Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Design Theory" channel.

  1. 25:15 I understand being afraid about potential propaganda use but the only real fix for that is to train people to evaluate trustworthiness of any piece of data. You can already use Blender 3D running on Linux (just as an example of fully open source software) to render photorealistic propaganda of anything you want. It just needs lots of skill and time, hence the propaganda photos you create that way will be expensive. DALL-E 2 or higher quality AI just makes the process cheaper but we have exactly the same problem anyway. I would even argue that when community in large is getting hit loads of photographic looking misinformation, they finally start to ask for references in a piece of news or supposed research studies. Majority of the people still accept pretty much any claim at face value as long as it's in written form in internet and that needs to change regardless of AI systems.
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  2. Useful product is a very interesting requirement because you can make a product that's highly usable for one specific purpose and really unusable for anything else. Supercars would be one example of this. On the other hand, Swiss army knife is a great example of a tool that's pretty usable for nearly everything but not perfectly usable for anything. I think Earth is too small to have enough storage space to have perfectly customized one purpose tools for everything so we should have more tools that are good enough for a lots of purposes.
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  3. AI can replace humans only if humans are not willing to adapt. Superhuman AGI (artificial general intelligence), on the other hand, is going to do everything better than humans, including art. It's like comparing greatest achievements of Bonobos and humans today. A super smart Bonobo can definitely do a lot more than most Bonobos but you would need to find pretty stupid human not to match the intelligence of the smartest Bonobo there is. There will be superhuman AGI that will make humans look like Bonobos compared to it. The only question is how long will it take until such thing is invented. I hope we have switched to universal basic income before that because otherwise there will be riots.
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  4. 4:15 Management telling the employees that giving any negative feedback results in firing is exactly the same kind of thinking that destroyed Nokia smartphone business, too. It barely functions in Japan where overall social culture is that everyone will do the best job possible even if not required, but it will not scale to countries where an average worker will only do exactly what was told. In that case, any poor design will end up in the final consumer product unless management prevents it from happening – this happens because no worker can say any thing about that even if they notice the problem. (And it appears that the Russia started the war against the Ukraine because Putin had had similar culture, too, and his club of yes-men pretended that there's nothing wrong with the idea of attacking Ukraine.)
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  5. Good video! I think it would have been even better with some of the repetion cut away. As for creativity. I think that if somebody feels that they have already created a couple of things they are proud of but are running out of new ideas, redoing previous work with a twist is always an option. For example, if you're drawing a comic characters, simply create a new character every day as a variation of the previous one. Maybe this one has an extra arm? Or a seriously long back? Or perfectly circular face? Or triangle-like face? After creating incremental changes, one per day for a year, you'll have a lot of changes in total even when the whole trip was totally incremental. And you don't need to spend a lot of time per day for the actual implementation – the important part is to think about your work every day and make at least one change. Another way to force yourself to be more creative is to do incremental changes but add artificial limitations for your own methods: "today I must do everything with my non-dominant hand". "Tomorrow I'll use pen and paper but I'll seriously wrinkle the paper before starting. If you're a digital artist working with vectors, you could decide that you cannot use bezier tool today. And another day you decide that bezier tool is the only tool you are allowed to use. I think I personally come up with the most creative solution when the environment is the most restrictive. The examples you had in this video where artists were in situation where they either succeed or possible stop their career match this same situation in my mind: you don't have any options so you have to accomplish your best work using the very limited resources you currently have available. Combined with lots of practice (lots of small incremental changes over time) allows you to fall back on your experience even with limited resources.
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