Generative AI has taken the world by storm, and it’s only been a few years since it’s captured the imagination of mainstream audiences. I’m been an evangelist for genAI since Stable Diffusion 1.5 was released, putting into the hands of creatives like me the incredible power to generate images of anything we could imagine. And barely three years later, genAI video powered by Sora and Veo and a panoply of other platforms is making it possible to create cinematic experiences once reserved to Hollywood studios with multimillion dollar budgets.
But I also understand the concerns you may have about intellectual property, environmental impact, and ethics. I can help you navigate the increasingly complex quagmire that is a post-genAI web.
Expanding Creative Possibilities
The commercial platforms we’ve become accustomed to are only the tip of the iceberg: ChatGPT and Gemini for LLMs; Midjourney for generative imagery; Suno and Elevenlabs for music; and Sora and Veo3 for video. The list of providers grows longer every day, as do the enterprise subscription fees to engage with these services. But the real magic of genAI happens locally: as open source tools like ComfyUI become more mature and capable, we can run local models like Qwen, Flux, and Z-Image to create custom fine-tunes that allow us to train on private datasets. Together, these tools create workflows that accelerate and streamline our production processes, expanding creative possibilities within tighter budgets.
Generative AI helps us pressure-test for ideas that resonate.
Iterative branding uses generative AI to explore and prototype visual identity. We can start with a handful of complementary ideas (whether they’re emotions we’re trying to evoke in our audience, cultural motifs we want to incorporate, or artistic styles we want to adopt) to produce a traditional moodboard that outlines our creative vision, and then use AI tooling to rapidly generate visual directions. Iterative branding through genAI allows us to quickly hone in on an “Ah ha!” moment that our visual designer can run with. All the while, the process of experimentation is driven by human judgment and intent. This approach is especially valuable for early-stage brands, creative projects in flux, or teams navigating a rebrand without the budget or risk tolerance for expensive (and therefore irreversible) bad decisions.
Rather than replacing visual designers and the process of art direction, generative AI helps us pressure test for ideas that resonate, long before the work hardens into real world assets and design guidelines.
In Advanced Old School Revival, we devised distinctive style guides for 22 product lines in two weeks, through a combination of prompt engineering and custom and open source fine-tunes. Now OSR+ can output art in minutes for any one of its products into web, video, or print formats.
Ecosystem design is not about adopting more AI for the sake of it; it’s about adopting the right amount in the right places.
Ecosystem design focuses on how generative AI can fit into a broader creative or technical environment within your business. Instead of members of your team adopting isolated tools to yield sporadic outputs across the organization, I can help you design workflows that connect only the most relevant tools to your data, and put the right people in the pilot’s seat of those tools, so that a single, coherent system can emerge that accelerates your overall business processes. This includes auditing your workflow to uncover acceleration opportunities, then selecting appropriate third party applications (or configuring local pipelines) and defining how these tools interact with existing design or engineering processes.
Ecosystem design is not about adopting more AI for the sake of it; it’s about adopting the right amount in the right places, so the system tells a coherent story about how work gets done:
A restaurant adopts an LLM to help draft seasonal ad copy in a consistent voice;
A marketer adopts tools that translate longform content into social media;
A game designer builds a chatbot that answers questions about the core rules.
Every ecosystem is different. This work benefits teams who feel overwhelmed by the pace of AI development and don’t have the enterprise budget (or the technical know-how) to take advantage of what the cutting edge has to offer.
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Leveraging NotebookLM as a Research Partner
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Even simple, out-of-box implementations of AI tools into analog processes can rapidly accelerate workflows. Advanced Old School Revival leveraged Google’s NotebookLM to cross-reference thirty, 300-page manuals all at once, which made building its own manuscript based on the most popular entries in those manuals realizable by a single game designer.
A genuine collaborator that can extend your reach.
Generative AI can dramatically accelerate content production when it’s guided by clear creative intent. But the power doesn’t come with the button pushing; anyone can do that. Instead, content production at scale requires careful prompt engineering and a deep understanding of the character of generative models (some LLMs write more creatively than others; some image models are better at photorealism than illustration) to ensure outputs meet a standard of quality that won’t come across as inauthentic to audiences on the receiving end. The selection of fine tunes to bias with aesthetic preferences on the image side, or the construction of RAG pipelines to prime LLMs with the right datasets, are both part of the technical setup involved in establishing a production workflow.
There are many other considerations that go beyond that technical setup, including the question of the longevity of third party integrations in a field where the technology is constantly changing, and an ever-evolving legal landscape.
But once it’s in place, genAI goes from being a thoughtless automatic content engine to a genuine collaborator that can extend your reach.
The Character Creator in the Advanced Old School Revival (OSR+) website contains a library of some 18,000 character portraits, which were generated in a matter of hours after the appropriate pipeline was put in place as a mold for generating art in the system’s branded style.
There’s room to educate, and so it’s important to get ahead of the debate.
The attitudes toward genAI in the public sphere are as diverse as they are fierce. According to worldwide polls as of 2026, meta analysis shows that your average consumer is skeptical of, or at least indifferent to the technology, despite vocal evangelists and even more vocal anti-AI activists. This means there’s room to educate, and so it’s important to get ahead of the debate.
Policy development addresses the structural questions surrounding generative AI adoption head on: what should be used, how, by whom, and under what constraints. I help organizations articulate internal guidelines that balance experimentation with accountability, covering issues like data privacy, ownership, disclosure, and ethical use. These policies are tailored to the organization’s values rather than copied from generic templates.
Drafting a policy such as what I’m describing is a first step before a formal legal review and organization-wide adoption. It’s especially valuable for teams whose lack of clear guidelines can lead to inconsistent use, or worse: outright conflict. By framing policy as a living document—open to revision as tools evolve—organizations can engage generative AI thoughtfully, without freezing innovation or ignoring responsibility.
Radical transparency about genAI use in your product forces you to address all the controversial issues internally, so you aren’t blindsided by questions you never considered. This can take the form of an FAQ or a formal public statement that gets everyone in your team on the same page.
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Ken Gagne Multimedia Communications Producer — Mass Eye and Ear
A fantastic job … His work completely transformed our web presence. He’s patient, thoughtful and talented. An innovator and a tireless worker. I recommend him highly and without reservation.
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Johnny Damm Editor-in-Chief — A Bad Penny Review
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Qualified Digital partnered with me to build Amplify Partners’ new website, which Qualified designed. Amplify was looking to take advantage of a modern redesign and all that WordPress Gutenberg has to offer.
Director and Chief Curator Rachel Nelson hired me to develop the redesign for the Institute of Arts & Sciences at University of California Santa Cruz, a university art and research center that houses art exhibitions and social justice initiatives.