It feels mostly awful to go online these days + AI is getting better and scarier.
But I'm optimistic. Everywhere I look I can see people joining a movement protecting and choosing human made art and experiences. Re-emerging weird and authentic.
Or using AI to do personal projects that they always thought/pretended they wanted to do, but lacked the skill and/or money for.
Like nobody’s watching
Change is accelerating. The length of tasks AI can do is doubling every 7 months.
Every new update to an LLM model feels like the equivalent of a tectonic plate beneath the ground shifting suddenly.
By the end of 2030, provided the world is still around, AI will perform jobs that take humans approximately one hundred years to complete, in less than a day.
But if AI is so good, why bother? How can you justify writing, drawing, or taking pictures in the age where AI gets better every week?
Because you should create to improve yourself, the quality of your perspective, and thus your contribution to your loved ones, to your society/culture.
Create like nobody’s watching.
The route as the justification of creativity in the age of AI
I’ve been just re-reading Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks, and found one of the most beautiful justifications of creativity in the age of AI, although published in the year 2000.
When the Chelgrian exile composer Mahrai Ziller asks the Masaq’ Orbital's Mind, about whether it could write a symphony like his, the Mind's avatar answers yes, of course it could — but he should look at himself through the eyes of a mountain climber: after days of effort he reaches the summit and finds people picnicking up there, brought by helicopter, but
“the sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages.”
(p299–300).
So create to work out yourself, to grow, to challenge, to heal.
Or/and to get weird.
Getting weird
Sara Wachter-Boettcher, my favourite future of work author and designer, writes in her recent Active Voice newsletter about giving yourself permission to imagine new, different things. To get weird, to create spaces (...) that aren’t driven purely by a desire to be professionally legible:
"(...) because getting weird—tapping into your curiosity, meeting people outside your bubble, creating internet art, writing stuff that’s not packaged up into a pithy LinkedIn post—will simply make your brain work differently. And you won’t know what’s on the other side of that until you try it."
A book in progress + letters from reality + a library of notes
My personal weird project that I've always wanted to do – but lacked the skill and/or money for – but lost an excuse for not building, because the tools got better & easier to use recently – is this hypertextual object called Mirage Mir, emerging across several speeds and modes (ehm, several spatiotemporal scales and regimes of attention).
- A note in the Library emerging on the order of hours. Or days.
- By contrast, a newsletter emerging on the order of weeks.
- The book emerging on the order of months to years.
Oh! I love this gradation!
But at the same time, I no longer believe in a book, in and of itself. Nor in a newsletter. Not even in a note, but in something larger.
I'm looking forward to find out more myself.
Happy new year 🫶🏻
. . .
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Peter
Peter