When is it appropriate to use AI? 🤖 (A bare minimum litmus test) ✨

I have lots of thoughts about AI, some of which are fairly clear, some less so.

But here are two principles I was thinking of recently that I think are non-negotiable when it comes to using AI, whatever your philosophical views of AI are.

1) Would you think it was OK in principle to delegate the task to another human being?

 

Here's a few examples:

 

Write a political speech. Write a best man speech. Data entry. Write a love letter. Write a social media post. Design your logo. Write a YouTube comment. Ghostwrite a book. Illustrate a book you wrote. Design stickers for you to sell on Etsy. Summarise the minutes of a meeting you were chairing. Write the captions of a video. Summarise an email from a friend. Book-keeping. Research your project. Write alt-text for images on your website...

 

Also, with each of these tasks, would you distinguish between a) delegating a rough draft (which you then take as a starting point and make your own), or b) delegating the entire task?

 

Different people will have different answers to each of these. What I'm asking, is what do YOU think is appropriate to delegate?

• If you'd be willing to delgate to another human, it may be appropriate to delegate to AI (other factors may of course mean it is not).
• BUT if you'd not delegate to a human, what makes it OK to delegate to AI?

We need to think about these things.

 

Would you delegate an illustration to brighten up a text-heavy blog post to AI? I just did. Not sure how I feel about that :-)

2) In a specifically Christian context, assuming your answer to my first question was yes, would it be something you were OK in principle with delegating to a nonbeliever? 

(I'm of course assuming a sympathetic non-believer who will do the task to the best of thier ability, not an anti-Christian troll!)

A few examples: 

 

Write a sermon. Write a prayer. Give you spiritual guidance. Design sermon visuals. Design church publicity. Write a Bible story book. Illustrate a Bible story book you have written. Advise you on the best candidate for a church job. Write a hymn. Write a tune for a hymn you have written. Plan a Sunday School lesson. Draw visuals for a Sunday School lesson you have written. Plan a church rota. Summarise the theological scholarship on a topic. Plus many of the examples in the first section...

Again, different people will have different answers to these. My question is what do YOU think is appropriate to delegate to a non-believer?

• If you'd be willing to delgate to a non-believer, it may be appropriate to delegate to AI (other factors may of course mean it is not).
• BUT if you'd not delegate to a non-believer, what on earth makes it OK to delegate to AI?

We really need to think about these things. 

Oh, and finally, if you have a chatbot that pretends to be Jesus, that is idolatry and blasphemy.

🗳️ Who to vote for - based entirely on their logos

This is a completely apolitical post - I'm looking at design only. Nothing said here reflects my political views AT ALL.

In order of the rainbow (because that's more design-y than the alphabet):

Labour 

I think this is a new logo for this election. I like it much better than the old rose, which was unclear and looked like a bad photocopy to me!

A thistle makes it look Scottish. It's a nice clear design. Interesting.

Changing to a pinkish red was an interesting design choice, and doesn't really say 'Labour' to me. It does look more modermn though. (Apparently it's supposed to be a red/purple gradient - but I think parties should stick to one colour.)

Could be a building society or sports logo.  

Liberal Democrat 

 

 It's just so happy! 

The flying bird suggests freedom, which goes with the name.

A nice golden colour too.

Nothing Scottish about it. 

Could be a building society logo. 

SNP

The symbol that is both a loopy cross and a thistle is clever.

Its simplicity means that anyone could draw it.

The black & yellow is a bit stark - though I think they've toned it down a bit. 

Of all the symbols, it would be the easiest for a totalitarian stare to use - it has that kind of non-fussy simplicity.

Green

So boring. The English one is more interesting.. Although it's different from the English one, there's nothing Scottish about it.

The only party whose colour is its name and message, which is handy. 

Putting your text inside a logo  can be tricky because you're forced to use a whole square every time, and the name can get rather small. A symbol that is separate from the name is easier to use in many contexts.

Could be an energy company or petrol station logo, which is slightly ironic. 

Reform 

 

Same issue with text inside, though I like the combination of black text and turquoise circle.

The arrow suggests moving forwards, which is a good thing for a political party to suggest though I'm not sure that it really reflects them, as their proposed reforms are of the conservative kind. It's definitely not touchy-feely, which does reflect them.

I can't see this used as a logo for anything but a political party. 

Conservative

 

Not bad. It's quite a dynamic saltire - Scottish but the touch of red brings in the Unionist aspect. The cyan is presumably just to add brightness. Unfortunately these colours are lost in black & white versions, where it becomes more underwhelming and loses something important. Don't rely on colour in your logos!

Could be a logo for a transport company or a bank.

Verdict 

So, in order of merit, based on logos alone, I'm going with:

1. Lib Dem 
2. Labour 
3. Reform 
4. SNP
5. Conservative
6. Green 

OK, now I'd better get on with figuring out who I'm actually voting for! 

Bad design

If you need to cover your carton of fabric softener in huge ugly DO NOT DRINK warnings, maybe consider that putting it in a carton identical to a juice carton is not the best idea.

Also, there's no braille warning.

Different colours

 It's amazing how different the same pattern can look in different colours.

Lorem Ipsum is a Good Thing

When laying out a page design, if you don't yet have the final text it's common to use a dummy text in garbled Latin, which starts "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." (hence the name).

I've just been watching a very useful tutorial video on how to do some page layout stuff in InDesign. Very useful, but the narrator had a slightly monotonous voice, and the text on the page was - for no apparent reason - Alice in Wonderland. Guess which I was paying more attention to...

Clever business card

Came across this old business card for a restaurant.

Fun logo

Saw this today.

Expensive design?

If I were to spend considerably more than my year's income on a watch, I would want the text on its face to be somewhat more professionally designed than what looks like Zapf Chancery (a ubiquitous off-the-peg font) set in all caps (which swash capitals should not be).

Colour wheel

Here's a colour wheel I made, for finding complementary colours.

Cmyk, and all steps are mathematically accurate (except that you can't have 0.5 of a colour, so I had to do some rounding!)

Catch 22

To make a fire escape plan more useful,
you need to add more info.
Which makes it more complex
which makes it less useful...

Although, tbh, I doubt anyone looks at them anyway.

Priority seating

Most trains have a small sign above the seats near the door, telling you to leave them for old/disabled/pregnant etc. people.

This is what a train I was on the other day has. Much more noticeable!

Christian book covers

Recently I've been reading a great site where self publishers submit their book cover designs, so that people can critique them and they can make them better - and not end up with a cover that screams 'self published'.

One of the books recently was a Christian book, and everyone seemed concerned that it didn't look 'Christian' enough. Which puzzled me, as there are so many genres of Christian books that I would expect them all to look different. And I certainly wouldn't expect any explicitly Christian imagery on them.

Anyway, I thought I'd check it out. So I did a quick survey of Christian book covers - ones on display on my church bookstall, and ones from my own shelf that have new-ish covers (after 2000).

Photos below, with captions which are not really relevant to the question :-)

Conclusion: Out of 37 books, only two had explicit Christian imagery (a Bible and a small cross).
Typographic covers with no imagery at all are very common.

Of course, a selection of books from a different church (or even the same church in a diffeerent month), and from another individual's book case might look completely different.

The point is that what matters is not that it 'looks Christian', but that it looks like the kind of Christian book the ideal reader likes to read (because all Christians do not like all Christian books, obviously).

[Edit: I was looking at imagery only, someone pointed out that the titles of most of those books do make it clear it's a Christian book. The problem is if nothing does.]

*I really like the 'FOR  YOU' series of book covers. This is one of the less interesting ones.
*Some of these covers are terribly boring.
*My church is not unhealthily obsessed with Revelation - we just happen to be doing a preaching series on it just now!

*Could the cover for The Historical Reliability of the Gospels be any more boring?
*A Biblical History of Israel has typical commentary design - brown, with a historical painting.
*True Friendship looks like a book on homosexuality, which it isn't. Adding another figure to one group would have solved that.
*The CS Lewis covers look nice, but don't reflect the content at all. Miracles gives the impression it's about seeing life as a miracle with childlike wonder or something. It's not. It is about do real supernatural miracles happen?
*I would never have chosen God knows your name based on the cover. But as it was a present I read it, and it's good. And not the kind of book suggested by the cover at all (but maybe the kind of cover the target audience likes?)

*These fiction books have more saturated, warmer colour scemes in general.
*The ones written by women all have a large photo of a face. The ones written by men either have no face or a small one.

A spoonful of sugar

A couple of years ago I did a poster about sugar in drinks for a friend who is a teacher.

From Hillpark Secondary's Twitter - click for complete tweet.

Unfortunately, a ceiling leak ruined it, so she asked me to make a new one.

What was fascinating, was how much less sugar there is in many of the drinks than there used to be.

I also added a teaspoon beside each, with the approximate number of teaspoons of sugar written on it. Much more meaningful than grammes. Frijj has 10¾ teaspoons!?! (although that is two full glasses).

Colours

The covers of my church's new hymn books are all different colours. This makes me happy.

Nice design

Maybe this is common on lots of phones, but I never had it before this one.
When you have music playing but the lock screen on, the wallpaper is taken from the album cover and the controls are colour matched to it.

Pretty!

Nice toilet doors

Inverness Bus Station:

The only problem with these ones is that the frosted man/woman symbol is too faint, and it took me a moment to remember which circle symbol was which (I know perfectly well, but it's not as automatic).

Eastwoodmains Medical Practise:

Taken rather hastily in case the ladies at reception wondered what on earth I was doing :-)

Fake letterpress

This label looks like it was printed by letterpress.

Actually, when you feel it, it's completely flat & smooth. Very convincing use of shading.

I wonder if they do it by hand, or have some kind of filter set up.

Church service worksheets

Did these ages ago for my own church - finally made them available for everyone!

6 different general worksheets
PLUS 4 communion worksheets
Print as many as you want
Black & white photocopiable versions included

(I've altered this one now, to say "Who read the Bible to us? Draw them."
So can be used even if kids aren't in for the sermon, or if their church uses other terminology like 'preacher')

Stickers!

I forgot to say, I now have a shop where you can buy my stickers.

This is a real passion project I've been working on for years.

I have specifically aimed at boys in designing these stickers. Not that they are only suitable for boys, but many Christian stickers are so cute and girly that I wanted to redress the balance :-) From having used prototype versions in my own Sunday School, girls do seem to like them too. Yes, even the skull!

Terms & Conditions

Do companies actually want people to read their terms & conditions?

Seems like they go out of their way to use formatting which is difficult to read. Often it's ALL CAPS, DESPITE THE FACT THAT A MIXTURE OF UPPER AND LOWER CASE is far nicer and easier to read.

I've just been looking at PayPal's T&Cs. They are in proper sentence case, but in lines about 25 words long - despite the fact that 9-12 words is what you should use for legibility. And shrinking the window doesn't help, as the lines don't wrap.