Link tags: creativity

On being human and “creative”

Now we have this collision of those who, with the specific intent of creative expression, make things that are wholly the product of their unique experience and skills and offer them in the marketplace. Then there are those who use machines to produce derivatives of other’s creative work to offer as products in the marketplace. Both are seeking an audience and financial benefit for their offering.

Those who wholly manufacture creative works are asking the same value be put on their imitation of creative expression as the value inherent with sentient creation. They are saying they deserve the same recognition—be that in respect, attention, acknowledgement or compensation—that works created by a person might receive. But they haven’t earned it.

Using generative AI is to ask What If but then hand off not only the responsibility and effort of answering the question but also accountability for the answer. When the machine creates something pleasing or marketable, it’s “look at what I did”. When the machine creates something terrible or wrong, it’s “not my fault, the machine did it”. The claim of ownership is conditional and only maintained if the output can generate value.

There’s so much to love here, like this:

My art is the story of how I have spent the time in my life.

And this:

The value of an idea comes from the execution of the idea.

The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think - NOEMA

Once you have reduced the concept of human intelligence to what the markets will pay for, then suddenly, all it takes to build an intelligent machine — even a superhuman one — is to make something that generates economically valuable outputs at a rate and average quality that exceeds your own economic output. Anything else is irrelevant.

By describing as superhuman a thing that is entirely insensible and unthinking, an object without desire or hope but relentlessly productive and adaptable to its assigned economically valuable tasks, we implicitly erase or devalue the concept of a “human” and all that a human can do and strive to become. Of course, attempts to erase and devalue the most humane parts of our existence are nothing new; AI is just a new excuse to do it.

Robin Rendle — The Other Side

Robin describes his experience of using a design system, having previously been one of the people making and enforcing a design system:

However it’s only now as a product designer that I realize just how much I want the design system to carefully guide me instead of brute-forcing its decisions onto my work. I want to fall into the loving embrace of the system because I don’t wanna have to think about hex values or button sizes or box shadows. I don’t want to rethink padding and margins or rethink the grid each time I design a page.

But by golly if a design system says “no” to me then I will do my very best to blow it up.

“‘AI’ is pretty much just shorthand for mediocre” — Piper Haywood

Continuous partial ick …or perhaps continuous partial cringe.

Anyways, maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where AI has that human “spark”, who knows. Maybe it’ll happen next month and I’ll eat my words. Until then, as most of the content we experience online becomes more grey and sludgy, the personal will become far more valuable.

Can Apple Win Back Music | Vulf Opinion | Brad Frost

There’s no AI substitute for a human-produced drawing of someone on the subway, even if a similar-or-even-better result could be produced in seconds by AI. The artifact is often less important than the process — the human process — that made it. That’s why I suspect videos of creative processes are so attractive; we are captivated by seeing humans doing human things.

Clippy returned (as an unnecessary “AI”) | hidde.blog

Personally, I want software to push me not towards reusing what exists, but away from that (and that’s harder). Whether I’m producing a plan or hefty biography, push me towards thinking critically about the work, rather than offering a quick way out.

An editor’s guide to giving feedback – Start here

I was content-buddying with one of my colleagues yesterday so Bobbie’s experience resonates.

Did technology kill the craftsman? - The Progress Network

There is something divine about creating. From building software to writing a book to completing a self-portrait, every act of creation is a miniature Genesis.

Speaking of doing things the long hard stupid way:

If you want to leave a fingerprint of talent on the world that lasts, get your hands dirty and practice your skill, because work that is beautiful and timeless demands dedication.

“Artificial Intelligence & Humanity,” an article by Dan Mall

AI is great anything quantity-related and bad and anything quality-related.

Sensible thinking from Dan here, that mirrors what we’re thinking at Clearleft.

In other words, it leans heavily on averages; the closer the training data matches an average, the higher degree of confidence that the result is more “correct,” or at least desirable.

The problem is that this is the polar opposite of what we consider creativity to be. Creativity isn’t about averages. It’s about the outliers, sometimes the one thing that’s different than all the rest.

404 Page Not Found | Kate Wagner

Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.

On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking ‹ Literary Hub

An excerpt from First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy DeSilva.

Our web design tools are holding us back ⚒ Nerd

A good ol’ rant by Vasilis on our design tools for the web.

html energy

Can you feel the energy?

Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” – The Marginalian

An ode to an ode. Both of them beautiful.

Notes, links, etc | 28 March - 2 April weeknotes

There’s a difference between creativity and production. I knit things but it’s not a creative process for me, it’s a physical one. I’m not interested in doing ‘something new’ with knitting (I don’t even call myself a ‘knitter’ to be honest. I don’t really think I’ve earned it). I haven’t learned the methods of construction. I’ve never tried to make something new out of the stitches I’ve learned. It’s not why I knit. I knit to relax. There’s joy in following a pattern and knowing that a more accomplished, knowledgeable person has done the hard creative work for me, and if I just do what they say, thing’s will probably work out fine. And I love the things I make. I put care into the production process - I take care to get the stitches neat, if I can. But when people look at the things I make and say “you’re so creative” - it’s just not true. In that context I can only ever say “no, I followed a pattern - it’s a good pattern. Do you want the link?”

morals in the machine | The Roof is on Phire

We are so excited by the idea of machines that can write, and create art, and compose music, with seemingly little regard for how many wells of creativity sit untapped because many of us spend the best hours of our days toiling away, and even more can barely fulfill basic needs for food, shelter, and water. I can’t help but wonder how rich our lives could be if we focused a little more on creating conditions that enable all humans to exercise their creativity as much as we would like robots to be able to.

mmm.page

This is a fun drag’n’drop way to make websites. And I like the philosophy:

Websites shouldn’t all look the same. We prefer campy, kitschy, messy, imperfect.

Simon Collison | This used to be our playground

Tending this website keeps me sane. I think of it as a digital garden, a kind of sanctuary. … And if my site is a kind of garden, then I see myself as both gardener and architect, in so much as I make plans and prepare the ground, then sow things that grow in all directions. Some things die, but others thrive, and that’s how my garden grows. And I tend it for me; visitors are a bonus.

A thoughtful and impassioned plea from Colly for more personal publishing:

I know that social media deprived the personal site of oxygen, but you are not your Twitter profile, nor are you your LinkedIn profile. You are not your Medium page. You are not your tiny presence on the company’s About page. If you are, then you look just like everyone else, and that’s not you at all. Right?

My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.

Painting With the Web · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.