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Throughout my career, I’ve taken direction more often than I’ve given it. So when I began working on the art for this issue, I had to use some muscles I’m not used to. As IBJ’s lead designer, I trust the instincts of the other designers on staff and try my best to only correct mistakes and not interrupt their creative process.
When it comes to AI tools, however, I’ve learned you need to be precise and show up with an idea. For this issue, we used AI tools to generate the main art that represents each feature story. I stuck with Adobe’s AI web app, Firefly, because I found it easy to use and fairly successful. I also appreciate that it pulls from Adobe’s stock library and content that doesn’t need a license or is in the public domain.
At first, my prompts were vague. Entering “artificial intelligence creating jobs in Indianapolis” gave me darkly colored illustrations that resembled a mad man’s laboratory. Plus, a lot of letters were forming what I can only assume were meant to be the words “artificial intelligence.”
The more I thought about each story and how I wanted to represent it visually, the better I got at communicating what I wanted to see. Instead of typing “artificial intelligence creating jobs in Indianapolis,” I asked to see “robots doing human jobs in an office.” Now I was getting somewhere.
None of the AI art you see in this issue is perfect. When I wondered if AI would know what a player piano is, I got my answer. It gave me images of people playing pianos. Still, I hope readers enjoy seeing what I and my new AI friend have come up with.
Am I threatened by AI after this experiment? Not really. I agree with many of the creatives you’ll hear from in this issue. AI is a useful tool, but it needs us to pull the strings.•
—Audrey Pelsor
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