Trashbag Ghost

slime drenched, monster & mask obsessed artist alter ego of @hichrisnoble PR box agency @GenieCreativeUS 🧞

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

👻➡️🧞 AI is eating illustration alive. In many ways it's really the walking dead, many don't realize it just yet. What's an artist to do?
I tapped back into my production roots and started an agency specializing ONLY in insane PR/seeding kits. Literally all we do and I'm loving it!
Follow what I'm up to these days @GenieCreativeUS

[GENIE Creative PR Boxes🧞 @GenieCreativeUS]

👋Hello world. we make 🤯 PR boxes

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

@nypost Judge Dreddito

[🕯𝖇𝖔𝖜 𝖘𝖊𝖍 𝖒𝖆𝖍🕯 🔜SCGCon Vegas @JamesBousema]

It’s in the 90s in Vegas in March

Also painted this

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

Probably not that long until “prompt to snack” at this rate 🥨

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

@brianwhitman @YouTube You are the funniest human being ever BW. Was living in a pool house no friends within 100 miles in 2005/2006 and laughing at you on the radio was the best part of my day!

[GENIE Creative PR Boxes🧞 @GenieCreativeUS]

I tried to use AI to design a PR box for @c4energy new flavor SERIAL KILLER 🥣… and things got out of hand. 💀🥹

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

Cc: @projectpayphone 800 block N Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012, USA 🌴

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

All means of physically rendering art is now a parlor trick. Still fun
⠛⠛⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡷⢶⣦⣶⣶⣤⣤⣤⣀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⡀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠉⠉⠉⠙⠻⣿⣿⠿⠿⠛⠛⠛⠻⣿⣿⣇⠀
⠀⠀⢤⣀⣀⣀⠀⠀⢸⣷⡄⠀ ⣀⣤⣴⣿⣿⣿⣆
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠹⠏⠀⠀⠀⣿⣧⠀⠹⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⣿
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠛⠿⠇⢀⣼⣿⣿⠛⢯⡿⡟
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠦⠴⢿⢿⣿⡿⠷⠀⣿⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⣷⣶⣶⣤⣤⣤⣤⣤⣶⣦⠃⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢐⣿⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⠻⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

The worlds best realistic pencil drawing is still a parlor trick. Nothing added, subtracted or multiplied. Behold the Human Xerox! Very technically impressive I will say!

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

What if humans aren’t as special as we thought and “intelligence” is just a different form of physics that expressed itself through us? 🤔

[Tim @timgedenk]

The death of the average.

We are currently witnessing the total collapse of the marginal cost of creation. Copywriting, design, video editing - skills that previously commanded a premium due to the barrier of technical execution are being democratised to the point of irrelevance.

Most marketers view this through the lens of efficiency. They see a tool that allows them to produce 10x the output for 1/10th of the cost.

When the supply of "good enough" content becomes infinite, the economic value of that content plummets to zero. We are entering an era of infinite noise. If you think it is hard to capture attention now, wait until the internet is flooded with billions of synthetically generated articles, tweets, and videos every single day.

(Which is already happening, just not at the quality and volume that it will in 6, 12 months from now)

In this environment, pure volume is no longer a valid strategy. You cannot out-publish a server farm.

The alpha in modern marketing is shifting entirely from production to provenance.

[1] The Trust Premium

As the internet becomes increasingly synthetic, we will see a massive flight to safety. "Is this real?" will become the single most important buying criterion.

We are moving away from algorithm-optimisation and back towards human-optimisation. Personal brands, founders-led sales, and verified human voices will command an exorbitant premium.

The faceless corporate brand is dead. If a consumer cannot verify the human source behind the message, they will subconsciously label it as "spam".

[2] High-Friction Marketing

For the last decade, the goal was "low friction". SEO, programmatic ads, automated email sequences.

As AI cannibalises these low-friction channels, - bots clicking on ads served by bots on sites written by bots - the smart money will move to high-friction channels.

Live events. Physical mail. Handshakes. Closed-door dinners.

The harder it is to scale, the more valuable it becomes. You prove your value by doing things that cannot be automated.

[3] Taste as a Moat

Large Language Models function by predicting the next most likely token. By definition, they regress to the mean. They give you the average of the entire internet.

If you use AI to guide your strategy, you are opting for mediocrity at scale.

"Taste" - the human ability to curate, to select the outlier, to understand nuance and subtext - becomes the only defensible moat.

The future of marketing is about who has the taste to know what *not* to create.

Paradoxically, the more artificial the world becomes, the higher the premium on being undeniably human.

[frye @___frye]

it’s time to accept these as an ambitious yet flawed experiment and move on

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

Artists, did you spend the past 3 years searching your soul to build a counter-argument to your own existence or did you spend it posting “ai art isn’t art🚫😭” on X? You might be right, but what if that wasn’t the right question…

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

Artists, AI's here. Time spent bewailing this is wasted. Instead, push the limits of this tech in service of building a counter-argument to your very existnece. Push deep into fear & anxiety. Leave yourself feeling like it's all over. Then figure out what makes you an artist. <3

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

heads up to followers who've followed me for art: freelance art is just kind of like meditation or gaming for me now. a healthy enjoyable dopamine drip way to spend some time but not a serious career.

AI changed the game for freelance illustrators, I saw it coming years ago which is why I pivoted to a specialty agency model. AI will consume/radically change that eventually too, it's just a longer runway, which is cool.

Storytelling and creating things that the market demands that require complex manual intervation are two keys as I see it if you choose to forge ahead as a creative. That's what I'm doing at @GenieCreativeUS

So I love and respect anyone who's followed me over the years for my art, but time's change and so do people, so this is your loving and respectful heads up that my activity here is going to be more... "well rounded" shall we say, moving ahead, and you may not be interested in the topics, and I don't want to give whiplash to anyone who's supported and liked what I do in the past!

I'll keep this account, when spooky projects come around I'll post here, but I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of conversations I'm interested in in terms of gaming, technology, investing, and just life in general by keeping this acct (started in a world that no longer exists) pigeonholed to art content <3 👻

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

@Richpor104 @tboe3D 👊

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

@HiBye_ImDie @horror4kids omg

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

@volkertdesign thanks Nick!

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

@_vandul I want a wood 7-eleven too 😨

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

@Michael_Aiello @HorrorNightsORL so sick

[Trashbag Ghost @TrashbagGhost]

Hey artist, AI is outside your window about to come inside, eat your insides and wear your face as a mask. 🤯 By my reckoning, there are two amulets of protection if you choose to continue to pursue a creative career. You better be one of the worlds best storytellers, and/or you need to be involved in the production of physical goods that the market demands. The time for arguing whether this is good or bad was in philosophy class a decade ago, it simply IS now.

The top image is my art, the second is AI generated based on the lowest effort prompt possible. Even gets the concept of the tattoos “F Sunshine” haha. And remember, AI today is the absolute worst it will ever be. Kind of crazy!

So make a plan artist, because your pixels living on a screen in the absence of a story are going to a market value of close to zero!

AI will come to be accepted as a legitimate creative tool to be wielded ethically and creatively just as the camera, Photoshop or anything else. Spending time feeling bad and dwelling on some notion of cosmic unfairness is a sure way to ensure you wind up broke and jobless by 2027. So don’t do that!

I say this out of love. I started game planning my own strategy a couple years ago and it’s uncomfortable to see so many fellow artists living in denial or genuine ignorance about where this tech is and where it’s going (fast!). I love art, I love making art, I love watching my friends make art, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game is switching to hard mode. Wake up! ❤️