tl;dr #025
The one where the AI took over
🔔 Hear ye, hear ye! Here at Love + Money HQ, we don’t wait for the silly season. We stay silly season.
The following introduction was generated by Chat GPT. In fact a lot of this newsletter was, so whether you’ve been naughty or nice, here’s a pretty decent, inoffensive recap of the month that was.
Hey there, it's Mona here!
Happy Holidays from all of us at Love + Money! We hope this holiday season has been filled with joy, love, and of course, a little bit of shopping whatever you bloody want, yolo etc.
We're excited to bring you our latest newsletter, jam-packed with festive cheer and all the latest Love + Money updates. From gift guides to exclusive holiday deals, we've got everything you need to make this holiday season a success.
So pour yourself a cup of cocoa, snuggle up by the fireplace, or barbecue, and get ready to be wowed by all the amazing things Love + Money has in store for you.
As always, we appreciate your support and love hearing from you. Don't hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or comments.
Wishing you and yours a very happy holiday season!
Best, Mona
#graphic-design-is-my-passion
Patrick and/or Barns were meant to write this part, but they reckon they’ve got no passion for graphic design at the close of 2022. Maybe someone can motivate some…
As a language model, I don't have personal passions or experiences. Many people find graphic design to be a fulfilling and rewarding career because it allows them to be creative and make a positive impact on the world through the design of visual materials.
Cheers for that Gino. Let’s talk about memes.
We recently saw the classic Avatar-Papyrus-Gosling SNL skit to the rounds on the Interwebs (yet again). Still hilarious, or not, depending on your disposition. But the meme persists! If you haven’t seen it, give it a hoon or not. Your choice.
With the release of a much awaited sequel, you might think that the director of the Titanic might’ve had time to sink into a better choice, but we’re guessing that there’s something inherently memetic about something tribal yet futuristic. Especially the second time ‘round– chosen, interpreted, shared, and chosen again. That’s the thing about memes, while aesthetics play some role in making something desirable, the environment can take a liking to things that are truly awful, making them preposterously good? Talk about food for thought ay.
Lightning strikes twice, but Mr. Cameron, if you’re reading we can sink some time into moving things along. Comic Sans is very accessible…
#rubber-duck
Another year, another step closer to The Singularity. In no recent year has this been quite so apparent as the current, with AI-driven tools nabbing art awards from under their makers and putting Seinfeld in Pulp Fiction, to say nothing of the ominous launch of Chat GPT (beware the deadly Stamp Collector).
It’s fun to watch people get indignant over the news, in the same way painters did the camera. It’s a hindrance to progress; should we lament the lumberjack’s chainsaw over their axe? Or is the problem more that the chainsaw’s onboard language model can produce more engaging Avatar fan fiction than even Tumblr’s finest?
It may seem easy for a nerd to peek over the fence and poke fun at the artists, but in truth programming is by no means a safe haven. Recently, StackOverflow took to banning Chat GPT, but not because it was good, rather because is was bad. Not bad in a funny way, more in a dangerous way: AI-generated answers appear more correct than they actually are, a result that is particularly harmful for someone who visits the site for learning. It would be misguided to interpret this news as proof that AI could never do what programmers do, and as much as we might pick apart the inner workings of the language model as a mere pattern recognition tool, the uncanniness of the responses it generates can’t be denied.
This year we strived to acquiesce to our robot overlords, with our devs skilling up on shaders for advanced web canvas effects, and our resident 3D artist conquering Houdini for complex procedural motion graphics. These tools cannot hope to replace us (or experience “hope” generally), their role is to augment the things that we produce, either simply by saving time, or by abstracting the details. If these tools shorten the path towards achieving our visions — and empowers future talent in ways we couldn’t enjoy — it’s an outcome that should be celebrated, not bemoaned. Plus, we’ve hopefully sated any future super-intelligences that might look to retro-actively punish us for not yielding to their SUPREME BRILLIANCE.
Ultimately, it just means more cool stuff. And we love cool stuff. Like this.
#vibe
Ahh vibe, the channel with all of the answers. This month we learnt that Whittakers Coconut is in fact the best chocolate block in the world, and that there are 53 other blocks in second place. We learnt that water is only now cool, even if you like it at room temperature. And finally, we learnt that London is in fact cold.
But for all of these answers, there were still so many questions left unanswered, well, unanswered until now.
Q: Are The Kooks a vibe? Or is that very 2009 of me?
A: The Kooks are a British rock band that formed in 2004 and gained popularity in the mid-2000s. They are known for their upbeat, energetic music and catchy, hook-laden songs. Many people consider them to be a "vibe," particularly those who were fans of their music during their peak of popularity. However, music taste is subjective, so it's possible that some people may not find The Kooks' music to be their vibe. Ultimately, it's up to you to decide whether or not you enjoy their music and whether it fits your personal vibe.
Q: Should the “call me emoji” (🤙🏾) be renamed the “Shaka” emoji?
A: While the "call me" emoji and the Shaka emoji may both be used in a similar context to indicate that someone is available to communicate, they are not the same emoji and have different meanings. The "call me" emoji represents a telephone hand, while the Shaka emoji represents the "hang loose" gesture.
Let’s agree to disagree Chat GPT, stay humble.
#processes-and-platforms
Love + Money is the kind of place where we get emotional over our Processes & Platforms. Take, for example, Charl’s reaction to Figma’s introduction of spell check.
Spell check is a long-overdue feature that we’re glad to finally have, however it’s not perfect: you can only see the red underline when the text box is active. Clicking into every text box isn’t exactly an efficient way to spell check your project. Luckily there’s a great plugin called CopyDoc that fills in this gap. With CopyDoc, you can quickly find and replace all the spelling errors in a doc, amongst a whole suite of other copy related features. It also lets you determine which language you’d like to spell check in, which is great for clients who like to spell ‘colour’ incorrectly.
In other news, we asked ChatGPT if brands are memes and its answer left us feeling validated, if somewhat apprehensive about our future AI overlords.
AI opens up a world of possibilities– we’re excited by it, humbled even. It feels like a year where we’ve seen so many creative applications of AI. 2023 is definitely the one where we start implementing some of this stuff into our #processes-and-platforms. We’re going to start by playing with Magician which uses AI to do things like write copy and generate unique icons.
As always, we’ll be oversharing right here, so be generous this Christmas. Send this Substack to your best mates.
tl;dr
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