2.31 out of 7. That is how morally objectionable the American public finds the idea of handing a search marketer's job to software, measured across 940 occupations in a Harvard survey. Only file clerks scored lower.
Hold that next to what happened in publishing. Authors objected to their work being used for training, litigated, and won a $1.5 billion settlement paying $3,000 a book. The payout arrived and publishers and literary agents started filing claims on it, so the argument has moved from whether the objection was valid to who owns it.
Two groups, one question, opposite outcomes. One had contracts and counsel. The other has a survey score of 2.31.
Then there is the television in the corner of the room, sweeping the local network to map which phones are nearby, across roughly 216 million sets. Nobody objected there either, because nobody was told there was anything to object to. Objection turns out to be a function of leverage rather than principle, which is worth knowing before you assume someone will raise a hand on your behalf.
Google Pics (pics.new)
Google shipped a standalone image creation and editing tool built on its Nano Banana model, open to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and most Workspace business customers, with integrations arriving in Docs, Slides and Drive over the coming weeks. The useful features are the unglamorous ones: isolating an object out of an existing image, and editing or translating text inside an image without rebuilding the file. Take the ten lowest-stakes visual requests currently sitting in your design queue, social variants, deck filler, localised banners, and run them through pics.new this week instead. What you are measuring is not image quality, it is how much of your design queue was never a design problem.
Happy Growth,
Dan
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