Looking ahead to fall on MBH4H
And an ethics statement on our use of AI.
August 14th will be three months to the day since I posted my first essay on MBH4H. Today’s is the 23rd post on our Substack—not including the first announcement post on February 18th which was little more than me saying “helloooo, is this thing on?” Since that first post, we’ve written about the essential art of making mistakes, an increased love of analog in the digital age, what it would take to perform AI lobotomy, and a generative AI video we can actually get behind.
As we head towards the fall—my favorite time of year here in New York and New England—it seems like the perfect time to look forward to our Q4, and to what Ross and I have in store for this grand micro-media experiment that is Made by Humans for Humans.
Before I go any further, I once again have to say a humongous thank you to everyone who has subscribed to MBH4H on Substack and read our work. It genuinely means a lot to both of us whenever someone new subscribes, and we are always pleasantly surprised that the number of post views remains remarkably consistent and the open rate way above average. From the beginning, we’ve been focused on building an engaged audience, not necessarily a large one—although, of course, we’ll take both if we can!
So where do we go from here?
Looking back over what we’ve written to date, our essays have evolved from our early, news-focused commentary to become more focused on evergreen opinion and insight about a creative industry experiencing seismic change in the era of AI. That’s partly because it’s a more logical fit—we now also have a separate weekly roundup in which we can link to news—but also because it better suits our style: We’ve found it almost impossible to write an article under 1100 words, no matter how hard we try. So we’re going to stop beating ourselves up about it, write evergreen essays and save the blogging for our weekly roundup.
We’re also going to adjust our publishing cadence: Starting the week after Labor Day (September 9th-13th), we will publish one medium-length essay at 9 am ET on Thursdays and move publishing of our roundup of the week from midday Friday to early Monday mornings. This revised schedule will give us more time to work on each week’s essay and the weekly review.
In addition to publishing cadence, we’re going to shift the focus of what we write about ever so slightly; not so much a change of direction as more a light navigational trim. We describe MBH4H as a creative collective and a micro-media brand dedicated to exploring human creativity in the era of artificial intelligence. Up until this point we’ve been very focused on the AI part of that sentence. Which is hardly surprising; AI is a transformative technology that will affect the creative industry for years to come—in both good ways and bad.
But it’s difficult to understand how AI is going to affect the creative industry without determining what exactly human creativity is in the first place. And that, in the words of Deep Thought, “the most powerful computer ever built, with one exception,” is “tricky.”
It’s especially tricky because human creativity isn’t a monolith; it’s infinitely varied depending on the creativity of the human involved and the medium they’re using. Human creativity is changing and adapting all the time, not least in part because of the emerging technology of GenAI.
And this is what we want to write about; the intersection between the creative medium, the technology and the human. I think what creative humans are making using analog and technological tools is far more interesting than writing about the questionable ethics and borderline illegal business practices employed by AI companies which, let’s be honest, could take up all of our time if we let it.
The AI industrial complex is shitty. We’re going to take that as a matter of established fact and save ourselves the trouble of writing about it too often. Instead, we’ll let other publications, of which there are many, cover those stories with more in-depth reporting than we can offer. We will focus on creatives and their work—which is something I am more familiar with and comfortable talking about. As yes, some of the creatives we cover may be working with AI. And when they do, we’ll be transparent about it.
MBH4H, AI, and disclosure
Back in June I wrote an essay titled “Using AI is a choice. Disclosing its use isn’t,” in which I wrote, “Ross and I will begin work on our own ethics statement for MBH4H to clearly outline to our audience (and anyone interested) exactly how we will and will not use AI in our work, both visual and written.”
So here it is: our ethics statement outlining exactly how we use AI and how we disclose it. This has been added to our about section for easy reference. We may update it from time to time (AI is constantly evolving) and we will disclose whenever we do:
MBH4H Ethics Statement
To date, we have not used any Generative AI (GenAI) programs to create any of the original artwork or imagery published on MBH4H. That isn’t to say we aren’t playing around with Midjourney, DALL-E, Llama, or Stable Diffusion, among others—we do, because we think it’s an important step in understanding the world we’re writing about. We just haven’t published anything that uses them.
If, in the future, we choose to use any form of GenAI in the process of creating original artwork, or any GenAI is used by any artists or creators whose work we feature or employ, we will clearly label that work accordingly in the associated caption.
We differentiate the AI tools built into Adobe programs like Photoshop (or individual plugins that work with these programs) from the larger GenAI platforms: In these specific cases, the AI tool is simply an extension of a program we are already using and is simply the AI version of something we can do “by hand” using the same program: For example, the Remove Background web app (or Photoshop plugin) used to cut out people or objects from a background. It is not generating anything new; rather, it is making an existing and manual process more efficient.
We think it’s confusing and redundant to declare when these specific tools are used. But we are disclosing that we have used these AI tools in the past and will continue to do so in the future. We will also use other AI tools built into programs or as plugins in this same manner as they become available in the future.
Similarly, we disclose that we frequently use copy editing tools like Grammarly (and may use Gemini in the future should it be built into Google Docs). But we have yet to use copy written by Gemini or ChatGPT within any of our written essays, articles or posts. We have strong reservations about using generative text in any published work, but should that change in the future, we will disclose its use at that time—each and every time.
Moving on
We think of MBH4H as a micro-media company, a publication made by creatives for creatives, and a creative experiment in its own right. AI is an important subject to cover and an incredibly powerful tool to use; an emergent technology that we need to become deeply familiar with, if only to enable us to talk and write about it.
Yet, the irony is that if experimenting and writing about AI over these past three months has had any significant effect on me or my work, it’s that I have rediscovered a long-forgotten passion for analog creative tools in general, and especially photography, that I never thought would stir again. As a result, my mint used Leica Summicron-M 35mm f/2 lens is currently winging its way from Japan.
And that is exactly why MBH4H exists: to inspire creative experimentation in the era of AI, even if that experiment is to rekindle a desire to shoot black-and-white photographs using a twenty-year old camera.
Editor's Note
It should probably go without saying, but just in case, +1 to everything written above. When James first approached me to collaborate on MBH4H, what excited me most was that we'd be launching this as an experiment in progress—that we wouldn't have everything figured out before we put the first words on the internet. That we could embrace the chaos of building a plane while flying, or however that saying goes.
Our first three months live were largely setting the foundation for what's to come. You've seen the fruits of that labor, but a majority of the work since day one has been us building processes to ensure we're able to nimbly express ideas and, you know, actually get the work done—build kanban boards, schedule brainstorming meetings, set deadlines, argue about the Oxford commas, etc. We could've figured all that out before launching, but again, part of the fun here was doing it live.
But now we're going to be holding ourselves to a higher standard. Building that foundation means we can go from "random idea" to "published work" a lot faster than we could in May. We have a stronger sense of how we feel about where technology and creativity intersect, and a better grasp on how we can talk about it effectively. That also puts the onus on us to try some new ideas and formats—which you’ll be seeing sooner rather than later.
We’re going to enjoy these last few weeks of summer but we’re already looking forward to fall; scarves and pumpkin spice lattes all round. —Ross