How Much A.I. is Too Much A.I.?

I don’t blog enough to be topical or cover current trends, and I like to keep things light and funny, or positive and optimistic in general. In fact, at the end of 2022 when I actually tried to be topical and write about artificial intelligence, I did it from a pretty altruistic standpoint with the hope that working with the changing landscape that a.i. isn’t going anywhere is a better approach then railing against it. At my core, I still believe that, and I’ll put a pin in that for now, but today I’d like to revisit a.i. with a little more experience after having had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Adobe Max Conference in Los Angeles as an attendee.

At the Adobe Max Conference, October 2023 where I got to meet Aaron Draplin!

I say, “a little more experience” because not long after my initial blog post about a.i. in December, I followed that up in April of this year (I told you I don’t blog enough to be topical!) with a post detailing my impressions using ChatGPT and Dall–E which very quickly became dated after both platforms made serious advancements technologically. I think for most people at that time, a.i. was still a fun and funny little moment of pop culture that humorously added to the zeitgeist with things like Keaton Patti’s bananas Olive Garden commercials and Trump Rallies—all created by feeding hours of those particular brands original content into a.i. bot programs. Maybe the undercurrent had a slight worrisome tone of the inevitability of robot overlords, but it was still relatively light–hearted and quaint. Who could have ever imagined we’d be pining for the simpler times of 2022.

Of course, like most technological milestones, once something starts to get traction, it really takes off. Granted, a.i. has actually existed since the mid 20th century (starting with the Perceptron Mark I in 1957), but really started to generate public interest in the 80s with the goal of revolutionizing computer processing. It’s directly because of this that artificial intelligence has thrived recently—not so much because tech geniuses have learned more about a.i. themselves—but rather because computer storage, memory, and speed have increased beyond what most average consumers even need. And in 2023, Dall•E released its latest text–to–image model featuring significantly more nuance and detail, and ChatGPT became the fastest growing consumer software application which now offers it’s GPT–3.5 engine operating its services on a freemium model while ChatGPT Plus offers its GPT–4 engine to users for $20 USD a month. If that’s not impressive enough, as of this post, ChatGPT itself isn’t even a full year old yet having launched in November of 2022! In March 2023, Adobe released its generative a.i. tools to Photoshop in beta testing. Today, those a.i. tools are fully integrated into Photoshop and Firefly a.i. is in beta for Adobe Illustrator—creating editable and functional vector illustrations—as well as Adobe Premiere Pro which also offers beta tools for speech to text editing for videos. It is insanely easy to use and saves lots of time.

All of these images on Adobe Stock are generative a.i.

Let’s step back and address just a couple quick bullet points I made previously regarding a.i.’s learning technique. Now initially I made a mistake and thought the process was called stable diffusion, but that is in fact the name of a latent diffusion model developed by a company called Stability AI. Artificial intelligence uses machine learning to develop a deep knowledge of whatever subject it’s tasked to create. I’m cutting out a lot of context here for the sake of brevity, but imagine a robot who has the capacity to instantly read every single book on a particular subject so that it can then use that knowledge to compose its own creation based on that immediate education. It only has the information it has acquired, so it bases everything it can do on that information alone. I read hundreds of text books about various software programs when I was in school, but it almost all felt useless after I actually started working and realized experience was vastly more important. As a result, most of my initial professional work looks ridiculous, much like what a robot who only learned from reading and not actually doing.

Now imagine that same robot is instructed to paint a masterpiece, but in order to do that, it has to visually take in every painting currently on display in the Louvre. So it rushes around the museum and sees works from DaVinci, Géricault, Michelangelo, and Jacques-Louis David. Afterwards, you ask the robot to paint its own masterpiece, but upon completion you notice it hasn't really painted anything original, but rather cut and pasted elements like the Mona Lisa's smile or Roman columns from the Oath of the Hoaratii. It's specifically these issues that have a lot of creative people feeling pretty upset because the robot hasn't actually created anything, it's just stolen components from others. But then you also notice that because the a.i.'s creators have basically told this robot to go out and learn everything from the internet, you start getting into real troublesome areas because if you haven't noticed, there's some pretty horrible stuff online and it's not exactly hidden either. So now on top of being an art thief, the robot has also learned to be racist, sexist, and creepy. You know, like actual real life people.

Again, I'm really compacting a lot here to keep things from getting bogged down with technical jargon, but these are real concerns that have had companies like Adobe make serious public efforts to proactively promote responsible guidelines for generative a.i. learning and sharing, as well as protecting intellectual property and reflecting diversity in a positive way. For the most part, this corporate responsibility and good faith approach has been necessary, not just because of the reactions from creatives worldwide, but because of the accountability these types of organizations can be held to legally. Remember, theft of any kind is generally frowned upon.

So now we get to the Max conference where the undeniable star was Adobe's generative text–to–image a.i. program, Firefly. All over the conference floor, in its classrooms and displays, and promoted heavily at each keynote session were strikingly beautiful images all created by artificial intelligence. What Firefly offered was so prominent that it sometimes felt invasive. Is it cool and will it save designers from doing tedious things like masking, editing, and rough concepts that require super quick turnaround? Oh man, you bet your a$$ it will. But as one classroom speaker jokingly noted at the beginning of one session that it was the only conference event not promoting any new artificial intelligence tools, he was met with a roaring standing ovation.

Adobe competently showed that it's a.i. deep learning methods were trained solely on its own library of photographs, illustrations, images, and graphics (pretty much its entire stock library) and that its engineers were working tirelessly to integrate guardrails so that diversity and inclusion were represented equally and respectfully. So there you go! Problem solved. You can stop worrying now about everything. Robots are kind, love is love, intellectual property theft is a thing of the past, and the system works great.

Even if all that were true, there's still a hiccup or two. Now put your personal feelings about a.i. aside for just a bit and let's pull that pin out regarding my optimistic outlook from earlier. The cold hard fact is that a.i. isn't going anywhere, and just by looking at what was just a year ago and what is now today, it's pretty obvious that what a.i. can create is only going to get more impressive and it's going to be up to everyone to ensure it's guided properly, safely, and responsibly. Up until the Max conference, I could be heard saying, "Man, if this is where it's at now, imagine what it'll be like in ten years!" But that was out dated thinking when I first wrote about a.i. Especially when Adobe has expressed its expectation to see user generated a.i. images increase 5 times more in the next 3 years than it currently already has which is already over 15 billion!

So while ethically we have a lot of work to do, I think it's also fair to say that we're currently pretty early on in this saga and we're already experiencing some pretty heavy a.i. fatigue, and to that point, I'd like to redirect your attention to stock images. I love stock images, like I adore stock images and I've written about them before (and it's a funny article I'm really proud of too), but because I almost exclusively use Adobe Stock, and because Adobe Stock is the epicenter of Adobe a.i.'s learning process, it's kind of saturating the store with its own product and nothing else. Imagine going to your local grocery store, and all they sold was their brand of corn flakes. No produce, no deli, no butcher; just aisle after aisle of varying sized boxes of store brand corn flakes and nothing else. Because Adobe's generative a.i. has come along so far and has gotten so good, it offers generative a.i. images as stock image options. Originally you'd see one ore two pop up, then it became the majority of what was offered. Now depending on what you're looking for, a.i. generative images can be all that's available.

Real quickly if you haven't read my post on stock image sites; they provide a designer access to photos, graphics, templates, or illustrations the designer wouldn't otherwise have time to create themselves. Creating an ad for a new coffee chain? I can search for something like, "Friends enjoying coffee together in a cafe" on a stock image site just like I might look for something in a search engine and I will get various results that will hopefully match the look and vibe I'm going for.

So just to clarify, I don't have an issue with a.i. generated images. The quality is really good and getting better. There will be times when an a.i. generated image is much better than anything else the stock image site is offering, but it's frustrating how much of it there is. When searching for "Friends enjoying coffee together in a cafe", the language in the search itself is referring to a very human experience. The generative a.i. image is good, but it's not perfect. Plus I think there's a subconscious bias that I personally have that (at least in this instance) using something that was not created by humans but that is supposed to be representative of a human experience does not feel like a genuine, intentional choice to encourage others to buy into the design I'm making.

This image was generated by a.i. Can you tell?

I realize there's so much to unpack there. I'm using a computer to design this resource, is it really that bad that I'm requesting a computer create an additional element to that? Will future designers be less likely to have such a bias if they grow up understanding how ubiquitous this technology is? How "human" does an image have to be to properly reflect a human experience when we're all already familiar with shorthand cues like seeing people in such settings—photographed, illustrated, or otherwise—that creating that established connection is even necessary?

For their part, Adobe has a very clear and up front policy regarding their ethical standards and practices regarding posting, hosting, sharing, and creating generative a.i. images. Now people will point out a lot of that responsibility falls heavily on the users respecting that system, and this is what I personally believe is at the heart of all of this and creates the endless loop of debate surrounding this. Policing people from playing with this technology may be noble, but it's also antithetical to creativity in general. I'll repeat it again:

Artificial intelligence is not going anywhere and will continue to develop, but a.i. is a mirror reflecting back on the people who use it, interact with it, and engage others with it. Just like the world we live in, what we put in will be synonymous with what it gives back.

A.I. images generated from Dall E 2 and Firefly using the prompt, “Renaissance painting of a black cat in a pink tu tu”

But what do you think? Is a.i. the cool new future that will bring the world peace and prosperity? Is this the beginning of the end? Will a.i. steal jobs from creative people as well as blue and white collar workers? Or am I just fixated on the loving memory of our cat Destiny and want a.i. to realize how special she was like my wife and I do?

Our actual (late) cat Destiny killing it better than any artist—a.i. generated or otherwise—ever could. Rest in Peace, sweet girl.

Thanks so much for stopping by, and I really would love to hear your thoughts on this. Please follow me on Instagram and let me know! Also like last time, here are more sources as well as some other great articles about a.i.:

Inspiration: Volk Clip Art

It’s 1995, and a teenage me (Hi! I’m Dave!) is up against the proverbial wall as my senior year of high school begins and I have absolutely no idea what the future holds for me. I have zero direction or ambition to know where I’ll go to further my education (if at all), I’m not even sure what I want to do in a best case scenario, and the bad news is there isn’t a best case scenario anyway because I may not even have enough credits to graduate with the rest of my class. My dad is getting frustrated because all I ever say that I want to do is draw, but how that translates into any kind of career is spectacularly vague and naive at best. Seemingly moments before the first day of school even starts, I’m enrolled in Monmouth County, New Jersey’s stellar vocational education program at the zero hour where my father finds a commercial art class which will give me a far better chance at achieving the necessary math and science credits I’ll need to get a high school diploma. The vocation curriculum is technically two years, meaning I’ll only complete the first and my fellow classmates will all be juniors, but there’s no time to split hairs. As far as Dad, the state of New Jersey, and any future higher education prospects are concerned, the name of the game is to simply graduate Neptune High School with a modest GPA.

Me and my fellow MCV classmates, 1996

If you know me or have read any other blog post here, you know that it all worked out. But I’m not actually writing about my time with the Monmouth County Vocational Commercial Art School in Aberdeen, nor how that class arguably saved my future career, how I made some great friends, or how we all relentlessly tortured our teacher Ms. Camp (I’m so sorry for all those headaches Ms. Camp! We all genuinely love you!), but rather how I discovered an art form that continues to inspire me to this day, the world of Volk Clip Art.

First let’s take a quick crash course through the history of what clip art actually is. As I mentioned when I wrote about stock image sites, designers are busy people, and may not always have the time or ability or money to cultivate graphics and images for their projects, so they turn to other methods by relying on pre–made works with varying licensing managements. Clip art specifically covers illustrated pieces for publishing products that offer a huge variety of content and illustrative styles. The term clip art comes from physically cutting images from printed works and pasting them into new publishing projects with type and/or other graphics. This would be done by a layout artist, mechanical artist, or production artist on a printing press back in the day. Thanks to desktop publishing though, we’ve condensed all that down to the noble graphic designer.

Now there’s a lot more to cover, but for brevity’s sake we’re just going to hit some bullet points here. Many publications and smaller businesses didn’t have the budget to hire illustrators, so clip art became a mainstay for consumption. I’m going to briefly skip over the main course of today’s post for a minute here, but eventually the ink–based, comic book style of clip art that I’m referencing today became dated, but not useless. So sometime in the 1970s, those higher quality, older designed and stylized clip art made it’s way into trade paperback books for the masses. At that point, all you needed was a collection of (mostly) public domain illustrations and a Xerox machine, and now anyone could create relatively high quality designs. Flash forward to today, and you can very easily get your hands on quality, royalty free clip art from a variety of online locations for dirt cheap or even free. In fact, a lot of those cool, vintage illustrations that we’ll be talking about in a second are even archived on sites like Flickr!

Back to 1995 and a young and green Dave is confronted with a fantastic collection of clip art and unlimited Xerox privileges. It’s at this point where we finally get to the meat of this post and the very specific art house that was arguably the titan of clip art: Volk. I’ve mentioned a few times before that even if you’ve never heard of a certain so–and–so, their work probably crossed your path. Unless you’ve been living under a rock and outside of the United States (and even then there’s an excellent chance), you have most definitely seen something from a Volk catalog. Ironically located just 84 miles south from my former vocational school, Harry Volk, Jr.—a former journalist—opened his art studio in Pleasantville, New Jersey in the mid 1950s that pumped out high quality, copyright free, clip art in saddle stitched paper booklets. These collections were organized into various themes that covered absolutely everything from popular holidays, space exploration, school activities, sales gimmicks, various occupations, elections, travel, and practically everything in between. Each booklet would cost just a few dollars and would be packed with fantastic, high quality illustrations that simultaneously reflected American values and societal changes surrounding race & gender, all at the same time somehow maintaining a specific but generic look.

The superstar of Volk was a man named Tom Sawyer. Yes, I know, but trust me, his name is the least intriguing thing about him. Thomas B. Sawyer’s work for Volk was ubiquitous, seen internationally in magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, sign boards, and on television. Mr. Sawyer isn’t just a top notch illustrator though. He’s a best selling novelist, author, screenwriter, playwright, producer, and story editor; but his biggest claim to fame was as the head writer and show runner for the classic CBS series Murder, She Wrote starring Angela Lansbury. I reached out to Mr. Sawyer for an interview seeing as his book, The Adventures of the Real Tom Sawyer shares the same publisher (Bear Mountain Media) as Sam and Friends – The Story of Jim Henson’s First Television Show by Craig Shemin, but I never heard back from him.

But Tom Sawyer was just one of the illustrators working for Volk. The vast collections of notable mid–century style drawings from Volk’s studio are exceptional. The weird thing is how little information there is anywhere about those other illustrators or even Harry Volk, Jr. himself! Seriously, there is almost nothing about him, his studio, or its employees other than Thomas Sawyer online. This blog post will hopefully garner him a few more fans. Perhaps one day I’ll even make the pilgrimage to his old studio!

Roughly a decade or so ago, I was helping a client/friend/coworker of mine who was working as the head preservationist, curator, and director of The Salvation Army’s Eastern Territory Heritage Museum when she presented me with a huge collection of Volk clip art, not only well preserved, but still in its plastic organizing case—an even rarer find than the art contained within! Opening that case (even still) is like a time machine, not only transporting me back to the essence of 1950s & 60s design, but even more specifically to Ms. Camp’s Commercial Art class to a host of Gen X teenagers irresponsibly taking advantage of the school’s copy machine and trying to get high off sniffing Krylon far away from the designated ventilation booth. Initially, that institutional green colored box was bound for the trash, but she gave it to me (a million thank you’s again, Kathy!).

Most of my collection is from the 70s through 90s

Ironically, this tale shares a much bigger, real world counterpart to publicly available clip art from Volk and other studios as well. A New York Times employee named Bart Solenthaler who worked in the advertising department was tasked with throwing away a massive collection of clip art, but instead took the time to scan and upload it to Flickr! You should absolutely check that collection out here.

Did you ever use clip art from Volk? All the images in this post are from my personal collection which are primarily from catalogs from the 80s and 90s, so they don’t reflect that cool mid–century style I’ve been talking about. However, you can find even more classic Volk clip art here. If you’d like to learn a little more detail about this type of clip art, check out my sources by visiting this article on Tedium and this one on Fast Company. For more vintage design inspiration, check out this article I wrote about my classic magazine collection.

Follow me on Instagram and Twitter and check back here on Fridays for more creative thinking and inspiration!

My Blogs One Year Anniversary

Just a little more than a year ago, I had read that search engines (Google in particular), love when a website is active and will move that site way up when it comes to searches. At that time, my name would link to either my Instagram or a few ToughPigs articles, but my website didn’t even list. It was at that moment I wondered why I was paying so much money for a site that was—at best—a resume placeholder that literally no one could see. I set out to be more proactive which was a job in and of itself. A year later however and I’m so proud and pleased with how this world of analytics and recognition have come along.

The best part is how keeping this blog up has helped me improve my ability to network. For starters, I learned a lot of valuable lessons on how to connect with others, and a lot of those lessons came through trial and error. In the long run though, it gave me opportunities to reconnect with old friends, introduce a lot of how I operate to new ones, and feature the work and ideas of a lot of super talented people. I’d like to take today to show off some of my favorite things that have happened on here over the last year.

So Much Talent!

Getting to interact with so many talented people has been the most fun by far. I won’t go into lengthy details, but simply present this cast of wonderful human beings who were kind enough to be a part of my journey.

Mike Barreiro

Danny Beckwith

Doug Berry

Nick Bondra

Mike Boon

Jonathan Brangwynne

Jamie Carroll

Will Carroll

Maria Chamra

Thank you again to all of these amazing humans! GO CHECK THEM OUT!!!

Some Freelance I’ve Done

Aside from just having another place to spotlight my work, I’ve enjoyed sharing my process with freelance I’ve done for clients like Matt Vogel or the work I’ve done for my full-time job at The Salvation Army. And of course, I’ll always take the opportunity to show off everything that was done for ToughPigs The Great Muppet Mural.

Personal Lessons

Writing a blog has also been cathartic. I’ve been able to share things that’s I’ve always felt very strongly about and wanted to tell. Coping with passive–aggressive clients and defining myself as an illustrator were two things in particular I’ve wanted to talk about for ages.

Real things people have actually said to me

One of the more exciting aspects for me was having my point of view completely refocused like when I asked if it was even necessary to be creative in order to be a good graphic designer or if being pigeonholed into drawing Muppets was a bad thing.

I’ve also really enjoyed looking at my career through a more personal lens in regards to how much my daughter continues to inspire me, the work that I do, and how that easily spreads across my professional and family life and how rewarding it all is.

Randomness

My blog has also provided me with so many creative challenges and new ways to try things I’ve always wanted to do. I’m itching to do more artist games like I did with Will Carroll and Noah Ginex (more of these are on the way too!). I had a blast trying to find every instance of Kermit I’ve ever drawn. I also dug deep to try my hand at redrawing my old illustrations too! All of these things were creative exercises that helped me learn and grow in so many wonderful ways.

My Favorites

For me, my favorite articles deal with talking about my family and being silly. Of everything I’ve written however, my post about Stock Image Sites is the one I’m most proud of. If you want to support me and this foray into writing, I would love if you read it. I’m super proud of that one.

If you’ve been a reader for even one article, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I have so many more posts I can’t wait to share with you! Please follow me on Instagram and Twitter and check back here on Fridays for more creative thinking!

The Wild World of Stock Image Sites

Recently, I was part of a very informative meeting regarding depictions of human trafficking in media. Essentially, our editorial and design staff were made to understand how common images that were originally used to bring awareness to modern day slavery are now outdated and even harmful as they inaccurately portray trafficking and its survivors. It is crucial for creative people to have an open dialog with professionals from other fields to progressively create content that can inform the public properly and in cases such as human trafficking, even assist law enforcement. These conversations can be difficult and awkward for both sides to understand each other in hopes to produce potent tools that can be used effectively. While right brained designers want to grab your attention with bold graphics and a clear narrative, left brained social workers prefer ethical empowerment and avoid sensationalism.

Human trafficking is a very serious issue that affects tens of millions of people, and as graphic designer, I personally recognize how important it is to have an open dialog with service providers, allied professionals, and government officials so that I can create materials that inform and assist the public in a helpful and sensitive way. There are a lot of solemn instances with different contextual uses of media that require a deft hand when designing resources for such heavy issues, and it’s definitely something all creative people need to be aware of. This particular blog entry—and I cannot stress this enough— is not that conversation. Sorry to lead you on like that, but I think it’s very important to highlight just how oblivious the creative industry can be and how image sites in particular seem to be day drinking heavily.

First off, let me take a minute to explain image sites to those who might not be familiar with them. Every advertisement and publication you see has two sides. The editorial side, and the design side. The editorial side provides all the information you need to know: what something costs, where something goes, and when something starts. The design side is what gets you to look and lets you know who something is for, how it works, and why you should get it. The visual content is usually the last piece of the puzzle to come about because editors and writers are slow and think they are more important than designers. If you have a budget and time, a designer can photograph or illustrate or film whatever they need and make a really cool piece of media they will proudly show everywhere. More often than not however, designers are pressed for time and need to get their hands on photographs, illustrations, or video immediately, I.e.; something that has already been created. Hence, stock image sites.

You’ve no doubt seen a news story with a Getty Images watermark front and center over it. For a fee, an image site will license media to you for an extended period of time. Unsplash, iStock, Story Blocks, Shutter Stock, Adobe Stock, and the multitudes that have been absorbed like Veer, Dollar Photo, and Corbis just to name a few. Image sites are helpful tools for creativity too and usually have media under a truckload of search tags so you can narrow down what you’re looking for to something very specific and still have a decent selection to choose from. Whether or not these sites pricing structures are fair and what cut they pay to the content creator is not what we’re talking about today either. Instead, I’d like to focus on some of the absolutely bananas content these places think creative people need and how out of touch they can sometimes feel.

Disclaimer 1: Initially I thought I’d do cross checks on multiple image stock sites, but the honest to God’s truth is that they are almost all the same. Not only do they feature the same content, they feature the same search results so while I may slip in an image from somewhere else here and there, the majority of what you’ll see here is from Adobestock. I actually really love Adobestock and Adobe products, but if I’m being honest, I’m still a little miffed they bought out Dollar Photos.

Disclaimer 2: There’s a good chance you’ve seen Reddit or other meme sites feature weird, WTF collections of pictures from image sites, but this isn’t that either. There’s a few images that I can’t fathom what they’d be used for, but nothing incredibly out of the ordinary. No “Hide the Pain Harold” here!

Disclaimer 3: I could write a book about this verses a blog post. The images shown here tell their own story and were not cherry picked to prove a point. I will probably write another post in the future with a more studied and researched collection, but for today, these are all images that came up within the first few pages of a search. It’s not rocket science and the algorithm for these searches are something every designer is familiar with and I’ve always found these results to be either hysterical or infuriating.

Words Bad Good

Sometimes a concept is just so lofty an idea that creatively the only way to convey it is to have a picture of the word you’re searching for.

“Okay, so this our new campaign regarding lunch programs for underprivileged…”

“LUNCH!!!”

“Er, what’s that Ralph?”

“LUNCH!! LUNCH!!”

“Sure, okay, let’s go with that.”

Either there’s a much higher demand for pictures of neon signs that say Ralph than I would imagine, or AI is responsible for a lot of these images.

Maybe it’s effective if it’s being used really well, but otherwise, this is the laziest of lazy design. To be fair also, this type of conveyance is heavily used when a concept is a little too abstract like searching for images related to ASAP for example.

Yes, “Condyloma” was one of the very first images that came up when searching for dynamic text.

Totally Not Racist

Everyone wants you to know they’re not racists… well, not overtly racist people because that’s their thing, but on a professional level, corporate America wants you to know they’re not racist. So clients understandably like images that show diversity. To an image site algorithm, “diversity” is a weird metaphor for racial harmony. Like a hit–you–over–the–head–to–say–we–swear–to–God–we’re–not–racist type of energy that tries way too hard. Why are you making hand hearts, or holding hands, or standing so uncomfortably close together? I want something other than just white people, you don’t have to invade each other’s personal space. And why is everyone so happy just to be standing around? To be fair, “diversity” as a search term is very slowly expanding. Now instead of a couple of black people, someone is also wearing a hijab usually so progress, I guess. Asians still can’t catch a break, they’re not invited to the stand around and smile parties.

We’re diverse AND awkward!

Anger, The Funniest Emotion

The easiest thing about capturing happiness on film (Hi! I’m old and say things like ‘on film’!) is that you can elicit a genuine look of it from a subject. All you need is a funny photographer, a wonderful memory, or the threat of not getting paid. Sadness is a little trickier, but good lighting, focusing on trauma, or the threat of not getting paid can make a believable image come to life. Anger? Well, maybe real anger looks too angsty or doesn’t convey just how dark the average human being is, so image sites portray anger as OH MY GOD!

You wouldn’t like me when I’m psychotic.

We’ve all been angry, but somewhere along the journey of visually presenting emotions, people translated “angry” to psycho murder demon. It’s funny, but usually “anger” in advertisements is used in relation to stress relief of some sort. Is your job getting you mad? Is your old appliance on the fritz? Is your internet slow? Are weasels deliberately mispronouncing your name? Well then you need our product! And to get your attention, we’ve used this very relatable approximation of you; violently screaming or punching something because that’s what normal people do every day.

They really hate laptops.

Maybe bullying is tangential to anger, but I get charged per subhead, so it’s going here as well. Also a serious and topical issue, bullying affects way more kids nowadays then when I was a kid. People who think bullying is just a part of childhood and that kids today are pansies can seriously go suck it because way back in the day (before the internet), you had a safe space called home or church or some extracurricular aside where you fit in. Your bully didn’t follow you everywhere which, thanks to social media, that’s exactly what they do today.

That woman in the gray dress is boldly playing both sides.

So again, I don’t mean to make light of a serious situation here. I’m Gen X, I sympathize with people and understand the world’s gonna’ keep changing regardless of how I feel. That being said, typically we relate bullying to adolescence. Yeah, I know it exists everywhere in every facet of life, but some of these images are hilarious. Not because someone is being bullied, but the setting for all of these is clearly a corporate environment and the idea that multiple adult coworkers would comedically harass other adult coworkers like they’re in an 80s Ivan Reitman film raises more questions than it sets out to solve. Why are they using a bullhorn? Why does their office have a bullhorn? They’re standing right in front of him, how necessary is the bullhorn?

A bullhorn isn’t a way to get people to listen, it’s a way to force people to hear you.

I’ve been in offices and on teams like this one. When computers are lined up side by side like this, it’s because everyone is working on the same project. Those two idiots are harassing someone who is most likely very consequential to their work and by proxy; deadline and paycheck. Help her out you lunatics! At the very least shun her for bringing unnecessary drama into the office and talk $#!t about her behind her back like a real American!

“Ha ha ha! Bob has a headache! Isn’t that hilarious?!”

Now this could be anxiety over an oppressive boss, or even something more serious like sexual harassment in the workplace. The problem is the focus is all off. She’s very strangely infatuated with the clipboard and he seems terrified of the succubus’ mouth forming from her chest, ready to devour his head. “Don’t these sales and revenue reports turn you on?”

You’re Doing It All Wrong!

If you have a talent, hobby, or interest that requires some degree of knowledge beyond what most people know of said subject, then an image site is rife with inaccuracies. That’s not how you hold a trumpet. The world at large may not know that or even care, so sue me and every other brass aficionado; but some of these are just confounding as to how anyone would use them for any purpose.

Is that woman playing Weird Al? Because it’s clearly a very funny song. Is that boy preaching to God himself? Wouldn’t he be pretty familiar with His own book? Are these people Jedis? Why are their hands so close to the ground? What is the relationship between planes and guitar strings? Did this couple stumble upon a guitar player in the middle of the woods or did they just drag him out in the middle of a forest to play because they’re tired of people criticizing how they clap? What the %@$# is going on?!

You know how you have to transfer all that digital information to paper? How tedious! Why do we even have computers?!

Sexism Everywhere

The initial idea that made me want to write this blog post in particularly however surrounded the overtly sexist tones image descriptions and key search words use. Take a look at these images and see if you can pick up on the subtle theme of angry male vs. angry female.

When a male supervisor is yelling at a female subordinate in a lot of these images, the description mentions blame on an ineffective or guilty employee. The male boss is usually labeled as frustrated. When a female supervisor yells at anyone, she’s labeled as unbalanced, superior, rude, or at the very least acknowledging the subordinates are stressed because of her. I understand that when these images are used, they may not be contextualized exactly as their descriptions indicate; but another interesting subtext from a visual standpoint is how often the camera angle changes depending on the sex of the boss. If it’s a dude, the camera is usually perched high, taking on the perspective of the man and from a position of power. When it’s a woman, the camera tends to sit low, taking on the perspective of the worker and from a position of vulnerability. It’s also curious and arguably unnecessary when the image shows just a singular angry person. The guy gets labeled as “handsome” while they double–down with “rage” for the lady.

I realize I’m only showing just a few images, but I’m not overly skewing information here. As mentioned in my earlier disclaimer, these are results from just the first 2 pages of my search. I also realize I’m not saying anything every single woman reading this already knows. “The image sites are sexist too?!” Yeah guys, this is what systemic sexism and racism coupled with unconscious bias look like. It’s literally everywhere.

All in all, stock image sites really are a valuable resource and the algorithms, subject matter, and overall quality continue to improve, but if we’re being honest, it will never be perfect. I had way to much fun with this post and I will most likely tackle this subject again. In fact, I would love to hear if anyone has had similar or other unique experiences when it comes to the world of stock images! Comment below or tell me on Instagram or Twitter!