Why AI is like a coloring book

Every day on LinkedIn, we all see the same back-and-forth about AI. It’s great...it’s evil. It’s a helpful tool...it’ll turn your brain to cottage cheese.

And which is true? The former, the latter, both? Here’s a way to think about it.

Let’s say you have 5-year-old twins.

One of them spends hours with a box of crayons and draws a crooked, color-filled picture of your home. The other spends a few minutes prompting AI and generates a photorealistic image of your house.Which one would you like better?

If you’re a normal parent (i.e. not an AI bro), you’d choose the hand-drawn picture.

Yes, the prompted image looks great. It has immense width, compiled from every beautiful photo on the internet. But the crayon drawing has a quality AI can’t produce. It has depth, it has a story.

So that was easy, question answered. But what if you’re the one drawing the picture? Then, well, you might appreciate it if you had a bit of help, some outlines to get you going and keep you on track.

When I was a kid, I had a coloring book of ancient Egypt, with chariots, reed boats, those dogs with the pointy ears. Man, I loved that book and I colored the hell out of it.

Did I stay in the lines? Of course not. Could I have drawn a hieroglyph myself? Of course not. Could I draw one even now. I guess I could, given enough time.

So yeah, AI can give us the outlines, the breadth of possibility. But the color, the depth, that’s on us. We can’t make a Rembrandt but we can still draw a picture that’s ours. And we can make a living.