‘Negative space’ in visual communication is defined as “the empty space around and between the subject of an image or design”. It’s as old as visual communication itself. Today, what isn’t there is just as illustrative and poignant as ‘what is’.
This phenomena exists in every form of communication we use, for example:
What ’isn’t said’ can speak louder than the contents of an entire speech.
The absence of an individual can be felt more than if they attended at all.
We as humans perceive both absence and presence equally, shaping our reality… or should that be ‘our dataset’?
AI is a genius. It reacts instantly without tiring, delivers eagerly and confidently without question, even offering further options and support should we want them. But it does so in a digital world, blinkered by the bounds of the request and data we supply it. It doesn’t act without us and has no sense for whether its response has ‘something missing’. Why would it? AI assimilated our prompt and proposed the best solution from the parameters, logic and data it has access to. Like following a recipe, it’s added the ingredients in the correct ratio and sequence, but when it offers a sample spoonful it’s us that decides ‘something’s missing’…
So what is ‘missing’?
The Italians amongst us may yell ‘Amore!’ to this analogy, which isn’t far off the mark. The answer really is that little bit of human sensing. We rely on our senses, they give us sentience which drives and informs our instincts for survival. Our connection to feeling and understanding is so hard coded into our existence that we describe something as ‘making sense’ when something is worth doing.
We are a complex mix of logic and feeling. We have a conscious and subconscious, we use intuition to drive success and sometimes make quantum leaps by being counter intuitive. Whether logical or not, we use our five senses and feelings to inform our decisions.
We didn’t get here relying solely on logic.
Our rise has been driven by using every sense we have to learn and adapt. Working together increased our survival rates and sped up our development, taking us from weak individual primates to the dominant community species on the planet. Capable of space travel and building electronic brains that de-burden our time. AI is the digital embodiment of ourselves, a thirst to learn and produce, but it can’t sense, see the gap, hear the silence nor feel absence.
AI is a tool we should all embrace to streamline our workflows so we can focus on what we do best: Creating connection and stimulating senses.
