What does Craftsmanship Mean in the New Age of Artificial Intelligence?

In 2018, I founded Craft Applied with a desire to work at a deliberate pace, with deep understanding and purposeful ambition to build things that mattered more.

My cofounding partner Claire and I arrived at the agency name of “Craft Applied”, aligning on a concept intended as a self-titled mission statement and a badge that customers would be proud to wear and share, following a job well done.

While the intervening years have been crammed with lessons across technology, business and leadership disciplines, nothing since 2018 has proved as profoundly disruptive as Artificial Intelligence.

And yet, I’ve grown up with AI from a young age. So why is it only so disruptive now?

Growing up with AI

It probably says a lot about me that as a preschooler one of my earliest childhood fixations was a robot.

In the 1986 movie Short Circuit, Number 5 is a military robot that gets hit by lightning (a trope responsible for a lot during my childhood viewing), gaining human-like AI sentience, before bounding around Oregon causing typical 1980s movie hi-jinx. Scenes depict robots that play music, automate chores, learn to drive and openly converse in convincing English.

It’s fascinating to reflect that this fantasy future is actually fulfilled.

Through my childhood and teenage years, using AI was a daily occurrence. Video games would present systems learning and emergent gameplay through opponent AI: shooters, racers, RPGs. Much of the joy in gaming was from learning, probing, matching, then finally exceeding an AI’s pre-programmed routines of Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) adversaries.

I was (and still am) amazed how an unknown puppeteer (the developer) could stimulate, challenge, teach and inspire from their past to my present, unconstrained by time or space.

All of this is to say that, as one of the earliest generations to grow up as a digital native, AI is nothing new.

Why is AI so profoundly disruptive?

From grand master performances in chess and go, to fully autonomous vehicles, via reality-bending media, personas and robotics, it’s safe to say our science-fiction fantasies have finally arrived.

Since the November 2022 public launch of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, it’s been incredible to watch the rapid evolution of Large Language Model’s (LLMs). Once a toy that could babble loose sentences, splutter poetry and wildly hallucinate on a topic, frontier models are now a majorly reliable, autonomous, all-knowing generalist and specialist digital workforce on demand.

Despite the advances, none of the industry leaders, politicians or general workforce seems to have grasped the full impact of all this. With breathless innovation and infinite funding, we are redefining what it means to work, produce, communicate and trade in a very short amount of time.

Unsurprisingly, professional expectations are also rapidly realigning. As a small team of product builders at Craft Applied, we are increasingly pressured to leverage these technologies to keep up with peers, competitors and wider markets. To deliver more, faster, cheaper (or bewilderingly, at no cost at all!).

Is good, fast and cheap actually a reasonable expectation now?

What does this say for digital craftsmanship?

With dozens of significant innovations, companies and products to adopt each week, it’s exciting, bewildering and exhausting in equal measure. We’re waiting for no one!

But what of the high-skilled producers that don’t care for the latest tooling or trends? Workers with hard earned, deep knowledge and high regard in their chosen domain. Those who continue at their own pace of artisanal execution. Those revered for honing decades of specialist knowledge and irreplaceable experience.

Does the value in their bespoke human-focussed design, empathetic messaging and optimised systems increase or decrease? Is the act of generating more or less valuable that crafting?

With the ability to churn out content, media and interfaces at close to the speed of thought, we can gain plenty, but are we concerned enough about what we are losing? What happens if we all (d)evolve from craft experts to LLM operators?

Personally, the more I lean into AI workflows, the more I question if my joy of work is dissipating. I’m not set on an answer yet, but I do find myself questioning this with increasing frequency…

I am therefore challenging both myself and my team to think hard on how to spend our time and position our services in this new age. With AI, we’re presented with a canvas almost infinitely broader and a toolkit increasingly larger. And with that there feels like a greater responsibility to leverage technology to do more and make more.

What next for Craft Applied?

But more and more of what?

Craft Applied was always about impact. We wanted to make a positive difference. And I contemplate if that mission now changes in accordance with the new tools available to us.

While it’s never been easier to generate code and content and ideas, it’s also never been harder to focus on what truly matters.

By channeling my (human) thinking into writing and publishing more, I hope to find that focus.