The drawing contest

Spoken words only - one hook counted, captions and notes excluded, at 130 wpm.

Hook

Are you still deciding if using AI for creativity is a good thing? I challenged AI to a drawing contest. Can you guess who won? Let me show you.

Body

My first job in media was when the front cover of a magazine was the hero piece.

When digital eventually took over, a digital cover became the showpiece for editorials.

Ever since, I've been chasing what comes next, and I think I might be onto something.

Right now the loudest question in the creative world is whether you should use AI for creativity. So I decided to go against AI to see who is the better creator.

A drawing contest.

I sketched an idea by hand, then asked AI to generate exactly the same thing, and put them side by side.

Honest result?

Personally, I preferred mine. Call me biased, but I think what AI created was too polished, too perfect.

That could have been the end of the battle. Humans one, AI zero.

But as always, I wanna push the boundaries just a little bit more. What if I used AI to help me build some interactivity into my illustration?

So I took a picture of my sketch. Dropped it into Illustrator to create the vectors.

Moved into Figma to create a concept for a front cover of an article.

This is what came out. An interactive front cover. About the battle of creativity between humans and AI.

AI lost the drawing contest, but it helped to produce something fun in a couple of hours, that would usually take a day or more.

Is this what is next for publishers? Not just something that we can see, but something we can interact with. A way to participate with our content. This is what I call Designed participation.

I took it that step further where I put it into my digital playground, where you can adjust the size, quantity, collision, spacing.

CTA

• If you want a link to my new front cover, type "Playground" in the comments.
• Tell me the part of your craft AI isn't getting anywhere near.