The Leap of Imagination – AI vs The Eye

A painting by Klimt recently sold for $236.4 million, the second highest amount ever paid for a painting at auction. Why would someone pay that much for a piece of canvas and paint?

Because the value of human creativity, expressed in any art form, is priceless to us. To stand in front of a Klimt is to see something truly exquisite. The colours, the light, the detail in every inch of it. But it’s not really about the paint. It’s the knowledge that we’re standing in front of something made by another person, and that brings a kind of amazement, a connection. The chance to see the world through their eyes, the way they wanted us to see it.

We think about that a lot at Steve Edge, because it’s exactly the question we’re being asked about AI right now. If a machine can research, write, generate and iterate faster than any of us, what’s left for the human? We think the answer is the same one that explains a $236.4 million painting. It’s the leap of imagination.

Cambridge Dictionary defines creativity as “the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas.” Not to gather ideas, or organise them, or even to combine them well. To produce something original and unusual. That’s the leap. It’s the point where all the information in the world stops being information and starts being something different, something unexpected, something human.

And there’s more information available to us now than at any point before. We live in a world of collective knowledge, where everything is out there: all the research, every case study, everything that’s gone before. Understanding what came before is vital to us. To create a genuinely unique story for a client we need to know their history, and the history of the sector they sit in. AI is indispensable here. It helps us make sense of an overwhelming amount of material and find what’s relevant to the brief in front of us. It saves us days.

But knowing what came before is only ever the starting point. The leap is what happens next, and that’s where the experienced eye comes in. It’s the eye that’s looked at ten thousand briefs and ten thousand references and can somehow feel when something is right, or nearly right, or completely wrong, long before it can explain why.

This is where we still believe in pen and paper. There’s something in letting the hand be free to explore a line, a detail, a bit of expression, without a screen or a prompt box in the way. The hand and the brain working together, back and forth, exploring, refining, and just as importantly, discarding. Discarding is underrated. Most of what comes out of a pen never makes it anywhere near a client, and that’s exactly the point. You can’t get to the nugget of gold without digging through a whole heap of rubbish first, and a pen lets you dig faster and more honestly than anything else we’ve found.

Thomas Edison said success is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. It’s a decent way to think about the leap too. You can’t know what feels right until you’ve done the hard work of finding out what feels wrong first, again and again, on real projects, under real pressure. That’s not something you can prompt your way past. AI can genuinely expedite that journey, get us to the interesting questions faster, clear away the obvious wrong turns. But it can’t do the journey for us. The eye that knows the difference is built on miles walked, not shortcuts taken.

Graphic design has always leaned into trends. Every year there are reports on the top design trends of the year, and as designers it’s hard not to be influenced by the world around us. But the trick isn’t avoiding influence, it’s choosing where it comes from. The danger is being influenced by the things standing directly next to you, your own sector, your own industry, because that’s how everything ends up feeling the same. Safety in numbers is anything but safe in design. Blending in means being invisible. The better path is staying open to inspiration from everywhere, and knowing when to use it and what feels right for the brand in front of you.

Right now, AI is a tool we use on that journey, and its fingerprint is everywhere. Client briefs are suddenly far more detailed. Emails are grammatically perfect and remarkably verbose. That’s fine. They serve the same end goal and save everyone time getting to where we need to go. But it can never replace knowing the subject, understanding the client, and really getting into the weeds with them. AI can’t sit in a room and feel the mood shift when you ask the right question. It can’t tell you which piece of history the client is quietly proud of, or which one they’d rather forget (not yet anyway!).

There’s also the question of things becoming “machine made,” where every error, rough edge, imperfection and idiosyncrasy gets polished out by AI. There comes a point where we lose the connection we talked about earlier, the sense of what someone stands for and what they wanted us to feel.

A client of ours recently told us her younger customers actually prefer the raw, natural shots of her product, taken on an iPhone with no studio lights, over the beautifully shot campaign images she painstakingly art directs and commissions every season. Perfect, in this case, isn’t perfect. There are so many AI images pervading every corner of the internet now that people are turning away from anything too polished, and asking the same question of every flawless image: is it real?

The best test we’ve found is still the oldest one. Share the idea with a colleague before you share it with anything else. Put it in front of another person, watch their face, hear what they say and what they don’t say. We’re making brands for humans, so it only makes sense to get a human perspective before going looking for an artificial one to back you up. AI is good at justifying an idea you’ve already decided you like. It’s not a substitute for someone across the desk telling you honestly that it isn’t quite there yet.

When it comes to designing for a brand, AI is a genuinely great tool to help us explore. But it’s the irreplaceable eye and human experience that ultimately makes the final call on what feels right. That’s the leap of imagination. It’s the reason someone will pay $236.4 million for a Klimt, and it’s the reason a client comes to us rather than a prompt box.

There’s one more idea worth sitting with, from long before any of this was a live question. In a 1967 documentary called The Futurists, the Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar said this:

Some people talk about predicting the future as if the future was going to unfold itself independently of our own wishes and desires. Now, I think one can take it as one of the great lessons of modern science or modern technology, that anything that is, in principle, possible will be done if people want to do it enough. So when one asks, what is going to happen in the 21st century, what one really wants to ask is, what do we want to happen in the 21st century?

Maybe that’s the better question for us too. Less time wondering what AI might do to our industry, more time deciding what we want it to do. So let’s decide. We want AI clearing the path, not walking it for us. We want the eye still making the call, the hand still on the pen, and the leap still ours to make.