AI's hand in creativity
Thinking about this perspective from Alan Jacobs about AI and people wanting to be recognized:
Millions of people desperately want affirmation. They don’t want to go to the trouble of writing or painting or drawing or making music, but they want people to believe that they have done so. We should be thinking often about the intensity of the need to be recognized, to be thought not basic but special.
I’m conscious of this when using AI to help me with anything creative. AI can be a great sanity check for writing, for example, but because it is trained on all the world’s knowledge, it also tends to water down any uniquely sharp edges in your work.
Sometimes that’s exactly what I want. In my post yesterday about the pope’s encyclical, I ran my first draft through ChatGPT and it had some good suggestions that softened a few phrases that I probably couldn’t stand behind. The final draft was better.
But also, I’m not inspired by writing a bland opinion that everyone has already heard. The best writers, painters, and maybe even coders are doing something that goes slightly against the grain. For blogging, I’m often drawn to writing a contrarian take outside the accepted narrative from social media.
Of course there’s a more profound theme in Alan’s post about our need to be special that goes beyond AI. I just like the irony that we’re unlikely to actually get there if AI has too strong a hand in the creative work.