Our Tryst with AI & Other Stories
The Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills of newsletters is seated for a transference-motivated affair, Lena-ing in, and seeing red (light).
Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreadpeeps,
As a couple of Substackers who are “keeping our day jobs” (we mean this both literally and euphemistically), we don’t exactly have the resources to employ a full art department. Still—and especially since we got nominated for the ASME for best newsletter!!—we often hear it’s time to take the Spread to “the next level.” Another thing that we often hear is that (until it kills us all), AI can be a useful tool for scrappy little operations such as our own. So earlier this week, on a day when we were on deadline for said day jobs and had no business dicking around, we felt inspired to try out the ole machine learnin’ for a little adventure in branding. What would be our first experiment? Duh, the writing was all over the wall. Urgently, we asked Gemini—can we call you GiGi?—to render your Spreaditors in the style of Italian artist Francesco Clemente’s portrait of Gwyneth Paltrow from the poster of the canonical 1998 Alfonso Cuarón film, Great Expectations. And we got:
Nice job, we told GiGi. (Misspelling of “presented” our own.) Our “branding exercise” was off to the races, and our creative juices were now fully flowing. This was clearly a path for us to level up and quickly begin making $275,300 a year (apiece!) on this enterprise. Hand in hand with GiGi, we sallied forth.
Could she Spreadify The Parent Trap?
She could! How about the classic Tatum O’Neal/Kristy McNichol vehicle, Little Darlings?
Yes indeedy! Though we’re not sure how Rachel ended up with Farrah Fawcett locks while Maggie got…buckteeth. But hey, when your art department’s working for free, you take it. Hey Gemini, we suggested, let’s go for a little more angst and try Thirteen.
And that was fine—though we may have to workshop that word “blog” and Maggie’s hair transformations were getting downright lazy.
Anyway, by now we were 120 minutes of premium Tuesday afternoon work hours into GiGi, what with the back and forth it took to get our various piercings and hair configurations right. Still, if time is money, we were a dream team! And GiGi was turning out to be the most chill art director we’d ever worked with.
Then we got this one. Good try, we told GiGi gently—in the tone we used with art directors of our past who, say, illustrated stories on postpartum psychosis with photos of generically hot teenage “sad girl” models. (This is true: We once had a photo director who compiled a binder of “sad girl” art just to illustrate our features.) Anyway, we told GiGi that while we loved what she’d done here, we would like her to make “the woman on the left” look a little less exactly like Susan Sarandon and more like Rachel Baker. Then we re-uploaded photos of Rachel, just to drive the point home.
Looking back, we can see that this is where things took a turn. Little did we know it, GiGi was mad. Real mad. Madder than any other art director we’ve ever squabbled with, which is really saying something. And we know this because—no joke—this is what she sent us next.
Folks, this is the AI equivalent of the time the creative director from our fashion mag past hurled a pair of scissors across the studio—narrowly missing several underlings—and stomped out. Thus concluded our brief interlude as a media “company” with an art “department” and the most hilarious day at the office in we don’t know when.
We’ll circle back,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Novelist Maria Semple is back and OK, sure, great—it’s not her fault that the film adaptation of Where’d You Go, Bernadette? was unbearably bad—but we did like ogling her stuff in the Wall Street Journal.
You know the drill… we’re just getting started! What’s on the other side of this line for paid subscribers? A banger of a therapist/client sexual affair (two words: “mistress money”); our ongoing Lena Dunham debate; the one thing you shouldn’t say to someone at a party (that we can’t stop saying); another doc from the Netflix Dept. of Fearmongering; a wild side-effect of all that red light you’ve been beaming at your eyeballs…
Come on in, the water is warm and the takes are spicy!
