We like AI—but we don’t like liking AI

AI/ML

Interesting—if not wholly unexpected—finding: People dig what generative systems create, but only if they don’t know how the pixel-sausage was made. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You’re not crazy, you’re not dumb, and you’re absolutely right to give a shit.

Idle Philosophizing, Shit That Actually Matters

That’s my core takeaway from this great conversation, which will give you hope.

Slack & Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield, whose We Don’t Sell Saddles Here memo I’ve referenced countless times, sat down for a colorful & wide-ranging talk with Lenny Rachitsky. For the key points, check out this summary, or dive right into the whole chat. You won’t regret it.

Visual summary courtesy of NotebookLM:

(00:00) Introduction to Stewart Butterfield
(04:58) Stewart’s current life and reflections
(06:44) Understanding utility curves
(10:13) The concept of divine discontent
(15:11) The importance of taste in product design
(19:03) Tilting your umbrella
(28:32) Balancing friction and comprehension
(45:07) The value of constant dissatisfaction
(47:06) Embracing continuous improvement
(50:03) The complexity of making things work
(54:27) Parkinson’s law and organizational growth
(01:03:17) Hyper-realistic work-like activities
(01:13:23) Advice on when to pivot
(01:18:36) The importance of generosity in leadership
(01:26:34) The owner’s delusion

Luck o’ the vibe coders

AI/ML

Being crazy-superstitious when it comes to college football, I must always repay Notre Dame for every score by doing a number of push-ups equivalent to the current point total.

In a normal game, determining the cumulative number of reps is pretty easy (e.g. 7 + 14 + 21), but when the team is able to pour it on, the math—and the burn—get challenging. So, I used Gemini the other day to whip up this little counter app, which it did in one shot! Days of Miracles & Wonder, Vol. ∞.

A charming BTS for Apple’s “Friends” holiday spot

Design

There’s almost no limit to my insane love of practical animal puppetry (usually the sillier, the better—e.g. Triumph, The Falconer), so I naturally loved this peek behind the scenes of Apple’s new spot:

Puppeteers dressed like blueberries. Individually placed whiskers. An entire forest built 3 feet off the ground. And so much more.

Bonus: Check out this look into the making of a similarly great Portland tourism commercial:

AI-powered catharsis

AI/ML, Illustration

I can’t think of a more burn-worthy app than Concur (whose “value prop” to enterprises, I swear, includes the amount they’ll save when employees give up rather than actually get reimbursed).

Visualizing conversations with Nano Banana

AI/ML, Illustration, Infographics, Nano Banana

The ever thoughtful Blaise Agüera y Arcas (CTO of Technology & Society at Google) recently sat down for a conversation with the similarly deep-thinking Dan Faggella. I love that I was able to get Gemini to render a high-level view of the talk:

My workflow, FWIW:

  • Use Gemini in Chrome to create a summary.
  • Open it in Gemini & copy it to a Google Doc.
  • Open the doc in NotebookLM & specify infographic creation preferences.
  • Download image, open it in Gemini, and refine likenesses by uploading images of each speaker.
  • Make minor tweaks in Photoshop to deal with the aspect ratio changing (a subtle & intermittent but annoying bug).

Here’s the stimulating chat itself:

Continue reading →

Gemini/Nano Banana promises SVG generation

AI/ML, Illustration, Nano Banana

Creating clean vectors has proven to be an elusive goal. Firefly in Illustrator still (to my knowledge) just generates bitmaps which then get vectorized. Therefore this tweet caught my attention:

In my very limited testing so far, however, results have been, well, impressionistic. 🙂

Here’s a direct comparison of my friend Kevin’s image (which I received as an image) vectorized via Image Trace (way more points than I’d like, but generally high fidelity), vs. the same one converted to SVG via Gemini(clean code/lines, but large deviation from the source drawing):

But hey, give it time. For now I love seeing the progress!

Fried chicken, product obsession, and Richard Feynman

Design

Passion is contagious, and I love when people deeply care what they’re bringing into the world. I had no idea I could find the details of fast-food chicken so interesting, but dang if founder Todd Graves’s enthusiasm doesn’t jump right off the screen. Seriously, give it a watch!

I’m reminded of Richard Feynman’s keen observation:

More tangentially, this gets me thinking back to my actor friends’ appreciation of Don Cheadle’s craft in this scene from Boogie Nights. “I could watch that guy pick out donuts all day!” And even though I can’t grok the work nearly as deeply as they do, I love how much they love it.

AI, outcomes, and closing loops: How Canva thinks

AI/ML

My buddy Bilawal recently sat down with Canva cofounder & Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams for an informative conversation. These points, among others, caught my attention:

  • “Canva is a goal-achievement machine.” That is, users approach it with particular outcomes in mind (e.g. land your first customer, get your first investment), and the feature development team works back from those goals. As the old saying goes, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole”—i.e. a specific outcome.
  • They seek to reduce the gap between idea & outcome. This reminded me of the first Adobe promo I saw more than 30 years ago: “Imagine what you can create. Create what you can imagine.”
  • Measuring the achievement of goals is critical. That includes gathering insights from audience response.
  • They’re pursuing a three-tiered AI strategy: homegrown foundational models that they need to own (based on deep insight into user behavior); partnerships with state-of-the-art models (e.g. GPT, Veo); and a rich ecosystem and app marketplace (hosting image & music generation and more).
  • “When you think about AI as a collaborator, it opens up a whole palette of different interactions & product experiences you can deliver.” No single modality (e.g. prompting alone) is ideal for everything from ideation to creation to refinement.
  • What’s it like to author at a higher level of abstraction? “It’s a dance,” and it’s still a work in progress.
  • What’s the role of personalization? Responsive content. Personalizing messaging has been a huge driver of Canva’s growth, and they want to bring similar tools & best practices to everyone.
  • “The real crux of Canva is storytelling.” Video is now used by tens of millions of people. Across media (video, images, presentations), the same challenges appear: Properly complete your idea. Make fine-grained edits. Bring in others & get their feedback.
  • “Knowing the start & the end, but less of the middle.” AI-enabled tools can remove production drudgery, but one’s starting point & desired outcome remain essential. Start: Fundamental understanding of what works. Ideas, thinking creatively. Elements of editorship & taste are essential. Later: It’s how you express this, measure impact, take insights into the creation loop.

00:00 – Canva’s $32B Empire the future of Design
02:26 – Design for Everyone: Canva’s Origin Story
04:19 – Why Canva Bet on the Web
07:29 – How Have Canva Users Changed Over the Years?
12:14 – Why Canva Isn’t Just Unbundling Adobe
14:50 – Canva’s AI Strategy Explained
18:12 – What Does Designing With AI Look Like?
22:55 – Scaling Content with Sheets, Data, and AI
27:17 – What is Canva Code?
29:38 – How Does Canva Fit Into Today’s AI Ecosystem?
32:35 – Why Adobe and Microsoft Should Be Worried
37:52 – Will Canva Expand Into Video Creation?
41:10 – Will AI Eliminate or Expand Creative Jobs?

A Brief History of the World (Models)

3D, AI/ML

On Friday I got to meet Dr. Fei-Fei Li, “the godmother of AI,” at the launch party for her new company, World Labs (see her launch blog post). We got to chat a bit about a paradox of complexity: that as computer models for perceiving & representing the world grow massively more sophisticated, the interfaces for doing common things—e.g. moving a person in a photo—can get radically simpler & more intentional. I’ll have more to say about this soon.

Meanwhile, here’s her fascinating & wide-ranging conversation with Lenny Rachitsky. I’m always a sucker for a good Platonic allegory-of-the-cave reference. 🙂

From the YouTube summary:

(00:00) Introduction to Dr. Fei-Fei Li
(05:31) The evolution of AI
(09:37) The birth of ImageNet
(17:25) The rise of deep learning
(23:53) The future of AI and AGI
(29:51) Introduction to world models
(40:45) The bitter lesson in AI and robotics
(48:02) Introducing Marble, a revolutionary product
(51:00) Applications and use cases of Marble
(01:01:01) The founder’s journey and insights
(01:10:05) Human-centered AI at Stanford
(01:14:24) The role of AI in various professions
(01:18:16) Conclusion and final thoughts

And here’s Gemini’s solid summary of their discussion of world models:

  • The Motivation: While LLMs are inspiring, they lack the spatial intelligence and world understanding that humans use daily. This ability to reason about the physical world—understanding objects, movement, and situational awareness—is essential for tasks like first response or even just tidying a kitchen 32:23.
  • The Concept: A world model is described as the lynchpin connecting visual intelligence, robotics, and other forms of intelligence beyond language 33:32. It is a foundational model that allows an agent (human or robot) to:
    • Create worlds in their mind’s eye through prompting 35:01.
    • Interact with that world by browsing, walking, picking up objects, or changing things 35:12.
    • Reason within the world, such as a robot planning its path 35:31.
  • The Application: World models are considered the key missing piece for building effective embodied AI, especially robots 36:08. Beyond robotics, the technology is expected to unlock major advances in scientific discovery (like deducing 3D structures from 2D data) 37:48, games, and design 37:31.
  • The Product: Dr. Li co-founded World Labs to pursue this mission 34:25. Their first product, Marble, is a generative model that outputs genuinely 3D worlds which users can navigate and explore 49:11. Current use cases include virtual production/VFX, game development, and creating synthetic data for robotic simulation 53:05.

Design: Finding your sacred objects

Idle Philosophizing

My old pal Sam is one of the most thoughtful, down-to-earth guys you’re ever likely to meet in the design community, and if you’re looking for a calm but re-energizing way to spend a couple of minutes, I think you’ll really enjoy his seven-minute talk below. I won’t spoil anything, but do trust me. 🙂

And here’s a little visual summary courtesy of NotebookLM:

“How ChatGPT is fueling an existential crisis in education”

AI/ML

I thought this was a pretty interesting & thoughtful conversation. It’s interesting to think about ways to evaluate & reward process (hard work through challenges) and not just product (final projects, tests, etc.). AI obviously enables a lot of skipping the former in pursuit of the latter—but (shocker!) people then don’t build knowhow around solving problems, or even remember (much less feel pride in) the artifacts they produce.

The issues go a lot deeper, to the very philosophy of education itself. So we sat down and talked to a lot of teachers — you’ll hear many of their voices throughout this episode — and we kept hearing one cri du coeur again and again: What are we even doing here? What’s the point?

Links, courtesy of the Verge team:

  • A majority of high school students use gen AI for schoolwork | College Board
  • About a quarter of teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork | Pew Research
  • Your brain on ChatGPT | MIT Media Lab
  • My students think it’s fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they’re on to something. | Vox
  • How children understand and learn from conversational AI | McGill University
  • File not Found | The Verge

Adobe Research debuts incredibly fast video synthesis

AI/ML

Check out MotionStream, “a streaming (real-time, long-duration) video generation system with motion controls, unlocking new possibilities for interactive content generation.” It’s said to run at 29fps on a single H100 GPU (!).

What I’m really wondering, though, it whether/when/how an interactive interface like this can come to Photoshop & other image-editing environments. I’m not yet sure how the dots connect, but could it be paired with something like this model?

Chocolate-coated glass shards

AI/ML

Oh man, this parody of the messaging around AI-justified (?) price increases is 100% pitch perfect. (“It’s the corporate music that sends me into a rage.”)

 

 
 
 
 
 
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“We Built The Matrix to Train You for What’s Coming”

3D, AI/ML

My friend Bilawal got to sit down with VFX pioneer John Gaeta to discuss “A new language of perception,” Bullet Time, groundbreaking photogrammetry, the coming Big Bang/golden age of storytelling, chasing “a feeling of limitlessness,” and much more.

In this conversation:

— How Matrix VFX techniques became the prototypes for AI filmmaking tools, game engines, and AR/VR systems
— How The Matrix team sourced PhD thesis films from university labs to invent new 3D capture techniques
— Why “universal capture” from Matrix 2 & 3 was the precursor to modern volumetric video and 3D avatars
— The Matrix 4 experiments with Unreal Engine that almost launched a transmedia universe based on The Animatrix
— Why dystopian sci-fi becomes infrastructure (and what that means for AI safety)
— Where John is building next: Escape.art and the future of interactive storytelling

Continue reading →

A cool new Photoshop feature (that’s still kinda dumb)

Typography

I’m pleased to see that as promised back in May, Photoshop has added a “Dynamic Text” toggle that automatically resizes the size of the letters in each line to produce a visually “packed” look:

Results can be really cool, but because the model has no knowledge of the meaning and importance of each word, they can sometimes look pretty dumb. Here’s my canonical example, which visually emphasizes exactly the wrong thing:

I continue to want to see the best of both worlds, with a layout engine taking into account the meaning & thus visual importance of words—like what my team shipped last year:

I’m absolutely confident that this can be done. I mean, just look at the kind of complex layouts I was knocking out in Ideogram a year ago.

The missing ingredient is just the link between image layouts & editability—provided either by bitmap->native conversion (often hard, but doable in some cases), or by in-place editing (e.g. change “Merry Christmas” to “Happy New Year” on a sign, then regenerate the image using the same style & dimensions)—or both.

Bonus points go to the app & model that enable generation with transparency (for easy compositing), or conversion to vectors—or, again, ¿porque no los dos? 🙂

Demo: Flux vs. Nano Banana inside Photoshop

AI/ML, Nano Banana

I recently shared a really helpful video from Jesús Ramirez that showed practical uses for each model inside Photoshop (e.g. text editing via Flux). Now here’s a direct comparison from Colin Smith, highlighting these strengths:

  • Flux: Realistic, detailed; doesn’t produce unwanted shifts in regions that should stay unchanged. Tends to maintain more of the original image, such as hair or background elements.
  • Nano Banana: Smooth & pleasing (if sometimes a bit “Disney”); good at following complex prompts. May be better at removing objects.

These specific examples are great, but I continue to wish for more standardized evals that would help produce objective measures across models. I’m investigating the state of the art there. More to share soon, I hope!

Emu 3.5 looks seriously impressive

3D, AI/ML

Improvements to imaging continues its breakneck pace, as engines evolve from “simple” text-to-image (which we considered miraculous just three years ago—and which I still kinda do, TBH) to understanding time & space.

Now Emu (see project page, code) can create entire multi-page/image narratives, turn 2D images into 3D worlds, and more. Check it out:

Nodevember comes early: Runway Workflows

AI/ML, Nodes, User Interface

“Nodes, nodes, nodes!” — my exasperated then-10yo coming home from learning Unreal at summer camp 🙂

Love ’em or hate ’em, these UI building blocks seem to be everywhere these days—including in Runway’s new Workflows environment:

Alloy promises PMs on-brand prototyping

AI/ML, User Interface

Hmm—consider me intrigued:

Alloy is AI Prototyping built for Product Management:
➤ Capture your product from the browser in one click
➤ Chat to build your feature ideas in minutes
➤ Share a link with teammates and customers
➤ 30+ integrations for PM teams: Linear, Notion, Jira Product Discovery, and more

Check out the brief demo:

Demo: Specific, practical uses of Flux + Nano Banana inside Photoshop

AI/ML, Nano Banana

Twitter (yes, always “Twitter”) can be useful, but a ton of the AI-related posts there are often fairly superficial and/or impractical rehashes of eye candy that garners attention & not much else.

By contrast, Photoshop expert Jesús Ramirez has put together a really solid, nutrient-dense tour—complete with all his prompts—that I think you’ll find immediately useful. Dive on in, or jump directly to one of the topics linked below.

I particularly like this demo of using Flux to modify the text in an image:

Continue reading →

Flux hackathon provides perspective

AI/ML, Illustration

The team at BFL is celebrating some of the most interesting, creative uses of the Flux model. Having helped bring the Vanishing Point tool to Photoshop, and always having been interested in building more such tech, this one caught my eye:

Snapseed adds automatic object selection & editing

AI/ML, Photography

Back when I worked in Google Research, my teammates developed fast models divide images & video into segments (people, animals, sky, etc.). I’m delighted that they’ve now brought this tech to Snapseed:

The new Object Brush in Snapseed on iOS, accessible in the “Adjust” tool, now lets you edit objects intuitively. It allows you to simply draw a stroke on the object you want to edit and then adjust how you want it to look, separate from the rest of the image.

Check out the team blog post for lots of technical details on how the model was trained.

The underlying model powers a wide range of image editing and manipulation tasks and serves as a foundational technology for intuitive selective editing. It has also been shipped in the new Chromebook Plus 14 to power AI image editing in the Gallery app. Next, we plan to integrate it across more image and creative editing products at Google.

HBoooookay

Design, Typography

“A few weeks ago,” writes John Gruber, “designer James Barnard made this TikTok video about what seemed to be a few mistakes in HBO’s logo. He got a bunch of crap from commenters arguing that they weren’t mistakes at all. Then he heard from the designer of the original version of the logo, from the 1970s.”

Check out these surprisingly interesting three minutes of logo design history:

@barnardco “Who. Cares? Unfollowed” This is how a *lot* of people responded to my post about the mistake in the HBO logo. For those that didn’t see it, the H and the B of the logo don’t line up at the top of the official vector version from the website. Not only that, but the original designer @Gerard Huerta700 got in touch! Long story short, we’re all good, and Designerrrs™ community members can watch my interview with Gerard Huerta where we talk about this and his illustrious career! #hbo #typography #logodesign #logo #designtok  original sound – James Barnard

How to change your eval ways (baby)

AI/ML

As much as one can be said to enjoy thinking through the details of how to evaluate AI (and it actually can be kinda fun!), I enjoyed this in-depth guide from Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar.

All year I’ve been focusing pretty intently on how to tease out the details of what makes image creation & editing models “good” (e.g. spelling, human realism, prompt alignment, detail preservation, and more). This talk pops up a level, focusing more on holistic analysis of end-to-end experiences. If you’re doing that kind of work, or even if you just want to better understand the kind of thing that’s super interesting to hiring managers now, I think you’ll find watching this to be time well spent.

Photoshop integrates Flux, Nano Banana

AI/ML, Nano Banana

I’m so happy to see Adobe greatly accelerating the pace of 3p API integrations!

Show your work, AI edition

AI/ML

Microsoft VP Aparna Chennapragada, who recruited me to Microsoft after I reported to her at Google, recently wrote a thoughtful piece about building trust through transparency. Specifically around AI agents, we want less of this…

…and more of this:

I agree completely. Having some thoughtful back-and-forth makes me feel better understood & therefore more confident in my assistant’s work.

And feel here is a big deal. As Maya Angelou said, “People won’t remember what you said, or even what you did, but they’ll remember how you made them *feel*. Microsoft AI leader (and previously DeepMind cofounder) Mustafa Suleyman totally gets this.

Conversely, I just saw a founder advertising his product as “visual storytelling on autopilot.” I get the intent, but I find the phrasing oxymoronic: would any worthwhile “story” be generated by autopilot? Yuck.

When apps try to do too much with my sparse input, seeing the results makes me feel like Neven Mrgan did upon receiving AI-generated slop from a friend: “I was repelled, as if digital anthrax had poured out of the app.” I don’t even want to read such content, much less share it, much less be judged on it.

So yeah, apps: ditch autopilot & instead take the time to show interest & ask good questions. “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”—and a little thoughtfulness up front will save me time while increasing my pride of ownership.

Google Flow adds Nano Banana

AI/ML, Nano Banana

In addition to adding support for vertical video & greater character consistency, the new Veo-powered storytelling tool now includes direct image creation & manipulation via tiny, tiny fruit: