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Separate Worlds

Seeing these AI generated versions of Nike shoes made me think about the future of design. Humans would need to come up with entirely new things that the AI has never seen before and cannot extrapolate based on what it has. As interesting as the sneakers are, none of the designs are beyond the ability of a human artist or designer if they had been given the brief of coming up with a collection of dainty shoes on the framework on a sneaker. This begs the question if the human designer should make their creations available in the public domain for AI to get inspired by and speed up its process. Should they want pictures taken of their creative projects such as this restaurant designed using unwanted things

I was at an art and craft fair recently and just about every vendor had prominent signs posted asking visitors not to take pictures. The exceptions to this were few and far between and typically those were the stalls that did not bring anything particularly unique to the party - it was the typical hand-made jewelry, pottery, decorative items for home and yard. Wherever there was some bit of unique and proprietary, the signs to not photograph were front and center. While that kills the opportunity for social media popularity and word of mouth marketing, it presumably protects the artist from making their product part of the training data set for the AI. I hope there will be a point where the AI and human-made would being two different genres entirely, with the tools to tell the two apart clearly. Each would have its place in the world but they would not suck the air out of the other's life and eco-system. 

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