AI Lab Newsletter

Creative challenges give us a reason to show up, experiment, and make something without carrying the pressure of a traditional assignment. There’s no client brief, no grade, and no predetermined outcome. There is no right answer. There is no wrong answer. That idea sits at the heart of my teaching philosophy: creativity grows when curiosity matters more than correctness, play comes before polish, and experimentation is allowed to lead somewhere unexpected.

When judgment is sharp, AI gets a creative team to distinct work faster. When judgment is weak, AI simply produces more mediocre work at scale. Right now, organizations are adopting generative tools much faster than their people are developing the criteria to direct them. The symptom isn’t a lack of technical skill. Everyone knows how to type a prompt.

Creating a character sheet gives you consistency. Creating a location gives that character somewhere to exist. Bring the two together, and you’re no longer generating isolated clips—you’re beginning to build a reusable visual world. Choose one character and one clearly defined location. Then create a short video in which the character actively interacts with that environment. Don’t simply place them in the scene.

I stopped by a local skatepark yesterday that is only a couple miles from where we are staying this month in Knoxville (Fountain City area). I mean to be in touch with the local governing body to see about having lights added to the park for night enjoyment by the tons of kids and young adults that frequent there. My goal was two-fold: Grab some pictures to document the scene as is, then use AI and show the park with and without lights at night.

If you are in the creative industry, I am sure you have at one time poured over Pinterest boards full of infographics, or Behance collections of hand-drawn note summaries, scrolled the Google Image returns of excellent designs, or if you are OG like me - you might recall uncovering excellent creative work in Communicative Arts that earned a sticky note at the top of the magazine (to revisit later).

We make thousands of decision each day, rarely pausing to consider what my wife and I refer to as the second- and third-order effects. Yet the very first decisions made at the threshold of an experience (which can feel completely innocuous), quickly sets the boundary conditions for all the decisions that follow. Let’s walk though a couple you may find familiar. Consider you just walked thru the sliding glass doors of your local grocery store.

Most AI-generated work fails before a single frame is generated. Not because the prompt was weak. Because nobody decided what story was being told. We’ve spent three years obsessed with the last six inches of the process — the prompt box, the syntax, the magic words. Meanwhile the decisions that actually determine whether work lands happen upstream, before anyone opens a tool. And those decisions haven’t changed in a hundred years of commercial storytelling.

For many creatives, the act of production is intoxicating. The daily ritual of writing, designing, or building creates a comforting feedback loop—a feeling of progress rooted entirely in effort, not outcomes. Because this production habit is so deeply seated, it feels like success. When the actual results lag, the instinctive response is rarely to pivot; instead, it is to double down on the same actions with greater intensity.

I just got this notification this week from Google, that Mixboard will be officially shutting down on September 28th of this year. If you have never experienced Mixboard, there are several AI platforms that have created versions of it. Adobe Firefly has a model called BOARDS that I talk about in my latest book - CREATIVE CONTROL. BOARDS is a pretty robust tool with even greater creative options (images and video with multiple AI tools integrated).

Sam Fowke (Food, Drink & Product Photographer) shared a post on LinkedIn about how he created an image that blended his in-studio shot with some creative use of AI. That after announcing what a lot of creative FEEL right now… Sam explained: Recently I shot this can of Milkis in the studio. The can is real, this lighting setup is real, the background is real. The milk is not. I didn’t want to soak my studio in milk this time around, I was against the clock and wanted to keep things quick and clean.