Link tags: creativity

How to raise children

It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.

There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.

Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved.

The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles

I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.

And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.

So much truth in one story:

They built a machine to gentrify the English language.

They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.

They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.

Alchemy - Josh Collinsworth blog

I am interested in art—we are interested in art, in any and all of its forms—because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting; the who, the how, and especially the why.

The existence of the work itself is only part of the point, and materializing an image out of thin air misses the point of art, in very much the same way that putting a football into a Waymo to drive it up and down the street for a few hours would be entirely missing the point of sports.

Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine

The transcript of a very thoughtful talk by Frank.

A cartoonist’s review of AI art - The Oatmeal

Stick with this. It’s worth it.

Addicted to Every Possibility by Nathan Beck

Find freedom not in infinite choice, but in working a single seam until you strike gold: conducting dozens, even hundreds, of iterations within a tight parameter space—not in search of more, but in search of better.

Large Language Muddle • Jason Santa Maria

It feels like someone just harvested lumber from a forest I helped grow, and now wants to sell me the furniture they made with it.

Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used | Frank Elavsky

Must be something in the air.

The luxury of saying no.

If I’m understanding Greg correctly here, he’s saying it’s okay for people to use large language models …because they’re being forced to?

Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking ‹ Literary Hub

When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.

Make stuff, on your own, first | Sean Voisen

AI can be incredibly useful when deployed skillfully in creative endeavors—as an ideation partner, as a scaffolding tool, by eliminating tedious tasks, etc.—but anyone making anything truly good with it is probably somebody who could already make something good first without it.

The Imperfectionist: Seventy per cent

If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it.

Works for me!

You’re also expanding your ability to act in the presence of feelings of displeasure, worry and uncertainty, so that you can take more actions, and more ambitious actions, later on.

Crucially, you’ll also be creating a body of evidence to prove to yourself that when you move forward at 70%, the sky stubbornly fails to fall in. People don’t heap scorn on you or punish you.

Creativity cannot be computed

The slides from Hidde’s presentation at Beyond Tellerrand.

A short note on AI – Me, Robin

I hope to make something that could only exist because I made it. Something that is the one thing that it is. Not an average sentence. Not a visual approximation of other people’s work. Not a stolen concept that boils lakes and uses more electricity than anything in my household.

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art | The New Yorker

Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Another great piece by Ted Chiang!

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception.

This bit reminded me of Simon’s rule:

Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Simon also makes an appearance here:

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

I could quote the whole thing, but I’ll stop with this one:

The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

On being human and “creative”

Now we have this collision of those who, with the specific intent of creative expression, make things that are wholly the product of their unique experience and skills and offer them in the marketplace. Then there are those who use machines to produce derivatives of other’s creative work to offer as products in the marketplace. Both are seeking an audience and financial benefit for their offering.

Those who wholly manufacture creative works are asking the same value be put on their imitation of creative expression as the value inherent with sentient creation. They are saying they deserve the same recognition—be that in respect, attention, acknowledgement or compensation—that works created by a person might receive. But they haven’t earned it.

Using generative AI is to ask What If but then hand off not only the responsibility and effort of answering the question but also accountability for the answer. When the machine creates something pleasing or marketable, it’s “look at what I did”. When the machine creates something terrible or wrong, it’s “not my fault, the machine did it”. The claim of ownership is conditional and only maintained if the output can generate value.

There’s so much to love here, like this:

My art is the story of how I have spent the time in my life.

And this:

The value of an idea comes from the execution of the idea.

The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think - NOEMA

Once you have reduced the concept of human intelligence to what the markets will pay for, then suddenly, all it takes to build an intelligent machine — even a superhuman one — is to make something that generates economically valuable outputs at a rate and average quality that exceeds your own economic output. Anything else is irrelevant.

By describing as superhuman a thing that is entirely insensible and unthinking, an object without desire or hope but relentlessly productive and adaptable to its assigned economically valuable tasks, we implicitly erase or devalue the concept of a “human” and all that a human can do and strive to become. Of course, attempts to erase and devalue the most humane parts of our existence are nothing new; AI is just a new excuse to do it.

Robin Rendle — The Other Side

Robin describes his experience of using a design system, having previously been one of the people making and enforcing a design system:

However it’s only now as a product designer that I realize just how much I want the design system to carefully guide me instead of brute-forcing its decisions onto my work. I want to fall into the loving embrace of the system because I don’t wanna have to think about hex values or button sizes or box shadows. I don’t want to rethink padding and margins or rethink the grid each time I design a page.

But by golly if a design system says “no” to me then I will do my very best to blow it up.

“‘AI’ is pretty much just shorthand for mediocre” — Piper Haywood

Continuous partial ick …or perhaps continuous partial cringe.

Anyways, maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where AI has that human “spark”, who knows. Maybe it’ll happen next month and I’ll eat my words. Until then, as most of the content we experience online becomes more grey and sludgy, the personal will become far more valuable.

Can Apple Win Back Music | Vulf Opinion | Brad Frost

There’s no AI substitute for a human-produced drawing of someone on the subway, even if a similar-or-even-better result could be produced in seconds by AI. The artifact is often less important than the process — the human process — that made it. That’s why I suspect videos of creative processes are so attractive; we are captivated by seeing humans doing human things.