Machine Learning
A proletariat's handbook for navigating the AI revolution
In the early nineties, my tech-savvy friend Mark Bankins proposed a revolutionary idea: a magazine focused on digital art. This bore little resemblance to the music and culture zine we’d eventually deliver, but it was just as forward-thinking. Mark knew I’d fallen in love with the Macintosh computer and thought I should contribute.
A magazine on digital art sounds quaint today, but in the Paleozoic Era of computer-aided design, art created by anything other than human hands was groundbreaking. Mark’s hubris had a big influence on me, and in the coming days, I’d convinced him to partner on what we’d call URB.
Ever proud of how we accessed the latest tools and used them to subvert traditional publishing, URB’s masthead detailed our arsenal: The latest Mac computers, various layout and photo software, and even the digital output methods only other publishing professionals could decipher.
At the end of this declaration, we’d sign off with “Exploit Technology.” The words were more than a coup de grâce. They signaled to readers that we were not the elite but the proletariat. And that if we could harness technology without any special codes or permissions, they could, too.
It felt like we were a generation ahead of the photocopied and stapled zines of the 1980s—and we were. Embracing the arrival of desktop publishing, laser printers, and state-of-the-art software quickly put us on par with mainstream publications. In our early salad days, we still used my home phone number as an office line, but we looked as legitimate as anybody else.
URB would be part of a golden age of music magazines birthed in the 1990s, aided by technological advancements in creativity and production. It marked a quantum leap into the future, at least until the Internet ate our lunch.
Had we launched just a year prior, we’d have depended on expensive intermediaries and arcane protocols reminiscent of the 1960s. One example I recall is having to physically go to a business that printed fonts of specific measurements for each page of your magazine. You’d spend a day ordering another version if you made a mistake. My $5k home setup replaced this brick-and-mortar workflow overnight.
So, is the coming age of artificial intelligence different than what we went through in the ’90s? Absolutely. For the first time in evolution, AI promises to challenge, augment, and, yes, replace human creativity in its most complex forms. The digital art in Mark’s imagined magazine would still have looked like robots made it. AI today is already impersonating us in ways barely conceivable a year ago.
Creative jobs in art, design, writing, and strategy are shifting daily, with some functions and roles removed from the equation completely. Of course, you could argue that professional gatekeepers always lament when the barbarians finally scale the wall. In this case, the hooligans are the AIs who can do the work better and the citizens who take advantage of this.
Many creators are in a justifiable existential panic. There’s zero question: AI will eliminate or change industries concentrated on human-powered creative functions. It’s ironic, given that so much of this work was already done with computers doing the heavy lifting. But today’s generative AI—where the result is a new creation—has reached a tipping point in a growing list of areas.
As a defiant student once more comfortable with a can of spray paint than a mouse, Apple’s 1984 Macintosh commercial inspired me to think different. Exploiting technology would be as important to URB’s success as the words and images on our pages. The optimist in me sees today through the same evolving lens.
As a creative, AI has allowed me to ideate, strategize, and build at scale and speed beyond anything I’d imagined ten months ago. And it’s done it in incredibly “human” and eerily insightful ways. From headline suggestions for this piece to co-writing (with me) nuanced business plans to tirelessly churning out dozens of logo and illustration ideas.
AI works for me like the ultimate personal assistant, adept at almost everything and smarter by the minute. Like any great assistant, it also knows me pretty well. I’ve shared my family details with ChatGPT and some of my dreams and ambitions. All of this makes its service to me more personal. And before you @ me, your credit card company probably knows the same about you and without any of the good intentions.
What sets AI apart from past advances is its universality. Rarely does technology offer a democratized onramp for such wide swaths of society. Call me Pollyannish, but that’s its most enduring promise.
A ChatGPT subscription is free (but $20/month gets you the latest and fastest version). It’s not hyperbole to say it will fundamentally transform how you process the world’s information. If you depend on creativity, spend $120 on a Canva Pro annual subscription, and you can replicate much of what an expensive design agency does. Grammarly will polish any writing, from emails to LinkedIn updates. For podcasters and vloggers, Descript’s free plan can make your one-person operation sound like a million-dollar studio produced it. These are just a few—hundreds, and soon thousands, of apps will be available.
I went to college for commercial art and still have decent design skills. My creative talents are better than average, but there are areas I’ve only recently been able to unlock. Using AI-powered applications for music production (Bandlab; Audition), photography (Lightroom; Topaz Labs), and illustration (Magic Studio), I’ve allowed technology to free me of a dependency on others.
Even if I work with prompts (essentially, AI instructions) instead of a pencil, loops instead of live drums, and filters where light science has failed me, the satisfaction of creating something is invaluable. Some decry this all as less than creative, but I’ve heard those arguments—sometimes even from me—for years. If the final result is beautiful, does the process matter? To paraphrase Rick Rubin, creativity is in the eye of the doer.
For independent operators, paying another creator to take on a project is often not feasible. AI is an even more vital lifeline since I left a corporate system that relied on vendors and teams. There is even a burgeoning cottage industry on places like Fiverr for self-style experts upselling these new technologies. This new AI arbitrage happens when a $150 piece of software is the cheat code you need to attract customers who are not ready to do it themselves.
And what about the elephant in the room? Can AI replace this blog? Soon enough, I’m sure. Still, even that doesn’t elicit a fight or flight response from me. There have always been editors, ghostwriters, and proofreaders behind the scenes. Most human creativity is augmented in some way.
For the record, this post was written by me. I used Grammarly for copy-editing and refinements. I used ChatGPT to suggest and test headlines. Like most writers on Substack, we’re here to do the work. I’ll ensure you know if I ever introduce full AI pieces to my repertoire.
I can hear the dissenters now. There was once a similar exuberance around the promise of social media, and look how that turned out. But was social media itself bad for humanity, or was the packaging and gamification designed to monetize it the issue? Either way, in the case of AI, it’s early days. You can access the technology in its virgin state, in an unlocked and unadulterated form, and it’s pretty incredible.
We’ve entered a brave new phase of human-created technology, which will challenge societal expectations at all levels. Protections against current and future AI abuses are already being developed. But none of that should hold you back from diving in today. Focusing your attention on the rumors of rogue AI or doomsaying by fearful knowledge workers is a recipe for ensuring you’re on the exploited end.
Undoubtedly, the questions posed by AI will only get more complicated, and I don’t profess to hold any sacred truths about how all this plays out. But the answers may be found in partnership with AI more than in competition. None of us know what that balance of power will be in five years. But AI is, at its core, us, a reflection of our collective humanity. We must accept that it’s only as scary and beautiful as we are.
All illustrations were created by me and the robots of Magic Studio inside Canva.
What has your experience been with AI? Has your work been transformed, threatened, or enhanced? I would love to hear from you. Drop a comment or DM me: info+substack@urb.com.
I have to whole heartedly co-sign here. I have an art degree in painting and drawing and make music because I love it. I needed a new logo and was fancying something in comic book style that day. Could I have drawn it myself? Yes but not it 5 minutes. Did it need tweaking and someone to come up with the initial concept? Absolutely! I spent another 2 hours doing editing on my buddy's face where the AI was less than accurate (I was quite pleased with its results on mine), and trying different backgrounds, fonts, and color schemes. So in the arguments about AI, I find myself in the "keep both hands on the reins" school of thought versus "OMG! It's going to kill us all, shut it down!!" camp. The military uses are the ones I fear the most and of course, humans being ourselves, that is what is getting the most research and resources. Place limits on the meat not the machines, I say.
Raymond, loving the URB reboot. Enjoyed reading your thoughts on AI.
For me, AI has been a force multiplier. It speeds up tasks like framing product requirements, writing scripts, testing ideas, and processing data much faster than I used to manage by hand. Yet, while it's quick and powerful today, it still doesn't fully grasp the emotions or motivations behind decisions. Effectively steering AI requires insight—garbage in, garbage out.
I'm not too concerned about AI taking over the roles of creatives or technologists right now; it lacks the lived experiences that shape our human perspective. But with the pace at which AI is evolving, who knows where we'll be years from now? Regardless, I foresee humans and AI collaborating, leveraging the strengths of both. Hopefully for good!