Productive worthless – Christopher Butler

What enables to make Ai is the thing it has the power to eliminate.

I still have sketchbooks, many are filled with ideas for logos, layouts, and other designs. These pages not only get fully informed images, though sketches. They obtained a whole mental process – the false starts, the unexpected discoveries, slowly, itulati refining ideas. Now, the same exploration can, if you choose, decrease an enthusiastic: “make a small, modern wordmark for a SaaS product called _____.”

The quick recognition is attractive. Recently, I found myself experimenting with one of the most recent Ai tools promising simple “generation of logo.” Within minutes, I generated dozens of logomarks – each one passes, but each one loses something that is important I can’t name. My eight-year-old daughter, looking, asked a question speaking: “Dad, did you play?”

His question remains me. After twenty years of designing, I look at our tools that make progress from physical to digital algorithmic, each shift sold with fewer messages: additional simplicity and Many parts; more efficiently and more attainment; more speed and more possibilities. But as we progress in the future where Ai generate endless differences in some keystrokes, the more I know what happens – or in case of generative work, what not happened – in the spaces between. This is the essential territory of human creativity that rejects compression.

Yes, I know it seems like I can argue against a straw person. One should not stop made logo, which is, all, only one image. This is a sketch of launch from. This makes the concept process easier. I don’t think I have a significant problem with receiving the role of Ai to shape.

But I’ve seen what’s easier with Ai sets in anticipation for the drops of the process. During a recent meeting, someone appeared to make a logo in seconds. If I asked if the tool can make an editable file (known, that is not possible), the answer I get is, “That’s the reason?” Well, of course it does! To take a logo ahead, actually making this function as the stone of the corner of an identity system, a flat, insufficient image. If justice is over the means, the meaning is easily invisible. But that is an article. (Self Note: The process of processing is the silent spring of AI.)

Back to hands and paper, then.

It is known to be completely trite for the people of my age repeatedly bring the merits of “analog” materials. And that’s because the resistance of a room is also a pen or pencil creates an important strife that moves your body and your mind. That resistance is precious; It pressed us to slow down. That gives our mind on time to process each step and think about the next. The best digital supplies are kept some of this productive friction. If you work in Illustrators, Vicma, or other creation creation, there is likely to have a pen tool, and its virtue is not healing.

Ai The tools don’t have anything else, by design. They collapse the space between purpose and consequence, between thinking and making. They eliminate the productivity that no one can – that space where uncertainty leads to discovery. This is the same vain we have experienced in waiting lines, walking from one place to the next, bath, dishwasher, stopped traffic. These are places where solutions to difficult problems bloom in our thoughts, not from working with them, but from discharge, even for a while.

Losing between the mind and machine, if the machine is a digital pen or one filled with ink, one side, not a bug. It will be preserved as fertile ground for observing and consideration. Ai Makes the ground, at least in the context of the image and design generation, at least today.

To be clear, I don’t have a Luddite. The development of Ai undeniable; The tools have changed how I work in ways that are bad and deep. But as a person watching design trends come and go since the late 1990s – from the Gocmap geocies chic to flat design; from Dreamweaver to Figma Photoshop in Ai – I’m ready to change as I worry about how quickly we can withstand the convenience for prosperity.

My son is three years old, and too much on the stage in progress where he knows what he is CAN have not been angry by an understanding of how it came before him. A violent need for “more apple!” repeated immediately because, good, children don’t have patience. The current period of Ai Am thinking about that stage of growth is pretty pretty. She, after all, grew up in a world where, thanks to the 21st century technology, the space between liking and progressing shorter. She hasn’t figured out that, but I am. And I’m worried about what kind of a person can do he or she will never experience a friction. And it is, of course, a reflection of my concern for what happens in society when it is no longer waiting for anything. If frictions have been changed to the mill in a point of view – what? – Lose the will to make the most of anything else? Obviously, we haven’t been at that point – there’s so much Ai We can do – but also, a point will lead to the next. What’s next?

There is a particular irony in this line of thinking, I know. I wrote it in a space surrounded by digital tools that looked amazing during my days sketchebooking back to college. Each design transfer technology has since occurred some kind of creative compression, each giving something and taking something. Ai will do that too. But this is the speed of Ai that I worry more to workers. This is the item Ai I have been prepared to surprise me with my own world not too far away today. Ug bisan kung gisulayan ko ang paghimog paghukom – gibati nako nga kini ang matinuorong butang nga buhaton sa kini nga higayon – ingon kami nameligro nga mawala ang mga butang sa taliwala sa mga butang, dili kami hingpit nga mabug-atan hangtod sila wala na.

These are the productive helpless.

The thing to do is not reject Ai completely. I have seen that kind of resistance is useless. But can we preserve spaces between things? Can we protect the natural resources of friction, in waiting, gaps and harvest?

In my own habit, I learned to use Ai not as a compression tool, but one of the expansion. Prompts are not goals but start points. They make new voids to explore, new territories for my mind to live.

My gathering sketchbook stacks reminds me that the design is always more than the result. It is about the journey, resist, the productive uncertainty that carries to discover. As we rushed to accept the power of AiWe can remember that what enables us to do this is the thing it has the power to eliminate.

February 12, 2025

nap