What AI teaches us

It’s a challenge, because in seconds it can pull out of a hat a quote from Groucho Marx or from Hegel, with the same authority and at a speed that leaves you disarmed.

And creating with AI? Do you actually create anything with it? Or does it spew something out and you don’t even ask yourself what on earth that is?

I like to think that AI is not a human being. In some ways, that puts me at a disadvantage: it doesn’t suffer from an inflated ego, nor does it need to be noticed in social life. For these and other reasons, it doesn’t cling to what it thinks and believes. It doesn’t need to feel unique in the world, as we humans do.

And I think that, because of this, it has no need to survive in the world, escape obscurity, be loved or even turn all its anguish into art! AI doesn’t create in the Romantic sense of the word – back in the 19th century, the Romantic poets believed they created out of nothing, that inspiration came from deep within their souls and that, for this reason, their work was original!

Shall we agree on one thing? AIs appropriate everything that has been produced to date and rearrange it all as if in a mathematical operation. They create more like an Arcadian poet, repeating the bucolic tale of the shepherd and his sheep that so many poets had sung before him.

That said, it does create! But it also creates by following the average. AI doesn’t need to break with anything to be noticed; there’s no ego at stake. In that sense, its universe of experience is rather narrow. It will never feel the breeze and the lapping of the sea and draw a song from it. Which doesn’t mean that, if you or I did, we would come away with a Girl from Ipanema ready to take us up the Billboard charts.

Because it creates the middling, and at an overwhelming speed, the world is becoming saturated with an aesthetic of sameness and dullness. Or do you think that, when you switch off the computer, it rushes off to take LSD and write a new Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?

No.

For a brand, this comes at a price. If everyone asks the same machine, everyone gets something alike: the same gradient, the same 3D icon, the same enthusiastic copy. And a brand that looks like all the others stops being a brand. It becomes just another product on the shelf.

At Laika, we use AI for real conversation: to debate, challenge and test ideas. But the decisions are ours. We have neural networks too, only ours have been trained over a whole lifetime – unique, absurdly sure of themselves, and affirming our human condition day after day.

Our synaesthetic world (touch, smells, images, sounds) embraces us. And that embrace holds every one of our ways of existing. This is the matter from which brands unlike any other are born.

What AI teaches us is that only we humans can cry in despair or laugh out of sheer nerves. Because, as a very ancient poet would put it:

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. That is: I am human, and I consider nothing human alien to me.
(Terence)

Superlimão branding: illustrations as brand identity

For the Superlimão brand, we explored patiently hand-drawn illustrations in which a few straight strokes build the lines, creating intentional deformities.
The visual language set out to push a way of representing reality to its limit, stretching forms until we found a universe unique to the brand.
The deformed look carries the brand’s ironic, experimental tone, one that allows itself to be humorous and provocative, just like its projects at the time.

Main image: Shodō (書道), “the way of writing” in Japanese, is the Japanese art of brush calligraphy. The image is part of the brand language project for the Japanese restaurant Tanabe.