Gavin Miller: Adobe Research

Gavin Miller presents poetry, writing, invention, and technology as parallel practices that periodically inform one another. His examples begin with early voice synthesis at Apple: he wrote lines to fit the limited and randomly intonated voice of an intelligent agent, imagining a system that both dismissed and longed for human company. A smart-home project and a light-sensing photo album extended the same idea into physical objects, where an agent could remind him about chores or play sounds matched to the page being viewed. These projects were not claims that the technology already understood people; they were imaginative prototypes that made a future interaction concrete.

The discussion then identifies a limitation of conversational AI: fluent stimulus-response behavior can sound convincing without containing real-world understanding. Miller argues that a system needs multiple ways to discuss the same concept, approach it from different angles, and reason about it rather than repeat one canned formulation. He connects this requirement to Adobe’s work on transforming media: captioning an image, changing the caption, finding a matching image, and synthesizing assets from descriptions. His career’s movement from 3D graphics toward AI-generated imagery is framed as a shift from directly manipulating models, light, color, and shape toward working with ideas that can generate visual outcomes.

Miller rejects a simple choice between manual craft and automation. Adobe’s research spans low-level tools that imitate analog materials, such as oil paint and watercolor, as well as automation for repetitive production work. Preserving control matters when an artist wants expressive or novel results; automating format adaptation, layout, and other routine variations can instead free attention for style, message, story, and human meaning. In this account, AI may change the artist’s role toward art direction or conceptual work, while the computer becomes a partner that produces polished alternatives rather than an authority that replaces judgment.