Brian Hewitt
Craft beer podcaster and homebrewer who discovered craft beer in Portland, Oregon, back when it was still called microbrew.
“When you're using AI for artistic purposes, sometimes using it to generate the whole thing is bad. Using it to generate elements of the thing you need, like a gradient for a background, and you stitch together the rest yourself, I don't know if anybody's going to be as angry about that. … I think there's a certain amount of practicality if you use it as a tool versus replacing a person's art.”
Beer Guys Radio Craft Beer Podcast · Food & Beverage · October 2026
Context
The hosts were discussing why AI-made covers and graphics draw so much hostility. Hewitt offers where he would draw the line between AI as a tool and AI as a replacement for an artist.
Transcript
vocal about it. You
…their signs down and writing, you know, stop using AI. That's a great place to use AI. You're not going to hire a graphic artist to make a banner advertising bingo night at the old folks home. You're not going to do that. And so, yeah, it's a hot topic, Brian. And I do not think it will calm down.
Probably not. I think over time people will adjust to it. I think that there will be, I've already heard about, and I'm involved from my work, a lot of discussion about there's already like watermarking of AI. So now there are ways, even if you can't detect it, that AI, the major AI Drama, text and images both. So you can tell if it's AI. They realize that people want to know that. And so this is a thing that I think people will get over. And like, it'll, it'll just be like, it'll be, it'll be, I don't know, a faux pas to use AI in the wrong setting. I'll tell you where a good place I've used AI recently related to the shows, tasting sheets. I had it generate tasting sheets for the 12, the 12 beers of Christmas because, man, putting together, I could have done that work. That work would have taken me a long, long time. And we had great sheets that we used and ultimately just threw away the sheets. All it was is for collecting data. Fantastic, you know. And I think that another thing I've noticed is when you're using AI, if you're using it for artistic purposes, sometimes like using it to generate the whole thing is bad. Using it to generate elements of the thing you need…
here's the rub for people that are 100% against it. And I understand this. I understand where they're coming from. The way that AI learned to do that was by studying the work of artists. So it studied others' work to learn how to do that. And they're like, you know, the more it's used and the more…
such? And I do want to want to point out that the stuff I put out now that, you know, on various social media platforms promoting the show is actually something I put together by hand. It's not AI generated. And believe it or not, my graphic tool of choice is PowerPoint. I'm just putting it out…
When we made beer labels back when we homebrewed a lot, you know, Brian, we're old enough that AI did not exist then. Didn't do that type of thing. So all the labels we made, we had to do it the old way with Photoshop and we had to hand angle things and erase backgrounds and all that. Zoom in like
More from Beer Guys Radio Craft Beer Podcast
