T/F: No one needs an 'idea guy'

[DokiDokiTsuna]

Recently, a few discussions about AI 'artists' trying to present prompt-writing as a job for which someone should want to pay them () brought this term to my attention...if you've never heard it before, an 'idea guy' is a hypothetical creator whose job it is to simply come up with ideas, which their colleagues with actual creative skills adopt and carry out. Their contributions would basically amount to "a story about X character who does Y" or "a picture of Y with Z in the background" (so...prompts, pretty much) and then they'd presumably just sit back and watch the artists and writers do all the work to make it exist.

But in reality, this...isn't a thing. =T If all you have is an idea, generally you should expect to pay others to help bring it to life, not to have them pay you for the "privilege" of doing so.

However...my experiences in media criticism make me hesitate to say that such a position is "useless" or nonsensical. ^^; I'll elaborate on that in a bit; first let's take a vote:

• True
• False

Show results

So, my position is basically True, but with an asterisk: there ARE creatives out there who could use an 'idea guy', but (a) those people are the least likely to realize that, and (b) they'd still be better off working with someone who has actual skills and insight as well as ideas.

I mean, sometimes the people running shows/games/films just don't have very interesting ideas, or enough ideas, or they clearly only have ideas about certain aspects of their work and leave everything else undeveloped...and I could genuinely see the value in them having someone around to go "I think it'd be cool if X. Y, and Z" when they're creatively bankrupt.

But the people who tend to go creatively bankrupt and start shoving out sloppy/unfinished/uninteresting work are usually just unprofessional people, who think the few ideas they do have are the best ever, and anything they can't figure out/decide to ignore isn't important anyway.
Either that, or they're under such tight budget/time restraints that what they really need is the manpower of another artist, not someone to toss out additional ideas when they're just barely managing to develop the ones they've got. The point is, neither of these people will have any interest in an 'idea guy'. ^^;

And this is a little beside the point, but: there's nothing stopping an 'idea guy' from becoming an actual writer. Or an editor, or a concept artist, or anyone with some amount of experience and skill to lend weight to their ideas. Which I think is why this remains a derisive term-- it tends to apply to the people who just want to come up with "things" and not bother with any of the hard work it takes to evaluate those things and make them appealing to others.

[Lensing]

Here is a quote
"An idea isn't worth that much. It's the execution of the idea that has value."

And I would phrase it more extreme but I will not

[darthmongoose]

I was going to say "true".... but then I thought about my boss and it got a little more complicated...

In my day job, I make edutainment. My boss has launched a pretty successful kids edutainment franchise, without really having any particular background in writing and with what she'd profess as "absolutely no drawing skills". Her approach to making a book is to basically get input, and help from a lot of other talented people; she'll find people with expertise in whatever she's writing about to give advice, she's named as the writer on the front of the book, but she's not scared to find writers to help write harder passages of text, or to take onboard recommendations from the editors, and of course the illustrations and design work are done by other people too.

At first, this approach angered me, because of course it would; my way of making a comic has always been "If I need to do something I can't do, I should learn to do it myself!" Meaning that after years of training and reading all the books (aw yeah, Autistic hyper-focus), I now draw, design and write to professional standard and can make a print book solo if I need to.
But the thing is... my boss' approach works? She has also managed to make books; well received ones, because even if she'd happily admit to not being the world's top writer, she has an amazing talent for connecting with talented and clever people, and for selling and promoting products. She knows how to come up with a series concept that makes investors and industry people look up with dollar signs in their eyes.

So I think my stance is like...

"You can be the ideas guy... but you'd better have very sellable ideas, means to realise them in a way that looks good within the budget you have, know what steps are required to do what you want to do, and be an absolute genius at selling what you're doing to people who can get you somewhere with them."

But as was said in the opening post, most people who want to be "the ideas guy" don't have that. Their idea is something uninspired like "A dark retelling of Alice in Wonderland" (this became an in-joke with my comics and games friends, that every useless ideas guy you meet wants to pitch a dark retelling of Alice in Wonderland), or just some generic Isekai story about a protagonist who totally isn't a self-insert but happens to be just like them... And then they come marching onto the forums like "Yeah, I need like... three line artists, an inker, two colourists, a writer, an assistant writer and an editor to make my amazing new webcomic. I'll pay you when we sell the rights to Netflix. Which I think we can do." They don't know where to find people so ask randomly, they don't know how to organise a webcomic or even what a realistic webcomic team looks like, and you can be assured they wouldn't even know how to pitch to Netflix even if they had a snowball's chance in hell.

And I'm sure those useless people are looking at AI and salivating like "aha! At last! I can make my thing without needing an artist! I just describe my brilliant idea to it and it makes what I say!" Because they miss that what an artist brings to a comic or even to a novel cover isn't just the ability to draw. Adding some art will definitely make a thing better, and if the art has nice rendering, yeah, that is an improvement over some rough doodles for sure.... but it'll never be as good as having somebody make just the right art. When the art style perfectly matches, and the artist is evoking the perfect energy for the story and their composition choices and the expressions they draw aren't just generically pretty pictures, but feel like real illustrations of the characters and scenes, something magical happens. It can only happen if you pick the right artist and trust them to add their voice. That's where you get a combination like Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake; creators who both have a very loud and distinctive voice of their own and together it's like combining John Lennon with Paul McCartney; you get magic.

You can't get magic if you're too scared that the artist's work will speak louder than yours. The timid choice of letting a computer generate you an image of a generically pretty face staring out into space, or somebody just off-centre in a vaguely painterly environment with their back turned can work, but it can never sing. AI can only fill a gap where an artist should be, and those rare effective ideas people know that. Steve Jobs understood fundamentally that he needed people like Steve Wozniak, and that his role was to make all these brilliant people work together and to sell it.

I think a person can be a successful "ideas guy", but they need to be a BOSS. They need to bring overwhelming force of personality and leadership, and the ability to attract talented people to them, and to have the person with just the right writing or artistic voice fill the right roles to get a working product, and then to sell the crap out of it. The good "ideas guy" has the power of charisma, and is a rare being indeed; rarer in my experience than even good artists and writers. AI just isn't a good fit for them because they need to have something unique to sell, and where the style really fits their pitch. Anyone can use AI and get the same sort of quality of result in the same sort of style, and you just end up throwing loads of time and money at it (and time IS money), at which point any person with some smarts will go "I could have just found some little known artist and commissioned them and then bigged up the artist as part of the story that sells the whole package."

[DualDragons]

I'm inclined to agree. To pull from my actual field of experiences, which is mechanical engineering (I know it's not comics/novels or other media with stories but bear with me):

There's no such thing as a pure idea guy in my field from what I have experienced thus far. In a project one of the tasks you have to carry out is come up with ideas, but you also have to discuss them with people you work together with.

You also have to expand upon the idea to realize it, there's no such thing as someone picking it up from you because it could cause miscommunication between the idea creator and the executor. Instead you expand upon it.

In the case of mechanical engineering it means 3D modelling and 2D technical drawings, doing calculations, calling suppliers to check out if they are able to supply the materials you need to realize your product, actually accounting for what materials you need and how to manufacture your product etc.

Of course you don't do it all alone. You work together with people from sales to determine the costs and the people who actually produce and ship your product. But you have to put in the work and communicate with people around you if you want to be on the team contributing.

Someone with just an idea is more of a client from another company who pays your company to execute their idea. That's the comparison I would make with "idea guys". And even then, I still think the client would actually do more work, because they are the ones who receive the product and perhaps have to send out their employees to install it. As well as actual insight and experience to back up their ideas.

TL, DR: I don't think in the real world a "idea guy" is actually a thing. Like nobody in serious practice would just purely spit ideas and get a income for that. And even then they need insight and experience to back up their ideas in my opinion. Which I doubt most AI artist or techbro possesses in the case of comics, drawings, novels or other media

[TroyVSTheWorld]

My older brother has an art degree and he's just an 'idea guy' and honestly I really hate it

[TheLemmaLlama]

This got me thinking -- when exactly does an 'idea guy' cross over from not being just an idea guy? Anyone with an idea must put in some amount of effort to communicate their ideas to others. I mean, writing and drawing are ultimately just high-fidelity, labour-intensive ways of communicating your ideas (putting them in a form comprehensible to other humans)

There's a scale here; from the purest 'spits out ideas, refuses to elaborate, leaves' ideas guy, to a guy who tells an artist what they want but sticks around to clarify their vision whenever there are any questions, to AI prompters*, to someone who storyboards their project and asks other artists to fill in the details, to someone who straight up does everything themselves.

(Heck, I'm making a comic by myself, but really I want an anime so I'm actually an 'ideas guy' who is drawing the comic as a means to communicate my vision to future people who might make the anime happen :P)

I guess for the pure 'spits out ideas, refuses to elaborate, leaves' ideas guy; theoretically there is a use case for them like you said in the OP, but in practice, it doesn't seem like any of them are getting used (I don't consider the 'boss' types others have mentioned pure 'idea guys'; their main value is leadership and coordination, which makes them useful even if someone else were coming up with the ideas (and they could muster the same enthusiasm when working with someone else's ideas)).

I can't say if the lack of real world cases of people finding idea guys useful is because of the reasons you specified in the OP, but it does seem like not many people have use for them, just as an empirical fact

*

who have to communicate very rigourously to get exactly what they want because the AI doesn't have common sense like a human artist; there's no-one on the other end making an effort to meet you in the middle - you have to meet the AI all the way on its side. (Also, let's say we're talking about a hypothetical AI that isn't trained on any copywritten works, so this conversation doesn't get sidetracked )

[NickRowler]

There is a thing in Hollywood where producers will pitch ideas and they will seek out writers/directors to help fully form it. This is quite common practice for IP films, like Barbie or the Disney live action remakes.

For using AI to create “original” stories, I would be concerned it would be used my low budget studios to just pump out films. People already accuse Hallmark films and similar studios for being formulaic, I don’t think we need to make it more so.

The reason why truly original stories don’t pop up as often isn’t about there not being any, it’s more if a marketing thing. Studios and publishers would rather play it safe. Like when all the Twilight and Hunger Games knock offs flooded the market.

[HGohwell]

I think it depends where you cross the line from Ideas Guy to Doing Guy. For instance, if you're a writer collaborating on a comic, you could be called the ideas guy depending on how clear and detailed the scripts given to the artist is. You're giving the artist ideas, they're pulling it all together. There are also just some people who have a lot of imagination and need reining in sometimes. I have this problem with my own work sometimes that I have some really cool ideas and concepts, but pulling them off is trickier, which is fine for me, I'm just me doing it for me and have time, but some people might have people and livelihoods relying on these things, so need someone who can execute their ideas.

Same with a lot of early ideas in any area of development. Someone has to come up with the initial moment of "what if this" and will often be passed off to other people to make work, and depending on the area/expertise they might just be purely ideas or they might just be able to do a bit of the number crunching or whatever the field requires themselves. And I think in big companies this is often a good idea. If everyone is coming up with ideas, that's too many ideas, but if only one person is it's too narrow, so having a little group of ideas guys just letting their imagination run wild and bouncing off each other can work. And also, just sometimes people have different areas they're good in. For instance, anyone who's watched anything like The Apprentice or similar shows, will have seen at least one really good idea that's been completely ruined by not listening to experts or incompetent marketing, and at least one good idea that's been completely overlooked for far worse ideas because no one wants to listen to an ideas guy and wants to copy the market trends. And of course, often these guys have years of experience in their field to have got to their position to start with. Ideas guy is rarely an entry level job, after all.

So there's definitely a space for ideas guys, but usually within big companies, not little individual artists and writers. And idk if anyone's watched this, or has time to play such a long video in the bg, but here is a video essay on this exact kind of business plan but with books and ghost writers for Audible instead, where someone comes up with a prompt, gives it to a ghost writer, gets it recorded and watches the money roll in and why it's not great.

[SleepingPoppy]

I imagine that whatever positions might equate to an "idea guy" require more background and skills to reach than what the people who talk about being an idea guy are imagining. So I voted "true" based on that.

Lots of people have genuinely good ideas that could be turned into amazing movies, tv shows, comics, etc, so I don't think people who aren't artists or writers are wrong for feeling that way or having those desires. But it will always take more work than the idea to make it into something. If someone wants to be a creator (have their ideas created), then they need to pursue the art of creation on some level. Or, you know, do something in the pursuit of acquiring a position that lets them have the power to get their ideas executed.

[NicDemonic]

Aren't consultants a thing or occupation?

[powerplantanimations]

Was going to agree until I realized I know artists who have difficult times coming up with ideas and they outright told me they just want to... draw or animate lmao. (I was shocked to meet like... three).

Wondering if the people who mostly vote for true are artists who're able to come up with ideas.

[Mallory]

I said "true" because to me an "idea guy" is a very specific kind of person who always daydreams about their ideas and is up for doing all the fun/easy parts (we all love just brainstorming new projects where there are no pressures or obvious problems yet), but will not move a finger to address anything difficult or anything that requires commitment. The guy who talks up about how much money this "idea" will make without sitting down and fleshing out the plot (and discovering all the plot holes) or sitting down to draw the characters (and discovering that they have no idea what this character should look like while hating all of their attempts) or even researching the ways this comic could make money (and realizing how much work and grind it's going to be to see a single cent).

To me, someone who is not a writer or an artist but who has a knack for markets and marketing, who can just talk to people and get them to buy in to a project, they're not just idea men, they're producers. Their part (securing funds, assuring success) is just as important as the person(s) making the actual project. And personally, while I haven't jumped on board yet, I have had the opportunity to talk to a few producers in the past and I take them and their ideas 100% more seriously than your average idea man.

[SleepingPoppy]

Do those artist only have trouble coming up with an idea, though, or are they looking for an actual story (like with dialogue and a plot)? I feel like those are different.

[powerplantanimations]

Ideas believe it or not. One of them I thought I was writing scripts, but I was just giving him sentences lol. He made a server where people can throw him ideas. He's pretty cool.

[darthmongoose]

Asking for ideas online for what to draw is a potential copyright minefield... For an individual illo, maybe it's fine, but hooo boy, if you get the idea for a comic off somebody else... and then it becomes a popular IP...

This is why a lot of publishers don't take unsolicited submissions, or why their submissions have a disclaimer that says something like: "If we happen to publish something with a similar story to what you submitted, you can't sue us for stealing your idea." Which some writers think means they're stealing ideas from the slush pile, but it's nearly always just that with so many people submitting story ideas, and so many stories being made, inevitably somebody's going to submit one that's coincidentally similar to something that actually gets released by that publisher.

Also this is why writers are advised by lawyers to say they don't read fanfiction based on their own series. If you admit to reading people's fanfic, then if somebody wrote a similar plotline to what you actually later write in the canon work, that's again, a potential copyright problem.

Getting somebody else just to come up with an idea, but without them being tied into the creation of the project could be a massive liablity because they could claim a significant portion of ownership of the IP without having really done any of the work. So I'm not sure I can really advise people to seek out an "ideas person" without getting some kind of contract signed regarding their role and ownership of the work!

[Darth_Biomech]

There can be an "ideas guy", but certainly not as shallow as the "type a sentence into a program and give you the result" guy. Coming up with a fairly well-thought-out and fleshed-out idea is not the same as going on "what if a giraffe had a penguin head?" types of ideas.

[Nugtown]

My issue with the "idea guy" is just that anyone can learn how to write and therefore stop being one. Artists can benefit from having a writer help them and it's precisely the same- except now the idea guy actually knows how to apply the ideas. The world needs less creatives and more creators.

[DiegoPalacios]

My boss has launched a pretty successful kids edutainment franchise, without really having any particular background in writing and with what she'd profess as "absolutely no drawing skills". Her approach to making a book is to basically get input, and help from a lot of other talented people; she'll find people with expertise in whatever she's writing about to give advice, she's named as the writer on the front of the book, but she's not scared to find writers to help write harder passages of text, or to take onboard recommendations from the editors, and of course the illustrations and design work are done by other people too.

the power of friendship is too OP XD

[darthmongoose]

As is the power of "paying people money" when just friendship doesn't do the trick. I will do a lot of research, design writing and drawing in return for not needing to worry about rent!

...But to be fair to my boss, she does legitimately amaze me sometimes with the people she's able to get advice from just on a casual basis. She'll just be like "Oh yes, I had a lovely chat with [one of the world's formost experts in a subject] the other day and they said..."

[DiegoPalacios]

As is the power of "paying people money" when just friendship doesn't do the trick.

A true friend doesn't ask a friend to do free professional labor

Your boss does a pretty clever approach. While some projects can be done single-handedly sometimes it's better to hire a person with the complementary skills.

she is not only an "idea gal" she is a team coordinator gal.