Creativity: AI vs The Real Human People Brain

My (lovely, beautiful, kick-ass, perfect in case she is reading this) wife recently took a new job, which is absolutely fantastic. However, as things seem to go these days, the need for her to start was urgent, and she agreed to start the Tuesday after we returned from visiting family in New York for a week.

This left about 30 seconds to figure out child care. The moments of panic we’ve been taught to feel when change comes sweeping around the corner quickly subsided to a realization that I work for me. And me is a nice boss.

So it is with these life changes that I found myself this morning with a baby in one hand, a bottle in the other, and no available hands to stop YouTube from auto playing the next video.

I had been watching Adam Savage build a paper dispenser, which was a nice chill morning vibe, and was slightly less than thrilled that the Google Gods Above decided the next logical video to watch was a frantically excited dude describing how GROUND BREAKING AI TECHNOLOGY CAN DESIGN WRITE AND BUILD A WHOLE WEBSITE SO FAST ITS CRAZYYYY PLEASE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.

Now, I’m not opposed to AI. All the open.ai projects are absolutely batshit crazy and super fun to play with. Just the other day, I helped my brother use ChatGPT to flesh out the inventory of a wandering desert merchant in a D&D campaign. But. And it’s a big THICC but. I think we have once again found ourselves in the pendulum swing of quality and quantity.

To better explain what the hell I’m talking about, think back to the last album you bought. What format was it? I bet it was vinyl. Before that, I bet it was on iTunes. Before that, I bet it was a CD. Before that, it was a tape. And, forgetting 8-tracks and the like, I bet before CDs, it was vinyl. Sure, there are industry trends, and nostalgia, and blah blah blah. But I would argue the single most important predictor of these changes isn’t the technology itself, but the trajectory of the change.

If you think back to the days of vinyl - the first one, an album coming out was a big deal. Buying a single album was a big deal. Album artwork was a big freaking deal. Music was largely inaccessible, and the inherent value of owning any music collection was massive.

Jump forward to tapes. Music was still super hype. Owning a new tape was full of social swagger. It became more reasonable to buy and own a large number of albums, and importantly, people got access to curating their own collections for the first time. Remember putting two tapes in a boombox to copy songs?

Jump forward to CDs. Music is more accessible than ever. Owning big libraries of CDs becomes pretty normal even for high school kids. The size of the collection starts to become significant. People are throwing away the album art to jam hundreds of CDs into a black trapper-keeper that would live and die on the floor of their Honda Civic. The ability to burn your own CDs is better than ever. If you were at least 10 years old in the early 2000s and don’t still have a mix cd the love of your life colored on with sharpies, you’re lying.

All of a sudden, we get iTunes. And Lime Wire. And Pirate Bay. And iPods. Things change forever. Suddenly the world goes from owning 150 CDs to owning tens of thousands of low-quality, torrented tracks, and having an absolutely massive iTunes library jammed on a billion-gig iPod becomes a  bragging point. Forget that you would never listen to 99% of the tracks, or that they were absolute garbage quality.

As the technology increased, quantity as a metric for the average listener became much more accessible.

And then there was Spotify.

And vinyl. Again.

So what happened?

As we pushed for more and more, we forgot about quality. We said, “Hey it’s okay if this file isn’t great quality if I have everything.” And there is honestly something to be said about that. People like access. Especially unlimited access. It feels strangely equitable, and never feeling left out because you couldn’t get your hands on that new album felt like a salve to some childhood trauma.

We hit a breaking point where the only further move toward quantity was 100%, available everywhere, all the time, for free. And that’s what Spotify did. Even Apple, who absolutely revolutionized the music industry in the early 2000s has since shut down the iPod, iTunes, and everything that was once representative of ultimate access in favor of Apple Music. There is simply nowhere else to go.

Where do we go when there is nowhere to go? Backward. The pendulum swings back toward quality. People adopt vinyl at massive rates. Grandpa’s record collection seems to go from worthless to a family heirloom overnight.

Will we ever forget about Spotify and Apple Music in favor of the quality of vinyl? Probably not. But the journey music production has taken carved an interesting path for what we now face in creativity.

Put simply, it’s become easier to create more. Just as we did with music, we’ve spent the last 40 or so years of technology making it easier and easier to be a creator. Need to spend hours in a dark room exposing photos? How about a trillion megapixels in the pocked of every grandma in America.

Technology has brought a remarkable acceleration in the quantity of creativity out there. Every person now has access to photo, video, audio, and writing tools to make everything they ever wanted in seconds. And they do. There are (according to a quick Google) around 500 hours of new content uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day.

At the same time, as the quantity of content has increased, so has consumption. Where you may have once sat down to watch one episode of The Office on a Thursday night, now you can watch 150 TikToks or scroll through thousands of tweets in the same amount of time.

So back to me, sitting on the couch, being forced to watch a man explain how AI designed a website.

I believe we are hitting the same quality → quantity breaking point as we saw in music a few short years ago. With new tools like ChatGPT and stable diffusion tech, we are getting close to 100% saturation. Creating a piece of content is almost as easy as pulling up a track on Spotify.

Just like in music, I don’t think this is going away. There is massive equity in the unlimited access to make and create, and unlike many of my creative peers, it doesn’t scare me. With every new tool comes new possibilities, and when the bar becomes easier to meet, the bar rises.

However, I think we are about to see the same shift we did in music, from a nearly universal trajectory, where everyone is using the same technology, to a divide between quality and quantity. The accessibility will continue to increase until it is almost 100%. At the same time, the value of good, old-fashioned, human-made creativity will find a new life in contrast.

So pour a glass of bourbon chosen by a master distiller’s 20-year refined palate, put on a 180-gram vinyl record, and write a long-ass blog post. For those of us sick of the quantity, we’ll appreciate the quality of the work.

One paragraph of this blog post was written by ChatGPT. Can you guess which one it is? Let me know if you can spot it!

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