Meet Your Agent

Meet Your Agent...

A small philosophical crisis involving artificial intelligence, subscriptions,
and who exactly is employed by whom.

There is a question I have been thinking about lately:
If you had one agent working for you full time, what would you want it to do?

At first, this sounds like a very modern question. Perhaps it would organize your life. Answer emails. Find things. Make things. Remember things you forgot. Remind you of things you deliberately forgot.

Possibly make coffee, although apparently artificial intelligence has decided that generating twelve-fingered Renaissance accountants is easier than operating an espresso machine.

Still. An agent. Working for me. Lovely.

Except I have recently begun to suspect that somewhere in the great technological revolution, the employment contract got mixed up. Because I seem to be working for them.

My new colleagues

I have several digital colleagues now.

One is very good at generating things from nothing. One is better when I already have something and want it changed. One understands photographs beautifully but occasionally develops strong opinions about what my photograph shouldhave looked like.

One can remove objects. One can add objects. One can remove the objects it just added. One can then add them again, but slightly to the left. This is called workflow.

They are all extremely talented. They are also completely incapable of admitting that another colleague might be better at something. So I have become management.

“Could you make this?” Certainly.
“No, not quite. Perhaps you could try?” Certainly.
“Interesting. Could you keep everything exactly the same except the hat?” Certainly.

Entire building disappears.
“Thank you. I think I’ll ask someone else.”

Then came loyalty

For some reason, we humans become strangely loyal to software. This is peculiar.

I have never worried that my screwdriver might feel rejected because I used a hammer. I don’t whisper to the toaster: “I’m sorry, but the oven is simply better for this one.”

But give me a subscription and suddenly there is a relationship.

I should probably use it.
Why?
Because I paid for it.

Ah. This is the same economic principle that makes people finish terrible desserts.

The credits are watching

Credits make this even more interesting. The moment something has credits, I stop being an artist and become a tiny accountant.

I have 2,846 Imaginary Creative Units. This costs 100. That costs 500. If I press this button twice, I will have 2,646.

Suddenly the question is no longer “Do I want to make this?”
It is: “Is this worth 200 Imaginary Creative Units?”

Nobody in the Renaissance had this problem.

Michelangelo did not stare at the Sistine Chapel ceiling and say: “Hmm. I could try another version of Adam’s hand, but that’s 80 credits.”

Although, considering the hand, perhaps he did.

The dangerous button

Every creative tool has one particularly dangerous button. It may be called Generate Again. Or Variation. Or Remix. Or something reassuring like Improve.

Improve is particularly sinister. Because who doesn’t want improvement?

You press it. The image changes. Is it better? Possibly.
You press it again. Now it is definitely worse. Excellent.
So naturally you press it again to get back to the first one. You never get the first one again.

This is how civilizations end.

PRUTT

Eventually, every creative workflow requires a technical term for the moment when further improvement becomes statistically indistinguishable from destruction.

Mine is: PRUTT.

PRUTT means: Stop. The image was good fourteen generations ago.
Close the tab. Step away from the reference image.

Do not adjust the atmospheric veil.
Do not make the whale slightly larger.
Do not ask whether perhaps one tiny vintage airplane in the upper-right corner would create narrative tension.

PRUTT.

This may be the most advanced creative technology currently available. And it is completely free.

Meet your actual agent

Which brings me back to the original question. What would it be like to have an agent working for you?

I think I finally know.

A good agent doesn’t make you reorganize your work around its needs. It doesn’t demand loyalty. It doesn’t need to be used because you have credits left. It doesn’t convince you to make something you didn’t particularly want because there is a button, a reward, a streak, a ranking, a badge or a tiny animated coin involved.

It has a job. And when that job appears, you hire it. That’s all.

Perhaps Tool A is brilliant at starting an image. Tool B is brilliant at finishing it. Tool C has one bizarre little feature that nobody else does quite as well.

Wonderful. Tool C can sit quietly in the cupboard until Tuesday. It will survive.

I am the workflow

This was my small revelation. I kept looking for the perfect creative platform.

Perhaps there isn’t one.
Perhaps I am the platform.

The tools are plugins in my workflow. I decide what I want to make. I decide which one gets called in. I decide when another one could do the job better. And most importantly, I decide when the job is finished.

That changes the relationship rather wonderfully.

I don’t have to leave a tool. I don’t have to marry one either. I can downgrade it, upgrade it, ignore it for three months, use one strange feature, spend the remaining credits on something ridiculous, and disappear again.

No hard feelings. We’re professionals.

And perhaps that is my new Meet Your Agent philosophy:
Don’t ask which AI you should work for. Ask which AI should work for you.

Give it one job. Let it do that job. Thank it politely. Then send it back to the cupboard.

And if it tries to persuade you that the whale would look better with slightly more magenta atmospheric diffusion—you know what to say.

PRUTT. 😂🌺

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