I’ve been thinking a lot about using AI in my work lately… in particular, LLM-based AI in an agentic environment. I’m frequently surprised at their rate of progress, and what they can accomplish given the right inputs. But I also think a lot of folks are going in with the wrong expectations.
It’s natural to go in thinking you should be asking for what you want. For example, maybe you want a new logo for your business. So you might say what your business is, give a brief description, and ask for a logo. But you’re never going to get a good logo that way, you’re going to get a very generic output.
This type of output is not acceptable. Sure, do things like this for a living, but that doesn’t mean I feel differently about a song or painting or other creative work generated by this kind of AI. They all generally suck. If you need a website, you’re still a lot better off picking a quality template and building from there, rather than asking an AI to build a website for you. It’s just not going to be good enough.
However, I often say that the best way to get a good X is to have a lot of X. Photography is a good example of this. I’m not a great photographer, but I’m a pretty good one. And I get good results by, more than any other technique, just taking lots of pictures and throwing most of them away! I encourage you to do the same.
This is where an LLM-based AI is most useful. You can ask it to come up with a lot of ideas, very diverse ideas, based on a lot of good context about a project. None of those ideas is good enough… but I can often see a lot of ideas in those designs I might not have had myself. The AI doesn’t get bored, doesn’t get tired, and doesn’t get tired of your shit. You can have it build you 100 different home pages if you want, and pick and choose the best parts.
So that’s my advice. Don’t try to get your AI to have good ideas for you. Get it to have a lot of bad ideas, so you can skip to the good part.