***No AI was used to write the following.***

When our team thinks about how artificial intelligence might fit into our current workflow, we try to shut out the marketing noise and hype. Like many other offices, we’ve been exploring tools and reading about the pros and cons of this technology.

And we are openminded, reminding ourselves that our agency has always learned new tricks. Our company was founded in 1981 – before the internet was even a thing and our first Apple Macintosh was acquired in 1987!

WHAT WE’VE TRIED

We’ve experimented with DALL•E, Chat GPT, PI, Claude, and Google Gemini. We’ve read the AI summaries that Gmail, Zoom, and Adobe Acrobat provide. We’ve downloaded generative AI images from Adobe Stock, used Photoshop’s powerful AI tools, and have asked Chat GPT for code snippets.

As creatives – writers, artists, coders – it is disheartening to realize that AI companies have scraped the internet of human-created open-source code, art, literature, and music – and now the AI algorithms are feeding that data back to us to further manipulate.

WHAT WE’VE SEEN

Both AI-generated work and the anti-AI trend are dominating creative marketing everywhere, and Q is staying curious. We’re finding ways AI is being used productively and positively – following along with the work of an Indigenous couple in New Zealand using AI to save the te reo Māori language and appreciating the elegant AI-created images for a food tracking app by design firm Smith & Diction.

We understand the promise of AI sorting through massive databases of medical, legal, and scientific data; and autonomous vehicles (on land, sea, and air) are proliferating. Our longtime client Mcity is expanding its reach from testing the safe rollout of autonomous vehicles and smart city research to drone and advanced air mobility with M-air.

Over the last few years we have been part of a team providing website services for ACCESS, a program established by the U.S. National Science Foundation that gives researchers and educators free access to U.S. computing systems and services. Since its start in September 2022, ACCESS has been an extremely popular program with over a million visits to the website. See map of usage.

Beginning in 2018 we’ve worked with the SC Conference Series – The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. Their recent SC25 conference in St. Louis was a huge success with a massive exhibit floor – 559 exhibitors and 16,500 attendees. The keynote speaker Thomas Koulopoulos gave us a look into the future of AI, and during the thoughtful Q&A afterwards attendees questioned the breakneck pace, immense resources needed, and the potential for increased social inequality in this new world. Ask Thomas’ AI Persona your questions.

Here in Ann Arbor the University of Michigan provides a custom suite of generative AI tools for its community. And Michigan, like many other communities across the nation (and the world), is grappling with the location of massive data centers and supercomputing facilities and the fresh water and electricity needed to power them. See this thorough write up from Michigan Public.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao. A sobering look at the breakneck speed in which OpenAI and other major AI players have rushed to market with their products and the hidden human and environmental costs.

How A.I. Is Changing the Way the World Builds Computers by Cade Metz, Karen Weise, Marco Hernandez, Mike Isaac and Anjali Singhvi 

I Love Generative AI and Hate the Companies Building It by Christina Wodkte

Gigatrends by Thomas Koulopoulos and Nathaniel Palmer

WHAT WE’RE WORRIED ABOUT

The speed of change

It feels like industry is forcing us to adopt AI and AI tools have been thrown into our laps. Products we use daily – Zoom, Adobe Creative Suite, Slack, Google Suite, LinkedIn, Yoast, etc. – assume we want the AI features that they have suddenly turned on.

We’ve been annoyed when the Otter Meeting Agent asks to join our Zoom meeting even before our human client signs on. And our client does not even know how otter.ai suddenly co-opted their Zoom preferences.

Safety and regulation

As AI companies race to bring products to market it seems safety has taken a back seat and regulation is missing. None of us want to walk into a building or fly in an airplane that has not passed inspection. When we use AI products we are concerned about privacy and where the data is coming from – is it valid, is it corrupt, is there a case of copyright infringement?

We hear that guardrails need to be put on this technology and states are trying to put some protections in place. Similar to the arms race, we are told that if we don’t build it first our adversaries and bad actors will prevail – and that provides the federal government a reason to be hands-off.

We are told that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the next phase in human evolution and it will happen, must happen, is happening. Or will it?

The non-profit Future of Life Institute publishes an AI Safety Index that grades the major AI players – Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, Z.ai, Meta, DeepSeek, and Alibaba Cloud – in six categories including Risk Assessment and Governance & Accountability. Most companies scored “D”.

Will AI replace our design work?

We have yet to find an AI tool that can:

  • Listen closely to a client’s design problem with empathy and expertise
  • Understand the current state of design and technical opportunities
  • Conduct a thorough discovery process and review and synthesize all client documents, email chains, and meeting notes
  • Manage a budget
  • Develop appropriate and creative solutions
  • Present these ideas and receive (human) feedback
  • Test, refine, and finalize
  • Deliver across a wide range of media – video, social, print, web, merchandise, exhibit and environmental design

Will we fall behind for not using AI?

Despite working with companies at the forefront of technology and innovation, at Q we value the process of actually working with our clients, understanding their needs, and co-creating with them.

Clients trust us with their organizations. We’ve worked with many of our clients for multiple years, watching them grow and change, building institutional knowledge, and understanding their preferences and pain points. Our current goal is to remain people-focused, introducing and using new AI technologies when we are certain they add value to our process.

IN CLOSING…

  • AI requires immense resources!!!! Is playing with AI as entertainment worth the water and resources required?
  • Should only a few players control AI? More people to the party seems better.
  • AGI? Smaller applications and discrete databases solving specific problems will be more useful then some type of monolith, uncontrollable database.
  • Support human-created work in real life (IRL)! Artists, musicians, writers, actors, designers, and coders.

Resources for turning off AI when companies assumed you wanted it.

How to Turn Off AI Tools Like Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Copilot, and More

I hate Gemini in my Gmail, so here’s how I turned it off

Control whether LinkedIn uses your data to improve generative AI

Stop Otter Notetaker from automatically joining your meetings

Email us your tips!

– Christine Golus, Olivia Graham, and the Q crew