Why AI Can't Teach Taste w/ Brooke Hopper | Ep 450

0:00The nature of AI is to recognize and repeat patterns. By its nature, it's giving us patterns. And if you are only following the patterns, it's training you as a human. And I think as designers, our challenge is to do things like breaking the rules. Hey, my name is Brooke Hopper, and you're listening to The Future.

0:24Chris Do: I have a rare opportunity to speak to somebody very high up at Adobe to find out what is going on. Brooke, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Tell me a little bit about you for people who don't know who you are. What is your role at Adobe? Sure. I'm a senior principal designer at Adobe. First one ever, actually, on the Adobe design team. But I lead a lot of thinking around what is the future of creative tools? And specifically, my contributions have been sort of bringing Firefly into our creative tools thinking about what the role is, and honestly just making sure that it's useful in creative workflows rather than no one wants to generate just something.

1:01We all want it to be useful. And so that's really how I think about that. And where do we go in the future?

1:07Chris Do: So we are to give you credit or the blame you at Firefly is what we love? You can do both. Okay. I'm actually, one of my big passions is really around helping people do the things that they really want to do, Whether that's using AI as a tool, whether it's just doing it on your own, it doesn't matter. Really what I view my role is I'm here to help people do what they love and also make it better. So one thing I think about that's really remarkable about Adobe is how intentional you are and thoughtful in creating AI tools because it's a tightrope. I think you're walking in that you're integrating AI technologies, but you're for creators.

1:44Chris Do: And so some creators are very emotionally not cool with AI. what is the philosophy behind like what you guys are doing and how you decide what you're going to make or not make yeah i mean you'll hear people say this a lot as we view ai as a tool but it's actually more than that i've been in adobe for 10 years i spent seven of those years building drawing apps so i'm very close to the illustration community a lot of that community has real concerns and i think has legitimate concerns around what is going to happen to their craft their art, what comes next. And that's really a lot of the things that I think about.

2:22And I think it's important as a designer, as someone who's building creative experiences, to hold that intention and to understand both of those sides. And so when we bring this into our tools, it's not, again, you're just generating a thing. Adobe has been around for 40 plus years. We've been building creative tools that entire time. And so Adobe knows precision and control better than any other company. And we know that when you're trying to make something, pixels matter. The tiny micro adjustments are actually the thing that matters. Anyone can do big, sweeping, gorgeous designs, but when it gets down to it, I'm actually wearing a shirt right now that says control freak.

3:04Designers are control freaks. We have to have everything in a way that really makes sense. And so it's all about the craft. And that's really what we're leaning into as we're thinking about what is the future of design tools? What is the future of illustration tools? What is the future of video? How does this stuff all play together to make your life better? Creative tools should feel creative.

3:26Chris Do: I like the integration. I like the love of control that as an early user of Firefly, I thought it was really neat. You're building a tool to do something versus just a wide open sandbox. I've seen it go through different iterations. I have to admit, sometimes I have a love and hate relationship with Firefly. Sometimes it does exactly what I want. I rush over, tell my wife who's a designer, like, babe, look at what I just did. And sometimes I'm like, God, I asked you to do this and it's not working. Do I take blame responsibility that I just don't know how to tell it what to do? You're not the only one.

3:56I get a lot of bad results. In fact, I got one up on stage today. You get bad results?

4:00Chris Do: No way. I think that's the thing is like, that is the nature of this technology. It is not meant to do exactly the thing that you want to do, which kind of goes back to the point where I said, Adobe knows control better than anyone. It's going to give you something random and that might spark a direction, but you have control over that direction. You get to decide whether you take it or not. And you can decide if you want to refine it or go deeper. And that's what we're here for. And totally agree with you. I mean, it's a love-hate relationship with Gen. Sometimes it's magical and amazing and allows you to do crazy things.

4:31And other times you're just like, you know what? I'm just going to pause for today.

4:36Chris Do: Now, I have to say this because I describe myself as an AI optimist. if you use the tools to help support what you do, you can work faster and you can ideate. I mean, maybe we transition into this idea of like, maybe once I was in production, but I'm moving up towards art direction, possibly creative direction. What do you see the role of AI and what you are making specifically to help me achieve those goals? Yeah. So I actually see AI helping me on the opposite ends, right? Like in the middle, I still, again, you're going to hear me say this a lot, but like I need precision control and I need finishing tools.

5:09But on either end, when I'm brainstorming and thinking about what this concept is going to be, I might be sketching, I might be doing things. Maybe if I'm a graphic designer, maybe I use Gen AI to help visualize a couple of concepts. And then on the production end, AI is really good at recognizing patterns and repeating patterns and looking at data and analyzing and help you find those trends. And so being able to use it for coming up with random ideas, something that I might not have ever thought of. And I think that's where it's really important to understand what does the machine do well and what do humans do well?

5:44And understanding what your value is and what you bring as a designer, as a creative person to this process actually makes the whole thing so much more clear. One exercise I actually love to do with students, I get asked to into a lot of universities to help introduce students to Gen AI and what it means to their workflow, is I give them a project and I say, we're going to do this entire assignment using only Gen AI. You cannot use any other tools. And a lot of them don't like it. But what it does is it actually helps them understand where does this tool make sense and where does it absolutely not make sense.

6:21And I think that's some of those things, we can get into curriculum and education and how that plays into where things go in the future, which I think it plays a very important role, but a lot of it is embracing it and helping the students understand where does it matter and where does it make sense just to like do it the way that you've been doing it for a while? Because there's a place for both.

6:43Chris Do: I talked to the director of a graduate program at SVA and he talked about how it's very important for him, for his students in the product design department to sketch, then use AI to iterate, render different materials and explore really quickly. I love it for its brainstorming capabilities. Are we getting close to that part where, okay, I love the idea of it. Now I want to be very specific and ask for certain things that happen that Firefly Photoshop can help me get there. I think we're getting there. But again, just based on what Gen AI is and does is it's not a technology of perfection. The whole idea around it is it's taking something and it's making a new thing every time.

7:26And so when you're working for, say you're an ID student, industrial design student, and you're working at a product company, you're not going to be generating that product into a bunch of ads. Yes, maybe in the ideation phase or when you're brainstorming and trying to think of how it might look, you know, sort of in situ situations. But at the end of the day, that company wants their product, not a generation or an approximation. Close enough is not good enough with a lot of those things. And so I think that goes back to use it where it works and where it makes sense. So for example, I have a good friend who's an industrial designer.

8:02And a lot of times he's asked to provide sketches to clients. And then not necessarily like a full turnaround, but they want different angles of what, say, a camera might look like. And his dream is, I want to do one or two sketches. And then Gen AI can generate the rest of those things for me. And we're at a place where that can happen. And so there are little tweaks in the workflow of just really addressing the things that are annoying or driving you nuts. And it's finding those little places where there's a catch or a hiccup or something just slightly annoying in the workflow that can make all the difference in the world.

8:38Chris Do: If you had all the power in the world and you could make anything happen, what would you wish for Firefly to be able to do now? I mean, this is very broad, but like what I would have it do is just like enable everyone to feel fun being creative. I think that this is something that I see a lot as we talk a lot about like people need content. We're creating more content. I got into design because I'm really passionate about it and I love it. And creating more and more and more content at a faster and faster pace isn't, I'm definitely not passionate about that. I can tell you that much. Like I want to have fun creating.

9:15And so if all it can do is just like take care of the things that I don't want to do so I can spend time coming up with fun ideas or creating a really gorgeous interface or I'm a graphic designer at heart. I call myself a recovering graphic designer. You know, make some gorgeous packaging like the world would be better.

9:35Chris Do: Okay, I'm not gonna let you off the hook. You gave me an answer, but that was not the question or the answer to the question I asked. I would really love to hear. I mean, people ask me weird questions like this all the time. I'm like this is what I would do. Yeah. You do. Yeah. Is it okay if I push a little bit here? Yeah. Yeah, you can. I mean, I can, I can share a couple of the things. One killer idea. The thing that I would love is when we're using tools, just the nature of tools, there are limitations and limitations can be good. Friction is good. That's a, it's an intentional part of play.

10:07And I've been thinking a lot about introducing intentional friction in the use of AI because it also allows you to feel ownership of it. But then there's also areas where there's friction and it's not intentional. And so one of the things that I was thinking about not too long ago was we've introduced this idea of mask tracking in After Effects and Premiere, something where you can select a piece of the video and then it will automatically propagate it out and follow that section. Well, what if I could just click it and change it. How crazy can we go with some of this stuff? And crazy is probably not the word, but like, what if I have two videos and I can just click something from one video and drag it into another?

10:54What if we could treat video editing kind of like image compositing? Or how can we push the boundaries on some of this stuff to make it feel more natural? We live in a 3D world. And I think just the nature of how we work, being in a 2D surface feels less natural. And so I think there could be a really cool opportunity to somehow allow our creation experiences to be a little more immersive. And I don't even want to say intuitive, but physical in a way. Like the first thing you do when you're a kid is you draw, you pick up a crayon. That's the most natural form of creativity. And so how can we make something like video editing feel as natural and intuitive as picking up a crayon when you're a two-year-old?

11:42I don't know. I don't have the answers, but like that would be pretty amazing. Imagine being able to like take an image and just turn it and rotate it and interact with it in ways. And just I think there's a natural, intuitive way that you can take objects and move them and adjust them. And I'm speaking purely more video and image compositing at this point, not necessarily UX design. but the ux enables you to interact with things in a way that feels more how i could pick up

12:11Chris Do: this water glass and take a drink of it since i'm a pop culture guy is it like what i think blade runner is or was where you know they do this like zoom in enhance but it's like how are you seeing around somebody's shoulder if i have the ability to take an image any image moving or static and say you know what i'd love to reframe this i want to change the camera angle i actually want them putting down the cup instead of picking it up. And that would save my butt when I'm like shooting. That technology exists today. It does. And is this something that we're going to see more of and more refined?

12:45Chris Do: And this is where it gets real tricky, right? I have done those things where I've fed it. I'm like, change this and it just goes bananas. There's extra body parts. There's all kinds of weird stuff happening, but we're marching towards that. We are. And again, Again, as Adobe, we know how to control those types of things. And I think a lot of times when you think of Adobe tools, you think of Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, kind of all the standards. And a lot of people forget that Adobe also has a huge suite of 3D products. And those 3D products can do a lot of things. And when you combine that with generative technology and then combine that with some of our traditional tools, you can imagine how this starts to play together and come to life.

13:28Chris Do: Are we talking about extracting a 3D model from a frame and then being able to rebuild it, retexture it and put it back in? Absolutely. Okay. Is there more you want to say about that? No, I just I think that your question was around if I could do anything with Gen AI, what would it be? And that's kind of what I'm getting at is like making things as intuitive as working with something in the real world. And working with 3D is not intuitive. I can tell you that as someone who has tried and failed to do 3D printing. But when we're working with 2D content in a 3D world, it's difficult. And so if you can take this water glass and just rotate the angle of it and it propagates throughout the video in a way and harmonizes itself, that's much easier.

14:14I am not a words person. I'm really bad at prompting. I don't think prompting is a natural way of creating for people who are visual. I want to be able to interact with things and move them around. And we are in a world where that can be possible. Where technology is allowing us to do things in ways that feel intuitive to us as humans who live and interact in a 3D world.

14:41Chris Do: Do you think people then become less decisive? Like, I think one of the things is we get experience. We're like, this looks good. Change that. And we kind of know. It's not like we literally have to move it every single place and rotate 100 times to figure that out. So are we marching towards that? I love this question because the answer to that is the nature of AI is to recognize and repeat patterns. By its nature, it's giving us patterns. And if you are only following the patterns, it's training you as a human. And I think as designers, our challenge is to do things like breaking the rules and deciding not to do it and really understanding what are the fundamentals of design and your craft.

15:25And you always hear the phrase, you have to know the rules to break the rules. That's very true. And so people who don't know the rules, of course, they're going to allow the AI to guide them through these patterns into a more possibly homogenous world. That's where the beauty of creativity and humanity comes in is you have a perspective. I have a perspective. We're sitting here in the same room and we have very different experiences and you can tell a story through your lens. I can tell a story through my lens. And so it's making those decisions based on our experiences, the stories we want to tell, deciding that you're just going to go completely in the opposite direction.

16:04That's where the real creativity lies. And that's something that requires curiosity. You have to, again, understand and know the fundamentals of storytelling, design, et cetera. and creativity is definitely not dead or dying. I think it's very much alive and I think the people who have that curiosity are really going to thrive.

16:27Chris Do: Weird question I'll throw at you, but I think given your background as a recovering designer, as an educator and someone who's pretty high up in the Adobe food chain here, I'm trying to fix the world by creating educational content that teach people to be better without going through school and getting into debt. Will Firefly teach me? Can it teach me? Is that part of the agenda? Because it's seen a lot more than a person can see. Any person can see, right? And it knows what's supposed to be good and like color harmony or theory and harmony and those kinds of things, rules of composition. I think it already knows those things.

17:03Maybe. I think it has to be taught. Let me frame it this way. There are some basics that this is good, this is bad. But really what makes design design design is when you choose whether or not to accept those things kind of back to those following decisions. And so, for example, if you're working with a brand, they definitely have brand guidelines that are good or bad. And so if it knows that it can check those, it can give you sort of general, I don't know if you were in the keynote this morning, but they demoed like, Hey, I call it design spell check, check some of these fundamentals for me.

17:38Maybe you want help making those decisions. And I think that's okay. But I think that as a human, you still have to learn those things. And yes, it may teach you some things along the way. I think that's great. But I think ultimately at the end of the day, you need to learn your taste and what taste is. I like, I'm a little skeptical that you should be learning taste from a machine.

18:02Chris Do: Wow. I think it can guide you. I mean, I feel like that's my role as a creative person at Adobe is to embrace technology with a healthy skepticism. I would love with its vast data set for not only to generate what we want, but to educate us in the process. Like, here's the first iteration. And this is why I did this. This is the most conservative version. And the composition is X, Y, and Z because you've asked for that. May I make other suggestions and may we talk about these other things that we could do. and like it was talking to a very junior level designer so that the profession can rise much faster perhaps or is that too crazy?

18:39No, no, no. I think that's how a lot of people look at AI is I hear a lot of people calling it their intern. I'm a little shy of calling AI a collaborator that feels, I think just for the time and place where we are today and the position where I'm in, where I'm working with creative people, collaborator feels a little too much for my personal taste. But that's really kind of what it's doing. I did an exercise recently with someone who, she's very much into typography and she got a group of people together and she said, okay, I want you, no looking online, come up with as many type jokes as you can, just from your mind.

19:20And then we did that for five, 10 minutes. And then we used AI to come up with a bunch of funny, I put that in quotes, type jokes. And then the third exercise was, okay, now do this again and collaborate with the AI. And they're by far better because you're bouncing off of this thing and it's giving you ideas. And really that's what the creative practice is. That's what you're doing with Firefly is, yeah, sure, you could take the thing straight out that it gives you, but is that really going to be the thing that you're happy with? Maybe sometimes yes, but I would argue as a creative person, probably not.

19:59You want to take it and you want to edit it and you want to make it yours and you want to work a little bit for it. You want that friction. Whether you admit it or not, like that's part of the joy of being a creative person is like having to work a little bit for it.

20:13Chris Do: So do you artificially handicap the software to make it, to add that friction into the process? Honestly, I think that's the question. You know, there's a lot of times where there's a bug in a software that causes a point of friction. and it ends up being like someone uses that to make something incredible and amazing and innovative. It's a feature, not a bug. I'm sure you know that phrase. And I think that's what some of this is. And the questions that I have is, if so, if we do introduce points of friction, where are those? Or should those just sort of like occur naturally somehow in the process?

20:49Chris Do: Final two questions. I think everyone's just catching their breath. Literally every day on Instagram, social media, oh, this new tool does this. And I'm like, oh my God, I cannot keep up with this. And there's this term being thrown around, agentic AI. I don't even know what that means. I think I know what it means. What is it? And should we be concerned or happy? Yeah. I mean, really, it's just the concept that we talked about was using AI as a collaborative tool to sort of come up with more ideas and help you do things. It's the intern concept. Really, that's, I mean, I think in the most basic sense, that's really what it is, you could argue, but really it's the helper is kind of what it is.

21:29Chris Do: How's it different than Gen AI now? There's a whole new term for this now, so it must be doing something different. It is slightly different. I mean, it's giving you context and it's able to produce answers. One agent is able to take things and deploy what they call sub-agents to go off and do other tasks. You know, it's mini worker bees all working together. In its most basic form, you can think of it as a chatbot. And then that chatbot can go and do other things behind the scenes while you're interacting with it or doing it. And so it's just bringing more information to you in a faster way. One really great example is, say, I'm doing some brainstorming.

22:11I can ask my chat, hey, go out and find a bunch of references that are like X, Y, and Z. And it can go out, search the internet in two minutes and bring all of that stuff, two minutes or less, honestly, and bring all of that stuff to me. Whereas if I were to go and do that on my own, I wouldn't, number one, I wouldn't find all of that stuff. Number two, it would take me forever. It could take me hours. It could take me days. And so that's a really great example of an agent or a chat helping you work quicker and faster in a way that makes sense.

22:42Chris Do: the practical application for this would be like i want to create a mood board or something like that like i kind of like this and find me a bunch of things and i'll pull it off the internet build the mood board for me that's an example there okay but you could be pulling in your own i think i guess that's where that's where again i always insert my sort of point of view from adobe is like it can do all that for you but from a creative perspective it's way more interesting if you're also bringing in your own stuff, kind of like the font joke. You can do it on your own. The AI can do it on your own.

23:16But if you do it together, it's actually way more interesting.

23:18Chris Do: So suppose that we're living in infinite multidimensional reality with infinite timelines. The five-year version of you in the future looks back at this moment in time. What do you see happening? Is this like an inflection point for humanity, creativity, that this was that fork in the road and we hit it? What has happened? So you're five years in the future. Looking back, what have you seen that's either made you happy or really sad? I think for me, I say this quite often with the industry I'm in, being a creative person, working in generative AI. I mentioned before, I like to have a healthy skepticism.

23:53I think that's really important. I think I'll be really happy with the way that I am helping and my contributions to how Adobe is approaching this. I care a lot about the creative community. I care a lot about education. And the fact that we're doing this, we're training models by compensating the artists for their work. We're licensing everything that we train on. We're not training on IP. That makes me feel really good. And that makes me feel really excited about what the future can be. And I'm happy to have contributed to it.

24:28Chris Do: I think that's amazing that Adobe's taken that line. I also feel like sometimes it's hurt Firefly in terms or the AI engine to learn because I don't think the other companies care that much and they look at everything. And so they have a much richer data set of images. Do you feel like that is accurate or? Yeah, of course. Okay, but you're going to fight that battle on ethical sword or whatever to make sure that that line isn't crossed, right? I don't think it's a battle to fight. And even for myself, I will use other generative tools in my work, but I'm not generating the entire thing. I'm using it for editing and for me being on the side of helping ensure that artists are paid and compensated.

25:12and I can feel good about the work that I'm doing and that I'm helping the people who are contributing to this. I mean, that's really where it comes down to for me. To me, it's not a battle. It's a matter of choice. It's a matter of preference. And I understand that there's people who don't, it's not a concern for them. And I think that's totally okay. But for me and my personal viewpoint and stance, that's what I feel the best about.

25:37Chris Do: Great. I think that's a great way to end this. Yeah. Thanks for being my guest on the pod. Yeah, thank you. of course