Crafting Ideas vs Crafting Vision

Prompting is not designing. It is directing, and letting AI do the designing for you.

It is not better or worst - just different. It is a different practice, with different benefits, and yielding different outcomes.

Those who prompt execute based on ideas, those who design execute based on vision. It is a subtle nuance, but an important one.

If you are a designer, you need tools that enable you to go straight from the picture in your mind to visuals others can see. Tools that enable visual depiction and manipulation may be better suited for that purpose.

Introducing layers of abstraction (words or code) and interpretation (AI) leads to lost precision, and is not necessary. You can move faster by staying in control, and with less frustration. Preserving the integrity of your vision is your priority - it is what you aim for, and what makes your role as a designer valuable.

Conversely, if your vision is not well-formed, the layers of translation and interpretation are a feature, not a bug. You are most likely less a visionary, and more of a conceptual thinker. AI can fill in the gaps for you, or generate complementary ideas. It is a shortcut to creativity and imagination.

Shortcutting creativity and imagination with AI can enable you to create more things, and faster - but not always better. It can make you prone to developing a dependency on it to do the creating and imagining for you.

Cognitive science teaches us that "if you don't use it you loose it". I can't imagine losing my imagination. It is a uniquely valuable skill (and way to see life) to be able to generate fully formed pictures in your mind.


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*Note: I am constantly impressed by how far language can go in terms of visual interpretation and translation. It speaks to evolution's extraordinary accomplishment in evolving language to represent our thoughts and ideas.

Most of us are not visionary and/or opinionated enough to need the precision to depict the visual illustrations in our minds. In most cases, the language we speak tends to inform how we see things (vs the reverse). Our vocabulary can therefore limit what we perceive.

I wonder if the societal distance and frustration of visual artists can sometimes be related to a lack of medium of expression to communicate how they conceive the world. They see and sense things without prior definitions. I like to think that having tools that facilitate visual depiction and manipulation helps.