Funny how changing a single word can shift your thinking. Well, not funny so much, as it’s well known that swapping out a passive verb for an active one makes a world of difference to the perception of the audience. Take today. I’ve be on hold waiting to speak to someone who will ‘handle my call’. Rather than answer it. I don’t want ‘handling’. I need help. Tell me I’m hanging for the best human-based help ever. Much more likely to hang on, no?
The idea of actual human intervention, even vaguely implied, makes me much better disposed to having to wait for something - or my expectations for what kind of experience I’m likely to be on the receiving end of.
Hence spending a coupe of days thunking around the subject of this short typing exercise (excise, possibly…) - on the difference between getting someone, or something, to create something - and what the difference is between ‘a brief’ and ‘a prompt’.
If you’re commissioning things - say, something to capture how to frame some aspect of your business, so as you can go social on your customer base - you might have either tried to write (or draw) it yourself. Or more likely, brief a writer or a designer, or a creative team of both. The operative word there, ‘briefing’. Something we’ve always done between people (zooming or teams-ing intermediation aside.)
With All The AI, likely that search for the perfect content looks likely coming back via prompting. Which sounds to me a lot like the word used by stage managers to ‘remind’ actors of their lines when they corpse on stage - and with that, the inference that the person prompting sort of knows the thing they’re prompting someone else to say.
Which can be biggly reassuring. Nothing like discovering you already knew you knew the answer.
So maybe for the moment - and just for that. These things tend to pick up Moore’s development speed once they achieve a certain velocity - ‘prompt’ is a good coinage. The result will come back with a bunch of stuff the machine ‘knows’ (skims off), so in nature will probably feel familiar. Or ’sunnier’ as Lauren Goode at Wired observed. That artificial is always on hand to help, makes for a ‘always sunny’ disposition.
She also captured an interesting aspect of this with her rather nice observation of
“…the tendency of these apps to “hallucinate” false information.”
That hallucinogenic property also feels close to how interacting with AI feels; a sort-of ‘other-worldly’ experience. In other words, the actual human experience of something that is not actual present (or at least present to anyone outside the mind of those not experiencing it. Am not looking to demean people who suffer from this.) The imaginary nature isn’t imagination at work, though. It’s imitation, and while it’s a nice game, it’s just ‘catch’ rather than the more interesting ‘catch-as-catch can’.
Could - or should we expect - AI to be arch (clever and mischievous; rather than the bridging kind!)? Or, is that the ‘artisanal’ part of art direction (and design) that we ought to expect and remain an indispensable factor in creative work to keep those virtual wolves from design’s door? Seems to me to be so.
It can’t just me thinking, with just a touch or irony, that briefs are rarely that - brief - and prompts tend to be the epitome of brevity.
See? There’s nothing that you can’t learn from the future.
