three links mid-feb

3 links i liked this mid-month:

• openai releases sora (text-to-video)
• the case for design engineers pt. II
• designer news is dead

openai & sora

the text-to-video examples are incredible.

below are screengrabs of the video examples, & i’m still processing the experience.

these are 60-second scenes that would be nearly indistinguishable as AI-generated on a smaller screen, which is where a significant amount of content is consumed.

i’m curious about the impact of this & the potential blurring of quality in content creation. I believe that the technology does not have to significantly improve if the process of applying it and creating videos is relatively quick.

i’m not sure what other text-to-video companies will do if this gets integrated into chatgpt.

the rate of change is so fast that i would advise against* subscribing to genai services beyond month-to-month. i’m really curious to see how many companies last until this time 2025.

it will be interesting to see how long it takes for open-source models to catch up.

the case for design engineers, pt II

i ended up reading part one through this post.

i like the emphasis on the important piece being whatever is in the end-person’s hands. whatever they are interacting with is what matters and design files are not artifacts that end up being interacted with.

the shift into interacting with production / directly with the end-person.

”Instead, the artifact is the deliverable”

i’m really interested in that idea of designers being able to produce production code (or interact with it in a meaningful way, like by updating design tokens & it propagating throughout the system).

increasing everyone’s ability to participate in a meaningful way is something that i think ai could help with.

it’s the translation-layer of putting ideas into other formats easily/quickly, & with some practice, i think teams would be able to leverage ai-tools in a way that increases communication rather than silo’s people off to explore end-to-end on their own.

designer news is dead

it was nice to get some insights from someone who was there in the beginning.

i vaguely remember checking designernews for the latest tools info in 2015, but then it started to get spammy & extremely quiet in the last couple years.

each post only had one or two votes on it & if there were comments, they seemed pretty bot-y.

that idea of a gated community, but one that other people could view, is interesting.

since there’s an ability to auto-generate content of medium quality in an instant, i think people will be even more interested in having a group that personally curates links & contributes to ideas.

i could see a desire for quality content + thoughts, even if it means that the observers cannot actively participate.

lurkin’, but not able to shit on activities or distract from the core-contributors.

if there is a premium option, i imagine that higher tiers means more access to higher levels of fidelity around the ideas & earlier insights that are more ambiguous - but nothing that allows for interaction. lurker-only.

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