Hi everyone and happy Monday :)
A few weeks ago a friend of mine who is a totally brilliant illustrator (and who will be reading this!) posted a couple of questions on their IG story about the future of creative work when with all these AI advances going on.
I think the summary was: “I just looked into this and holy shit, am I even going to have work in the future?!!!”
I replied with some things but I promised myself I’d put some thoughts down here. Mostly because I think it will be interesting if I place a stake in the ground now and then reflect on what actually ends up happening.
My position can be summarised fairly simply by saying, ‘we feel things, then we make things’.
I feel sad and I write a song. I feel joyful and I paint something incredible.
Do you know what we make when we feel nothing. Nothing.
Let’s not have a conversation here about if computers feel anything or not. Or more importantly, what even is a feeling?
If you listen to the AI hype lords atm, you will quickly be told that there isn’t anything that won’t eventually be replaced by larger and more advanced models.
I have friends who are becoming excellent ‘prompt engineers’, honing their craft to type better instructions into mid-journey to create images. Some of the work is amazing. And I do still think that that work is real work.
But the most important thing in all of this is that at some point, the idea, the need, the want, the feeling to make has to be there. And that isn’t something we think computers have yet (or will ever have).
A side note though: there are some very smart people who think that intelligence is ‘substrate independent’. The ‘substrate’ they are referring to is…your brain. The theory is, your ‘you’, your intelligence could as easily live on a large hard drive as is it can your brain. We just haven’t figure out how to do it yet, but it is possible (link below to that convo).
Does that resonate with you? I struggle with it. I think, rightly or wrongly, that there is something important about our biology and we can’t just recreated it on a stack of servers.
Of course, if I’m wrong about this then I simply give up.
Last week Billie Eilish performed “
What was I made for?” at the Oscars. It’s they song her and her brother wrote for the Barbie film. Watch the performance. It’s stunning. It hauntingly beautiful. It’s what we were made for and it's what she was made for.
When I see things like that, I go, “oh yes, this is what it’s all about. This is what happens when people feels things and make things.”
AI, ML, LLM’s, etc. will and should take a lot of production type work off our hands. And I’m mostly happy about that.
But the work of creating new things that come from a place inside us isn’t going to go anywhere quickly. And I hope as creatives we can feel some sense of calm about that.
I hope that as this new wave of technology engulfs us, more of the work that we were not made to do goes away and we can spend more time doing that things that we are actually made for.
Below I’ll link to a few related things I’ve been reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too.
Nick x