The fitted sheet lay on the bed and it was a flat expanse of white cotton but it had no logic. I took the first corner and I tried to find the seam and then I took the second corner and I tried to tuck it into the first. It did not work. I moved to the other side of the mattress and the fabric pulled tight and then the first corner popped off and hit me in the eye.

I tried again and I failed again and then I bundled the whole thing into a heavy, uneven ball and I pushed it into the back of the linen closet. It was a failure of geometry and it was a failure of patience and I felt the weight of it in my chest.

This is how I feel about our marketing. This is how I feel about the way we make things now. We have every tool and we have every opportunity and we use them to create a heap of fabric that we cannot fold.

The Room of Infinite Columns

There were twelve of us in the room and the air was thin and the coffee was cold. We were looking at a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet had twelve columns for twelve different versions of a single advertisement. We had used a generator to make them and the generator was fast and the images were beautiful.

One image showed a woman in a yellow raincoat and she was standing on a pier in the rain. Another image showed a mountain range and the sun was setting and the light was purple and orange. We had twelve of these and they had cost us almost nothing to produce.

The plan was to test them. We were going to run two versions against each other and see which one the people liked more and then we were going to take the winner and run it against the next one. This is what we told the client and this is what we told ourselves.

But the morning was short and the deadline was long and the friction of the test was greater than the friction of the creation. To test the images we had to set up the tracking codes and we had to divide the budget and we had to wait for the numbers to come back. It was easier to just post all twelve.

We decided to put them all on the various channels and we decided to let the world see everything at once. We told ourselves that this was a broader reach and we told ourselves that we were being efficient. We were not being efficient. We were being lazy with our abundance.

We posted the raincoat and we posted the mountains and we posted the coffee cups and the dogs and the interior of the modern living rooms. By the end of the day we had published more content than a team of ten photographers could have produced in a month of shooting.

We learned nothing. At the end of the week the data came back and the raincoat had four hundred clicks and the mountains had three hundred and ninety-eight clicks and the dog had four hundred and two clicks. The differences were small and the noise was loud.

We did not know if the people liked the raincoat because of the color or because of the rain or because they were sad that day. We did not know if they liked the dog or if they just clicked it because they have a dog.

Because we had tested everything at once we had tested nothing at all. The ease of production had removed the necessity of the choice and without the choice there was no information. We had spent the week making noise and we had called the noise a strategy.

The Discipline of Scarcity

The price of a photograph used to be high and that price was a filter. When a shoot cost $9,140 and required a crew of six people and a truck full of lights you had to be very sure of what you wanted.

You sat in a room and you looked at the sketches and you argued about the shadows. You made a choice because you could not afford not to make a choice. The scarcity of the resource forced a discipline of the mind.

You had to commit to the raincoat or you had to commit to the mountain. When you committed you were either right or you were wrong and the market would tell you which one it was. You felt the pressure of the money and the pressure made you sharp.

Now the pressure is gone and we are all becoming soft. We have tools that allow us to

gerar foto com ia

and these tools are magnificent and they are dangerous.

They are magnificent because they remove the ceiling of what we can imagine but they are dangerous because they remove the floor of what we must decide. A user types a few words and a photo appears in two seconds and it is a real photo with real light and real depth.

It is usable for commercial work and it is free of the old costs. This should be the greatest era of experimentation in the history of the world. We should be running a hundred tests a day and we should be narrowing down the truth of what people want with the precision of a surgeon.

Instead we are using the speed to avoid the work. We are making twelve versions because we are afraid to pick one. We are proliferation addicts. We think that if we throw enough images at the wall some of them will stick and we will not have to explain why they stuck.

We are like the man who buys a thousand lottery tickets and thinks he is a financial planner. He is not a planner and he is just a man with a lot of paper. We have a lot of pixels and we have a lot of variants and we have a very small understanding of our own business.

The Responsibility of the Mind

I looked at the linen closet and I thought about the ball of the fitted sheet. It was taking up more space than it should and it was a mess. If I had taken the time to learn the fold I would have a neat rectangle and I would have more room for the towels.

If we had taken the time to run the test we would have a neat insight and we would have more room for the growth. But we are in a hurry to be busy and we are not in a hurry to be right. We treat the abundance of the AI as a way to escape the responsibility of the creative director.

We let the machine generate the options and then we let the algorithm distribute the options and then we wonder why our brand feels like a blurry thumbprint on a window.

The machine does not know what a good image is. The machine only knows what a requested image is. It will give you the raincoat and it will give you the mountain and it will give you the dog and it will do it with a smile that is made of code.

It is up to the person to say that the raincoat is the answer. It is up to the person to say that the mountain is a distraction. When we use a platform like AI Photo Master we are given a superpower and we are using it to become more average.

We are using the five free generations to make five things that are slightly different and then we are posting all five because we are too tired to look at them with a critical eye.

I want to go back to the pressure. I do not want the old costs and I do not want the old delays but I want the old discipline. I want to generate ten images and then I want to delete nine of them. I want to delete them before anyone else sees them.

I want to force myself to argue for the one that remains. If I can afford to test everything then I should have the courage to test one thing at a time. I should have the hypothesis and I should have the control and I should have the result.

Anything else is just a hobby. Anything else is just folding sheets into balls and pretending that the closet is full.

We are drowning in the possible and we are starving for the definite. The world does not need twelve more ads for a raincoat. The world needs one ad that understands why a person stands in the rain. You can find that image in two seconds or you can find it in two days but you have to find it.

You cannot just hope it is in the pile somewhere. We have reached the point where the cost of making is zero and the cost of thinking is still the same as it has always been. It is the only thing that is still expensive and it is the only thing that we are trying to cut from the budget.

Mastery over the Mind

I am going to take the sheet out of the closet and I am going to lay it on the floor. I am going to find the corners and I am going to fold them properly even if it takes me all night. And tomorrow I am going to go into the office and I am going to look at the twelve images and I am going to delete eleven of them.

I am going to pick the raincoat and I am going to stand by it and I am going to see if I am right. It is a small thing but it is a start. It is a way to remember that the tool is a servant and the mind is the master and the choice is the only thing that ever mattered.

The sheet is a rectangle until you try to hold it, and the data is a map until you try to follow every path at once.

The office was still dark when I left and the light from the streetlamps was yellow on the pavement. I felt lighter than I had felt in a long time. I had less content but I had more intent. The screen on my phone stayed dark and I did not check the clicks.

I knew what I was doing and that was enough. The abundance was still there but it was behind me now and it was no longer a burden. It was just a tool in a box and the box was closed.

I walked home and I thought about the rain and I thought about the woman on the pier and I wondered if she was cold. I hoped she was. It made the image better. It made the choice real.