Creativity and AI

I feel a sense of existential dread. Not the old dread -- although that never went away -- a new one.

Many years ago, skilled tradespeople worked hard to build great things like chairs and bookshelves and bed frames and sinks. Human beings would devote years and years to perfecting their craft and they became profoundly good at what they did. They mastered woodworking and masonry; they worked with iron and steel and copper and stone.

Have you ever watched a skilled tradesperson ply their skills? Have you watched them scrape a piece of wood or blow a piece of glass without machinery or computers or guides? Have you watched them create something that can only be described as art using only a few hand tools?

I have a dresser that's made out of oak. Only oak. It has no nails. There are no screws. The entire piece is made of wood. The joints of the drawers are dovetailed perfectly. The dowels that secure the top in place are immaculate. It was my grandmother's for many decades. The piece is well over 100 years old. The only imperfections on it are where I did a poor job refinishing it twenty-something years ago.

The people who made that dresser excelled at their craft. Given the condition of the dresser, it has at least a couple hundred more years left in it.

Something happened along the way. What was once the sole purview of skilled tradespeople became subject to mass production. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing. However, instead of one or two people knowing all there was to know about making a dresser, there became a bunch of machines that would cut and trim and glue and nail things together. Those skilled tradespeople needed to know how to operate a machine, not how to build the whole thing from scratch.

It's understandable. I don't begrudge the growth.

I also understand that not everyone has the privilege of owning a dresser built before there were such things as World Wars. I understand that sometimes, you need a dresser right now and you don't have the resources to purchase something that took person-weeks of effort to build. I understand that sometimes you can't use solid oak; that the budget allows for fabricated materials made of glue and sawdust. I don't judge those situations at all.

I was having a conversation with someone earlier about creativity in the realm of artificial intelligence. They were someone experienced in visual art. They're an artist. Their skills and experiences and talents are unknowable to me. We spoke about how they've been resistant to adopting AI; they recently took a course that encouraged a survey of generative tooling that could create text and images and videos. I sat virtually alongside them as they went through their course and all I can say is, "wow." There's so much out there. There's so much to know and it keeps changing.

A few months ago, I was bemoaning to some colleagues about how hardware I had purchased a year ago is ready to join the Commodore 64 in the bin of antiquity. Meanwhile, a look at what it would cost to keep that machine current — and remember, it's only a year old — far eclipse the cost of the machine itself.

Things change. Things are changing. Fast.

This isn't the dread I mentioned before. This is an inconvenience. There are probably a bunch of brand new AI-based services available by the time you read this that don't yetvexist as I write this.

I've read more than a few articles and blog posts and opinion pieces that talk about how AI is going to destroy the world. Whole strata of the economy are going to be decimated. I've also read more than a few pieces about how the world will be just fine as the only groups pouring money into AI are companies that stand to benefit from AI.

It seems like AI is everywhere. I saw a commercial earlier today that showed how they're making AI available to help customers sort through their products. I received an email encouraging me to "enjoy new flexible payment options" at their store. (only an AI would think I would enjoy payment options..)

The other day, I wanted to see a differential view of a cluster of services running in my Docker Swarm cluster. Hashicorp's Terraform product has the ability to provide this kind of feedback by running terraform plan to see the difference between what's running and what's proposed by the changes in the Terraform code. I wanted that, but for a Docker Swarm environment. It only took a few prompts — detailed, verbose prompts — and I had a plan script for Swarm.

What surprised me was that it worked. It worked perfectly. It worked perfectly THE FIRST TIME. It's a tool made of 1,300 lines of Python code. It's 43,000 characters long.

While it's true that I spent several minutes writing the prompts, the whole project was done and dusted in much less than an hour. Many years of learning boiled down to seconds.

This is probably how the tradespeople felt when a production line was able to put together a dresser in hours instead of weeks.

The fact that it was able to write so much code so quickly and have it all work perfectly the first time was nothing short of intimidating. How do I compete with that? Not just in terms of speed, but accuracy? I don't know about you, gentle reader, but writing that much code without a single mistake, a single typo, or a single logic error is beyond my capacity.

That isn't the nature of the dread I was feeling. I'm used to people being faster or smarter or more experienced than I am. None of that is new in any way.

The dread comes from the eviceration of creative capacity and the human experience.

For as much as AI can do, there is no soul, no pain, no experience, no humility… there is no humanity in an AI. It's like reading a poem about heartbreak by someone who has never been in love. It's like reading a story about the color blue written by someone who has lived in darkness their entire life. It's like a tree trying to explain the thrill of chasing prey across the open ocean.

The dread comes from waking up in a world where creativity can be outsourced to a computer program.

The dread comes from reducing the human experience to numbers and lines of code.

The dread comes from reducing creativity to whatever everyone else has done.

The dread comes from replacing imperfections with statistical probabilities.

The dread comes from seeing curated lives and retouched images on social media and watching AI say, "that's cute.. hold my beer."

I do not mean to imply that AI is bad. It is not.

My fear is simpler than that but harder to name. My fear is that we will begin to confuse assistance with authorship, efficiency with meaning, polish with wisdom. My fear is that we will hand over not only the labor of making, but the formation that comes from making: the patience, the struggle, the failure, the judgment, the quiet discovery of what we think because we had to wrestle something into existence with our own hands.

Tools have always changed us. Machines have always changed the shape of work. That is not new. What matters is whether we still leave room for what is irreducibly human: lived experience, imperfect craft, the long discipline of becoming someone who can make a thing worth making.

When we factor out what it means to feel, to struggle, to live, there is no ghost in the machine, only a soul-shaped emptiness where the maker used to be.