The documented labour of love — Newsletter issue 012

I rarely talk about AI. Whilst I use it every day, as one tool amongst many in my creative toolkit, the subject bores me. And there are enough people out there talking about it already.

But there's something important being missed from the conversation.

I see many people flaunting how easy it is to generate plausible creative work with just a few prompts. And they're not wrong, it is easy. Whether or not the result is technically sound and creatively distinct is subjective and irrelevant. Because what these people don't realise is that the value of creativity has never been measured by its output – it's measured in provenance.

In the art world, provenance is what separates a painting worth millions from an identical-looking copy.

In wine, it's what makes one bottle worth ten times the next.

In antiques, it's the difference between an heirloom and a reproduction.

When a prompt generates a picture-perfect result in seconds, there is no story behind it. And without a story, there is nothing to talk about, nothing to anticipate and nothing to trust.

Most of us will have seen Apple TV's colour-dispersing logo unveiled last year. It looks slick – but it was the behind-the-scenes footage that revealed how it was made that drew the biggest attention. Instead of rendering it in CGI, which would have generated a near-identical result in an afternoon, they spent weeks in a London studio moving lights by hand and tracking a camera around polished glass panels to create those colour shifts. Eight months on, I'm still talking about it.

I rarely go to the cinema, but for the first time in years I chose to book tickets to Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. The earliest showing at London's BFI IMAX that has not yet been booked up is six weeks away, on a Monday at 10am. It opened last weekend to $257 million globally; the biggest opening of his career. It wasn't the film itself that drew my interest – it was Nolan's commitment to the craft. Minimal CGI, no shortcuts, on-location shoots, and the stories I'm seeing from the set that have filled our feeds.

Grand Theft Auto VI hasn't launched yet (for those living under a rock, it's scheduled to release in November). But the anticipation is already a record-breaking cultural phenomenon. Reportedly costing over a billion dollars to make, Rockstar's CEO confirmed earlier this year that zero generative AI was used in its development. Every building, every street, every neighbourhood has been built by hand.

The people at the top of their craft continue to bet on provenance being the key to their legacy. The blood, sweat and tears. The craft and the labour of love. The real human hours put in.

At Function & Form we still break down our pricing in hours and days. I use AI to make my work more efficient – just as much as anyone. But the time we save gets reinvested back into the project. Time dedicated to the craft, to deliver all the storytelling nuances your competition were willing to leave out.