Issue #42: You MUST Embrace the Boring and the Mundane
I wish we could ban the word “productivity” from our vocabulary altogether. It’s a doomsday cult.
Happy February y’all! 💖
I know we're all sick to death of Topics Which Are In The News. I look forward to talking about other stuff that's actually helpful for the creative process. But with the rise of the extreme right's unholy alliance with Big Tech & Big AI, it's important we keep pushing back on crappy narratives about how human creativity actually flourishes and how great art is born.
So without further ado…
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“AI will do all the boring and mundane stuff so you can focus on the most exciting and productive stuff” is a seductive lie.
It’s a lie because that’s not how creativity works.
I do boring and mundane stuff 80% of the time. I do that because, 20% of the time, my brain switches away from the boring and the mundane and temporarily becomes a genius.
Temporarily being the word of the hour, because there is simply no way we can sustain great, innovative insight for long stretches of time on a daily basis. True aha! moments—breakthroughs, epiphanies—are few and fleeting.
Alas, human history is riddled with stories of young whippersnappers who come along all cocky thinking they can skip the boring routines of training and practice, and jump right ahead to the good stuff. Nope.
We look askance upon poorly written movies or TV shows where the protagonist somehow is an incredible fighter, an amazing hacker, and a novel leader…when the explanations of how they acquired any of these traits or skills are inadequate.
Captain America may be super-strong, but even Steve Rogers has to be disciplined, train regularly, and learn how to fight and strategize.
So pardon me if I listen to your AI hype about how we can let the computers “do all the work for us” while we just come up with great ideas all the time (or fix up the wonky slop output so now it’s great), and laugh my ass off. Because that’s not how creativity works.
But don’t take my word for it! Numerous studies are coming online showing how relying on AI for "creative work" is having deleterious effects on cognitive function (this one coming surprisingly from research funded by Microsoft!), raising concerns not only about the quality of human output in these scenarios but the lack of novel solutions overall. AI output tends to converge on similar outcomes, which makes sense because essentially everything you’re seeing is a sort of averaging out of massive Internet datasets.
If you wonder why so much AI “art” looks like AI art, that’s because AI is not incentivized to try something out of left field, nor does it really have the means to do so because—despite the hype—the Artificial Intelligence we have today is not sentient, nor is it even intelligent. It’s more of an “intelligence simulator” which might be a helluva lot of fun in games and flashy tech demos but is rather disastrous when deployed at scale.
Creators, you need to stop taking shortcuts. I wish we could ban the word “productivity” from our vocabulary altogether. It’s a doomsday cult. Great art is not productive, nor does productivity produce great art. Sometimes it’s the exact opposite. In truth, the more time you spend screwing around, experimenting, failing, and frankly doing piss-poor work, the likelihood of you eventually producing something incredible increases. And I don’t care what medium we’re talking about. It’s all the same to me:
- Writing
- Painting
- Coding
- Gardening
- Musicmaking
- Filming
- Acting
- Storytelling
- Designing
- Building
- Organizing (yes, political action can be a form of art, and remember, all art is political)
- Did I mention coding?
Apologies if I feel the need to single out coding, but unfortunately this is ground zero for the “AI attack” which strikes at the heart of creativity. Somehow a surprising number of otherwise smart engineers have come to the unfortunate conclusion that the profession of “programmer” as we’ve come to know it will soon be long gone because AI will code better than humans so we can just enjoy designing experiences and feature-sets and let the AI write all the code.
It is my life’s mission to demolish this anti-craft, anti-humanist, backwards & faulty argument.
But I digress. This isn’t a programming newsletter! (Check out “That HTML Blog” or “Fullstack Ruby” for that!)
There is a rotten nihilism at the heart of many of the pro-AI shysters who claim they understand what drives humanity but then spout the most outrageous anti-human drivel you could come up with. People don’t actually like making music in particular has got to be one of the dumbest lines ever.
Listen, I enjoy everything I do as a creator, whether I’m programming, writing, editing video, recording a podcast, mixing a music track…the list goes on. Are there aspects of those things I don’t like? Certainly! Do certain tasks feel boring or repetitive sometimes? Totally.
Do I sometimes seek out those boring, repetitive moments on purpose because my creative juices just aren’t flowing yet but I need something to do? Absolutely. I am grateful sometimes when I get assigned “boring” work to do on a project. Because maybe I’ve been tired lately, or I’m still a little sick, and I welcome the less exciting flow for a spell.
Friends, let’s get honest about how creative work works. And don’t allow the anti-craft AI hype mess with your understanding of how you work. You know better than these Big Tech asshat CEOs how the roundabout & circuitous nature of making art is mysterious, fragile, and definitely not productive. 🤓
–Jared
💡 Things that make you think: 🤔
Tools tend to exist between us and a goal, and the shape of the tool tells us something about how to proceed, and what outcomes are desirable. Tech enacts and shapes our world, our lives, and our politics.
Guns don’t kill people, guns are designed to help people kill people.
Maybe we should consider the beliefs and assumptions that have been built into a technology before we embrace it?
–Miriam Eric Suzzanne, “Tech continues to be political”