2 days ago
- The difference between illusionists and conjurers: illusionists perfect a single move through scarcity (one shot, one audience), while conjurers generate abundance then curate the best.
- The shift from film to digital photography transformed the craft from capturing images (scarcity) to choosing them (abundance), sparking new tools like Flickr, Instagram, and Lightroom.
- AI enables a similar scarcity-to-abundance shift; raw material becomes infinite, and the craft moves from precise execution to recognition and curation.
- The author built a tool called 'Conjure' for AI-generated slide decks, where users create a grimoire (style guide), generate multiple variations, select the best slides, and stitch them together.
- The conjurer's skill is recognition—summoning many options and identifying the right one, contrasting with the illusionist's precision from limited chances.
- The ecosystem of tools for organizing, filtering, and finding patterns in abundant media (like Flickr for photos) is still missing for AI, but the grimoire concept helps encode 'good' persistently.