Alight 018 ✧ When Creation is Endless
Thoughts on navigating the deep new ocean of AI slop
You good? ✌️ How’s it going. Guess who kind of got a little busy and forgot that they have a substack (me). I’m good - thanks to those of you somehow found this little neighbourhood and liked it enough to stick around. Obviously, I can’t promise a consistent schedule. What I can promise is that this is always going to stay mine and I’m not gonna let a robot anywhere near the thing.
If you like it, let me know - it’ll help keep it front of mind when I have something to say that I deem worthwhile enough to sit down and mentally meander within.
The Laundering of Meaning
We’ve invited inhuman ghosts into our day to day that operate on the collective memories and thoughts of millions of beautiful and meaningful lives, which have now been run through the cold wash of progress, mainly for the benefit of just five deeply uncool guys. The people whose work was consumed and melted down didn’t have say in how it would be used, which so far has amounted to some marginal productivity gains at work, with the mild trade off being psychosis.
I work in tech, and I use AI everyday. If that sounds like a confession, I kind of mean it to be - I’m pretty good at using something that I know a lot of creative, smart, funny, bright people really hate. Most weeks, I’m designing more than a few new processes that further push me towards what can essentially be a fully automated day. If that sounds like a scary proposal to you, well… what can I tell you, it’s happening fast. I’ll see you soon at the carpentry night school when we’re replaced.
Having said that, there is one thing that I’m doing a little differently, which I think has come directly from keeping a creative practice over the years. Everything I put out in my day to day life has an intrinsic meaning that is unequivocally set by me. I don’t share things unless I actively put a part of who I am within it’s boundaries. People notice, and it makes a difference.
A piece of work that costs the creator nothing is worth nothing.
What I sometimes interpret as over-confidence in people who are using AI in the worst ways, I now think is potentially a deficit in their current capability to be vulnerable - to admit that they don’t know, and they’re scared. I believe you can draw a pretty straight line from practicing an art form to being comfortable with the unknown. If you’re a photographer, you have a story that involves pointing your camera at somebody you don’t know and figuring it all out despite their eyes connecting with yours, signalling a thousand different possibilities in a microsecond. If you’re a painter, that next stroke on the canvas could send you down an infinite number of new paths. A sculptor, who knows nothing of what’s inside the stone before they start hitting it with their… chipping thing? A hammer? I don’t know from sculpting. Keep at it.
In the same way a software engineer who can’t explain what their code does is dangerous, so is an artist who can’t explain the meaning of their own work - what they were thinking during the process of creation, how it’s connected to their experience, the piece of them that is in the piece.
Who Even Are You
I wrote something for work and sent it out among the company recently that essentially said: “I won’t read what you sent me if I think an AI wrote it”. If we’re discussing something, and I get the sense you’re not on the other end of the line, then who am I talking to? Where is the information going? I know it’s not going into your head, which was my expectation, so just let me know when you’re back.
We owe it to each other to take in the other’s experience to better understand ourselves and our surroundings. This seems to me to be the only truly meaningful purpose of life, and it was seemingly equally on my mind back in May of 2024.
Agents like ChatGPT or Claude are really good at pretending they’re on top of things, which is why they can sometimes feel like magic, and they will generate three pages of confident nonsense to prove to you that they totally, totally understand. I had an experience last month where I was working on a side project that involved re-building a ‘flipbook’ solution, which is open-source code we’ve essentially had for decades online. Explaining a book to the agent initially seemed pretty trivial; two covers, one front one back, bunch of pages in the middle. Difficult to really go wrong here, for a human. The agent said ‘you got it, boss’ and produced consistent failures - pages that bent backwards through the back cover, a front cover that broke free of the spine to shift left, weirdly revealing both the first and second pages in a spread.
We can pretend all we like that these machines can approximate human speech, but they cannot in any meaningful way approximate human experience. You know what a book is, and I know that you know what a book is when I’m telling you about one. This kind of thing is a baseline of understanding that we have taken for granted, but will become increasingly pertinent to connecting in ways that are truly worthwhile.
I fundamentally can’t understand the people who say they are using Chatbots for therapy, or for relationships, or just for friendly banter. How can something that has never felt it’s heart break with failed expectations possibly provide real comfort? I roughly know the counter-argument to this - that it draws on the collective experience of a library of text which mathematically chooses the right sequences of related words that others might’ve used to respond to questions of heartbreak, so it’s efficient aggregation of relevant advice. I can stretch my imagination to understand that might be helpful in a very short window. I can’t rationalise the absolute risk-free scenario of sharing the core of yourself with an entity that risks nothing in return. Love is constant a risk-reward endeavour - to expect one without the other collapses any need for self-reflection, and all of sudden we have a deficit of experiences that could possibly make us feel human.
We’ve got to get outside and risk fucking up, way more often. It’s the only way we can prove to ourselves we’re real. Use all the time you’re saving at an automated work place to go out and take risks telling stories, making art, trying and failing, seeing something you’ve never seen and wondering about it.
Editor’s Note: My friends Ave and Hazen are some of the brightest lights on this earth and they need your help as Hazen enters end-of-life care, if you can provide it: https://www.gofundme.com/f/hazen-ave-ambrose
Here are a couple things I’ve been reading and talking about that helped inform my personal position on this whole subject. Special shout out to my wife who is the ideal ‘sit-at-the-coffee-shop-and-rant-about-AI’ partner.