of the set, and it looked bland and un-interesting. Like a misspelled copyright logo!

This is where engaging someone with more expertise and experience really paid off. Because I trusted my acquaintance's taste, if gave them freer reign than I'd originally planned, and asked for any ideas, no matter how different from my original thoughts, and that was the key. They didn't stray far off the reservation, just far enough outside my initial brief to land on a perfect solution that still feels harmonious with the rest. They replaced the actual punctuation characters with idealised true circular segments, and rotated them 45 degrees to add a nice diagonal element to the design. Then, to add the needed little splash of whimsey, varied the size of the two letters. All of those conceptual leaps were beyond my limited imagination, I needed help to get there!

One last little detail I want to highlight — notice that the mix of upper and lower case is not random! For all four of the logos, Humans get upper-case letters, and corporate entities don't! That little touch of deeper meaning really unifies the whole set nicely for me, and not something I'd have ever brought to the table on my own.

Story 3 — Coding with GitHub Copilot

The last piece of context is my recent inclusion of some AI agent assistance in my professional live — we were given the OK to use Microsoft’s various Copilot AI agents, so I adopted the one that fits my work best. I write a lot of PowerShell code these days, so I've enabled the GitHub Copilot AI agent in the VS Code IDE. I now have an ever-present helping hand while I get on with my coding tasks.

This closes the circle nicely, because here I'm the subject matter expert considering whether and how AI can help me do my work. The people consuming the outputs from my code neither know nor care where or not I used AI to get the job done — they just need the data or the functionality my code delivers for them!

I honestly didn't know what to expect when I enabled the AI agent. Now that I've been letting it help me for a few weeks, I can report that my initial thoughts on AI have been reinforced by the experience. Microsoft really did name this technology appropriately by describing it as a copilot — I am very much the pilot flying (to abuse some aviation jargon), and not in any way being railroaded by the AI. The AI following my lead, and if I don't lead, nothing happens!

Code assistants use a slightly different mechanism to prompt their pre-trained LLMz (Large Language Models) than the one used by regular AI chatbots. Regular bots project forward from a history which is a mix of pre-loaded context and your conversation with the bot to that point. It's very linear, past inputs projected forward. That's not what code suggestion bots do — they suggest next middle pieces to insert at your current cursor position. They don't just consider the code that's before the current cursor position, they consider your entire codebase, looking both forward and backwards in the current file, and at all the other files that make up your project. This means the copilot suggests additional code in the same style and using the same conventions as your existing code. Instead of offering generic suggestions, it offers suggestions that do things your way. This means it amplifies your existing skills rather than try to re-train you to do things differently. It also means that if you have no skills to bring to the party, there's not much happening. But, if you're really good at your job, you can get a lot more done with the same amount of time and effort!

The AI is not replacing skilled coders, it's making their skills even more valuable!

So What About Photography?

So, with all that context, I've been spending a lot of time musing about what AI might mean for the future of my beloved art and craft of photography.

It's far to early for strongly held beliefs about all this, but my opinions are starting to crystallise a little more.

First off, I'm becoming ever more secure in my belief that what ever problems we need to overcome as a society when it comes to adapting to the ever increasing prevalence and power of AI in our lives, this is not about copyright. Training on data is no more copying it than indexing it for a search engine is. The whole copyright palaver is distracting us from the real problems — the training is not at the root of the very real problems we're facing, it's abuses of the trained models that are at the root of our problems! Instead of fixating on the minutia of the training mechanism, we need to look at the harmful outcomes abuse of the models is producing.

Using AIs to rip off artists is not a copyright problem, it's a counterfeit problem! When someone sells fake Levi Jeans we don't fixate on the minutia of the imitation cloth gets made. We don't fixate on regulating the machines for weaving fabrics or creating blue dyes! Instead, we deal the problem of knock-off Levis flooding online market places as what it truly is — counterfeiting, and we tackle it right there in those market places, right at the point of sale! We need to do the same when people sell AI-generated knock-offs.

The other opinion I'm becoming ever more confident of is my view that AI is not going to replace human creativity and experience. Like the digital spreadsheet freed chartered accountants from the chore of manually performing calculations cell by cell, and freed them up to run more models to better inform and advise their customers, AI is going to amplify the skills humans bring to photography. The fear when spreadsheets were digitised was that it would result in the number of chartered accounts needed by society plumetting, throwing millions out of work. But no, that's not what happened, there are more chartered accountants now than ever before! Accountant's true value was not in their ability to crunch numbers, it was in their ability to extract useful insights from those numbers. Letting the computers do the tedious arithmetic didn't replace accountants, it empowered them!

The lesson I take from all this is that if you're bringing truly human skills to the table, you don't need to worry about being replaced by an AI. It's people who only do menial chores that need to up-skill before they go the way of the steam locomotive firemen, the gas lamp lighters, and the human computers of the past.

When I think about the kinds of people currently making their livings from photography, I don't see many people doing just menial chores. I see lots of people bringing truly human skills to the table. The one exception I can think of is people who shoot only generic stock images — those really can be replaced by AI image generators, but only those doing purely generic stock.

Even focusing in just on stock photography, the truly valuable banks of stock images are not generic, they're focused. I can see this first-hand in work. As a major Irish University, Maynooth University uses a lot of stock images all the time, but they're not coming from Getty or Shutterstock, they're coming from our internal stock photo library. They don't show generic university buildings, they show our buildings, they don't show generic lecturers and tutors, they show our wonderful academics do their thing, and they don't show generic students doing vaguely academic looking things, they show our students using our facilities, working in our labs, and excelling on our sports fields in our uniforms. That stock library has real value to our institution, and it was created by professional photographers who understand our university's brand and character in the same way the Defecto Sound team, Bren, and my graphic designing acquaintance took the time to learn about me and my brand before developing the creative assets I needed.

If you want to make a living in photography, lean in to your human skills, and use AI to amplify them — don't try to become a better machine that the machines, because eventually, the machines alway out-machine the humans! But, equally, the humans will always out-human the machines