A Note About A.I.!

I get into conversations about A.I. almost daily. In the last few years it has gone from a curiosity to a nuisance as I used it for small tasks then experimenting with bigger, more complicated things. I started asking it for spell checks and as a dictionary and thesaurus as I wrote pretty much everything. For the agency, I have used it to translate emails from other languages and also summarize emails that were long winded. As a creator, I was curious if it could organize story elements and then tried to see what it could do with ideas. At some point, I asked it to GIVE me story ideas, which I’ll never do again. I even fooled around with asking it to draw a few things in my style, just to see what it could do.

The results were mixed. It did ok, but not great.

It does everything “ok” and at the same time is not good at much when it comes to creative work, especially when it comes to merging words with pictures and telling stories from the heart.

What I found through my experiments is when I ask A.I. creative questions, it simply forms more questions. It gives me info that I wasn’t thinking about, but also gives me so much that I don’t need. It makes it “easier” to do certain things, but makes those things exponentially harder and leaves me more confused than I was before I started. In the end, A.I.’s answers have no soul. It doesn’t truly know how to feel about things.

Creativity, for me, is about original and critical thinking. If I can’t think and rethink about an idea and connect it with my life’s experiences and maybe lose sleep searching for an answer—if I can’t FEEL something for it, how important is it? If my “thinking” muscle starts to atrophy, what am I left with?

My commitment moving forward is to avoid A.I. as much as possible. I am not scared of it. It has some great uses and will continue to get better and more refined—and it is not going away. Hopefully it will not lead to the downfall of civilization as many believe, but it has certainly already lead to some nefarious uses. My wish is that it can be harnessed to bring great good, but for me as a creator, it does not bring great good. I’m underwhelmed by it.

One day I may face the hard truth as A.I. takes over my job, but for the foreseeable future, I am a creator . . . so I am going to create. I’ll do it by not looking back, nor too far ahead. I’ll continue to do it the hard way, like I always have, with critical thinking, lots of sweat and brain pain, and most likely some lost sleep.

In the end, it’s the only way I know to make anything that’s worth engaging with and the only way to grow and learn.

Bring it on!