Generative AI

or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Cook an Entire Thanksgiving Feast in my Amana Touchmatic II Radarange??

In 1978 the Amana Touchmatic II Radarange hit the market and found a place on our kitchen counter. To the relief of my hard-working mom the promise of a simpler, more convenient, modern approach to cooking meals was finally here. At the touch of a few buttons an entire meal could be prepared in seconds — hours of cooking time reduced to mere minutes through the modern miracle of microwave radiation.

Along with this new technology came a wave of cooking classes and cookbooks that aimed to help home cooks learn how to prepare 5-star meals for their families using nothing but their microwave ovens: prepare a whole fish, cook a ham, or roast a whole stuffed turkey; steam vegetables and dehydrate fruits; boil pastas and rice; and bake a loaf of delicious bread or a fruit pie with a flaky crust. There was nothing this cutting edge kitchen technology couldn’t handle.

Soon enough we learned that while this was an invaluable, time-saving tool for our kitchens, it was never going to replace all of our appliances. Nor was it going to churn out Michelin star quality entrees. But it does some things incredibly well: making popcorn, melting butter, cheese, or chocolate, boiling water, reheating leftovers, or preparing frozen and other prepared meals.

In fact, an entire industry has flourished around microwaveable foods. Unlike the late 1970s, today there are aisles and aisles of food dedicated to microwave preparation — from the frozen food section to the deli counter.

Even world-renowned chefs have gotten in on the act, licensing their names to these products. But nuking up a Wolfgang Puck Margherita Pizza in my microwave will never compare to the experience of eating a meal at Spago, or even a Wolfgang Puck Café for that matter. In the end we have a bevy of choices but they’re all mediocre at best. They may have the ingredients, nutrients, and calorie counts to satisfy our needs, but are they great?

Today we understand that the microwave is just a tool, and used effectively it helps create efficiencies where things used to be more time consuming. I’m confident most award-winning chefs have microwaves in their homes and in their professional kitchens, but having a microwave doesn’t make me an award winning chef. Even if I was the best microwave operator in the world, I would still lack all the other complimenting techniques and skills to put together an exquisite meal.

Just like those heady days of the late-1970s microwave cooking era, we’re at the same inflection point with Generative AI today. Instead of aisles and aisles of mediocre foods, prepare for pages and pages of mediocre content. It’ll check the boxes that marketers and consumers need — but it won’t be great. Depending on who you talk to Generative AI is still at or near its peak of Inflated Expectations. While some are still expecting to prompt their way to a complete holiday feast in minutes, others recognize that Generative AI is more of a compliment to the greater set of tools that creatives and marketers need to execute concepts and tell their stories.

For me, I’m getting more and more comfortable with this new tool in my toolbox and have found several “boiling water”-type uses for it, including:

• Replacing Royalty Free Stock Photography/Video: Microwave content at its finest. If I’m looking for RF-imagery it’s because we didn’t have a photography budget in the first place so I’m going to be stuck with meh content anyway. I’ve found I’m able to move much faster using prompts to generate an image I need than digging through stock media sites.
• Replacing Lorem Ipsum: Using realistic copy in designs is more effective for client reviews and usability tests. Using generative text as the placeholder helps create greater context than lorem ipsum.
• Headline/Subject Line Variations: Coming up with multiple headline options based on an original prompt or article content.
• Creating Derivative Text: Generating teaser, preview, or abstract text for existing content.
• Generative Fill: Using generative AI to extend an image or remove an object
• Alt-text for media: Creating descriptive text for images for accessibility.

I’m still getting comfortable with more advanced tools and techniques, but there are still many cases where I’d rather have the control and refinement of conventional design and writing tools. I’m excited to see how Gen AI continues to push the boundaries of what's possible, and even more excited to see what skilled artists and technicians can bring to life with these tools.

In the meantime, I gotta go grab this Hungry-Man out of the microwave.