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Hot Type Cold Type Lead Type Bold Type
I'm a fourth-generation printer, graphic designer, and the youngest person in my family to have set hot metal type.
For someone as someone whose first exposure to a computer was my father's i386 and spent their life primarily in front of a screen; whose primary hobbies have been, for better or worse, largely computer-oriented, and whose entire career has been spent pushing pixels, moving mice, and tapping keys: I can admit that I've been remarkably late in adopting LLMs into my workflow.
This year, I've had two career-firsts within the first six months: In February, I got a "perfect" performance review: on every metric, I exceeded expectations. 2 months later, I was included in a broad reduction-in-force across the marketing department finding myself unemployed for the first time in my adult life.
Make of that what you will.
I've decided to start writing a blog for a few reasons, and it felt appropriate to use this inaugural "hello world" post to both lay those out and to help me figure out what I want to do here.
The first is unashamedly self-serving, but one my marketing colleagues will understand: content enables visibility, and it doesn't matter how differentiated the product, service, or person is if no one knows about them. To that end, it dawned on me that my capacity to wax lyrical a bit on things I find interesting, prodigious vocabulary, and whatever I've got passing for wit and whimsy might actually be differentiating now that so much content is simply generated wholesale.
A few years ago, if I'd thought about writing something like this, I would've asked "who would really care?" because it seemed like everyone had a blog, and most of it was keyword-stuffing with a side of mashed display ads drizzled with congealed JavaScript gravy.
Now? The fact that I'm composing this myself at all seems to be meaningfully valuable. The LLMs, by nature, can only produce derivative work. That's not a weakness; that's their strength.
Which brings me to the counter-intuitive second theme of this blog: I'd like to share what I have learned and am continuing to learn about the use of LLMs as I introduce them into my workflow, specifically as someone who had identified as an extreme skeptic. That's not to say I'm a total convert, and the ethical implications are not something to ignore at all; but it's been genuinely useful in certain cases where I hadn't expected it to be.
To that end, and probably understanding I'll be leaving money on the table by way of some overpriced course I could sell, I'm hoping and planning to provide my rationale for the use case (as I don't feel LLMs and generative video/image models are always appropriate for every single task), real prompts exactly as I used them, how I interacted with the model in general, along with an honest (but admittedly best-guess) assessment of how and where it saved [or cost] me time overall. In the coming weeks I'll be looking at how I approached this new website project with these facets in mind.
Finally, I'd like to periodically explore parallels with what we're seeing across creative, technology, marketing, business, and economics to history; beginning with a period that I haven't seen discussed more that I feel may warrant some exploration: the death of photo-typesetting and the rise of the desktop publishing tool.
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Disengage Ottopilot!
To make it plain: no, I don't plan to use AI to write content for me on this blog. For better or worse, I'm going to bring you artisanal, overly-verbose, lightly-proofread, and almost certainly just as inconsequential as the next blog, but at least these will be my words.
If I'm going to read a book and tell you about it, I'm going to read it so it'll be me telling you about it.
If I'm using AI assistance to build a project out, I've got no qualms to describe how and where I have, in as much specificity as I can provide.
This site wasn't designed with AI. It wasn't coded with AI. I didn't need to use AI to design it because I wanted something I could easily, quickly, and reliably update. What I did use AI for was helping me fill in knowledge gaps in domains that I'd only ever had a layperson's exposure to at best. But all of that is a story for another day.
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