this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
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You believe people who can't draw also can't.. think visually? That's a completely different skill common in most of the population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking
Not exactly; People who can draw can use that tool to explore visual ideas and think visually; But you can do that with design concepts, paper cutouts, Adobe Illustrator shapes and so on. People who only engage with linguistic concepts as in the case of an LLM are not really engaging in the nuances of any visual language. They are using information set into a translator that outputs a result. It's like thinking that Using google translate Makes me "Think in Chinese" lol.
I see it often that clients come to me thinking that they have a realized visual Idea but they really don't have much. They have some overall aesthetic short hands. A couple of images they liked and a standard they want to meet. This is not visual thinking; this is called being a client. Then there is the job of art directors, they won't draw everything themselves but they will offer a system, information critique, cultural awareness, even technical methods.
You can engage an LLM as a client or an art director; But in the end you are still using google translate to write in English and have an output in Chinese, if you follow my former metaphor. You are not really thinking in the true language of the output, There is wide cultural barrier between you and what you are making; most of the context cues and nuances of your message are lost or irrelevant.
You're judging people's thoughts by their output. Explaining visual ideas in detail, in words no less, is yet another skill separate from drawing and thinking. It's closer to writing clarity, how well one expresses themselves in text.
It isn't fair to think someone who's bad at communicating ideas is equally bad at having them. This is the same fallacy that causes one to think LLMs are alive. People are more than their output, they have inner lives.
I don't contend that people who can't paint can think like a painter, but that visual thinking is more than just thinking like a painter.
In the case of the people you describe as 'client', it sounds to me like they just don't care about what the result is, it's just a job to them.
That said I do think there's merit to expressing ideas yourself. Having to dwell on it to bring it into existence, to make decisions where the idea is vague can make you realize its shortcomings and see how it can be improved. The act of creating the product can make you aware of the strengths and limitations of your tools. That becomes a lesson for the next time, so you can have better ideas from the get go. And the experience from creating it lets you know which details matter when explaining it to another person.
I've met a lot of people who are very proficient in Putting down visual Ideas and most of them have a very humble approach to what they do. They speak about "experimenting", "doing research" and "putting down options for review." The Dunning Kruger effect comes to mind where The less someone knows about a discipline they are tackling the more you overinflate your level of skill. On the flip side; The more experienced you are at a discipline, the more you understand your limitations and become humble. In this sense It's not aimless judging to make a guess that people using LLm's thinking the have "fully formed ideas in their mind" are overestimating their abilities. LLM's have a bad rep of exacerbating the dunning Kruger effect by cutting them off with engaging with the medium they are "commissioning" The LLM.
I have never seen a commissioner believe they created the image they commissioned, but for some reason LLM users want some recognition for being "Ideas men" We have always had Ideas men. Everyone has a dumb Idea in their head. Some of them are stuff that don't need to engage with any cultural language or medium. But is there any merit to them? I've had clients that do care for the results given: A writer asks for a set of sketches for the architecture of their fantasy story; They ask questions, they beg for feedback, they even bring crude MS paint drawings. If a visual concept results from this collaboration, The writer won't take credit for the visual part. They will be humble and recognize that they don't have the background to generate a fully fleshed visual idea idea. But the work done during the collaboration, The back and forth enrich both parts of the process; An artist can learn a lot from a writer and vice versa. The is struggle, critique. It's messy; There is work done.
This will sound like an unrelated topic; But I'm a huge music fan; I have a collection of hundreds of albums. And what disgusts me about AI music in particular is not the fact that "there is no talent" or "soul" but that it's designed to kill the vibrancy of the music community. Everyone can take someone else's sound, and tack a dumb masturbatory "idea" on top. There is no engagement with theory, music history, or with music scenes. There is no engagement with people. It's spam. It's Useless spam made by "idea men." And there is an air of staleness to it. I said it on the initial post; There is a stench of cowardice to AI "creative" tools. The AI music scene statistically is full of white men making music that mimics Black women singers. It's larping, It's being unable to own up to your body and it's limitations. Who wants to waste time listening to that? I feel "ideas men" Have a tradition of being like that. People that don't want to put themselves in their ideas and instead outsource the work. At the very least conceptual artists of the 80's and 90's like Demian Hirst thought of a brand or a style. But Ideas men of the LLM go beyond that. It's the signature style of the vending machine or some lora of work they stole.
It is easier than ever to make something and putting it out there, and it's pathetic to see people make excuses on why they won't do it. I know people in wheel chairs paralyzed that draw with their frigging mouths! There are no excuses.