Imperfect

generative ai abundance

Inspired by Matt's re: ai fuels creativity, which responds to ai fuels creativity.

There's so much more to generative AI processes and outputs beyond "when you use a prompt and the AI generates a piece of media". Many workflows involve more complex components and routing that goes above and beyond the typical text-to-image process that gets commonly derided. Even the constraint of prompting hosted services for media involves so much creativity, including but not limited to: your wants, your prompts, your optional iterations, and your choice of service to take care of all that. The naturally inert models that AI systems use will not work without your creative involvement.

Matt explains how generative AI can create an accessible bridge toward discovering or fulfilling taste:

The act of creating has always been accessible to anyone, this is why the gatekeeping argument is on shaky ground at best, I believe what people mean when they say it's more accessible is that they can now create things that look like they want them to look, in short - they're talking about taste.

Perhaps it's better to watch this quote about 'the gap' by Ira Glass.

Behold the full quote, courtesy of Goodreads:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

You can combine Ira's call to persevere toward tasteful work with Matt's call to creating tasteful work through the accessibility of generative AI or other tools altogether. Raise both your floor and your ceiling.

I'm interested in the words 'traditional methods'. What are you classing as 'traditional methods'? There are plenty of digital creators out there not using GenAI worth gifting my attention to.

To Matt's point, "traditional methods" fits "not using GenAI". However, how clean is such a creative's cleanroom? Their tools, practices, and inspirations may very well be influenced or augmented by generative AI processes, outputs, or users in some way. With how prevalent the technology has become, how certain can Matt be that he only gifts attention only to creators not using it in any fashion?

Now, with regards to these quotes:

"Please. You let bread machines knead your dough, but you don’t write think-pieces on how that makes you a loser."

"AI is just the toaster for your thoughts. It doesn’t replace your creativity; it browns it evenly, maybe adds a nice crunch."

"Whether it’s a heating element or a large language model, the point is the same: The bread still gets toasted. The ideas still get served."

It's an interesting take, it seems to be touching more on AI as a whole, but as a question, at what point does the idea (or the outcome) stop being yours? This take is essentially saying you feed us the 'bread', we'll make it better and it's okay because the 'idea' still gets out there.

With how intellectual goods like ideas and outcomes can inhabit many minds at once while "originals" get preserved, are those ideas and outcomes ever strictly yours?

In other words, it's all about convenience. Yes, we do let bread machines knead our dough, yet we find ourselves saying how much better it tastes when we do it ourselves.

How many people find themselves saying how much better it tastes when they let machines knead the dough?

Even then, how inhuman are machines kneading dough or machine-kneaded dough in the first place? Account for how much humanity has worked together to realize either. Entire careers and lives revolve around ever smaller aspects of machinery: brainstorming, prototyping, manufacturing, distribution, usage, maintenance, repair, etc. By how many antecedents any bread machine has - down to the raw materials that comprise it - you will never know a fraction of the people that were involved in making the end product a reality. Yet, it's thanks to their taste, creativity, and artistic expression that a gift like machine-kneaded dough exists today, let alone dough for that matter. It shows how competition is cooperative, riffing on Xavier's On the oversimplification of anti-capitalist critiques (or: what you think you hate isn't capitalism).

I would also like to refer to these quotes from this Ollie Anders article

"... they are getting products without need of their own skill to make it or financially through hiring someone else to, but it ignores the entitlement of choosing to bypass those requirements."

"... But to feel as though you deserve artwork when you cannot make it yourself is a back-handed compliment to those who can. Artists put the time and effort to hone their skills to be able to do things themselves; they earned it. To deny the need to learn to make art but feel entitled to get it anyway devalues creative expression on the whole."

Artists that use generative AI sharpen old and new skills and learn to make art through it like they would with other tools.

There will always be a reason for using GenAI for anyone who wants to find one, but I believe it's harmful, not just for the industry but for the individual partaking in the practice, you're diluting your own voice, opinions and experiences through GenAI.

That's one side of the spectrum. The other side sees how readily generative AI augments their own voice, opinions, and experiences. Yet, there's so much more nuanced positions than those.

It's exciting to see the benefits and costs of "artificial intelligence" evolving in real time. Even with how much of a bubble it may be creating, I'm optimistic that humanity can wield it for fun and profit. Think about the many prior technological developments which we find enriching and indispensable today. How much further can we push the envelope of abundance amidst the reality of scarcity?

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