It's been over six years since I have last written here. Why did I stop writing? arriving at an answer would require a few pages of writing in itself, but it would still feel unclear. Unlike the last time my words made it here, now a good portion of creations are outsourced to Alien Intelligences. In one of my first posts so many years back at least 10 years back, I boasted that "now I am writing alone but who knows I might have robots writing for me someday". Little did I know that it was going to be an everyday reality in less than a decade. The information tsunami has got pretty much everyone suffocating. At the time when google+ was at its peak, I remember fighting in comment section with someone over AI doing things is not creativity, I held to the point AI is just rearranging pieces it knows and calls it creativity, but humans fundamentally come up with something different, I kept saying there is a secret sauce to human creativity. I failed the argument to someone across the globe proving to me that humans are doing nothing other than what AI did, they learn and they reproduce. The world is now at a place where the freely and openly accessible AI can create much better content than most people could ever imagine in their lifetimes. There is a part of me still saying, no we are still missing the secret sauce? Can I prove it? No.
Question now is not whether to use AI or not but is there something only humans can still come up with or even is there something humans should keep doing no matter how advanced the AI becomes. In pursuit of it we might stumble on our secret sauce. I want to focus on the second question since the first is too far-fetched for now. There is a theme of creation as not a process of producing an output but a journey or exploration. The creative process as we call it. When you think of creative process as a production line, AI definitely does a much better job at it, meaning we are not a competition and we are jobless considering most content creations (we prompt and curate, but still).
Now, I am not abandoning the previous line of thought there but approaching from a different angle. While in school, I remember teachers saying don't google much, students should use the library to find your answers, what are teachers saying to students now? There is a subtle "cutting noise creates noise" contradiction that happens when technology grows. Let's say you didn't have a lot of technology nor a library to get some information. One practical solution would be for you to ask around and figure out, you will ask and ask, somebody will say somebody else knows this and we would be in a pursuit of answers. Finding answers were a process, a journey. If this was something you could find in a library, you would still need to go through multiple references, maybe visit multiple libraries etc... There was definitely noise that didn't contribute to the final answer. But some of those noise which integrated into background knowledge or experience that builds up intuition of the world. When search engines came, we cut out most of these noise, more efficient. Now with AI, you don't even have to open those top 10 links from Google's 1st page or hit that I am feeling lucky button once you are tired. The path of least resistance to the answer. The process is linear, narrow, sharp, efficient. Great answers, well-articulated, well studied and updated. How is it that we cut almost all of the noise in the journey to answers but submerged the whole world in the noise tsunami? The path of least resistance probably. Creation for sake of output, path to output is the least resistance than the journey taken.
I still believe that creative process in general shouldn't be a production line, it should be a messy journey with a lot of noise. A journey that can throw us off the tangent into something bigger or even meaningful. I am pretty sure as humans there were times when you were in pursuit of something, but on the road, you experienced something that told you, this was all destiny, this experience is what was meant for me with this journey and not the output itself. Things that grew into something bigger something better. A story to tell. Creative process is an exploration in chaos. But in all that chaos there are some guiding principles of ego, identification of self, personal values. A complex mixture of layered identities weighing in every micro-exposure to this reality, a nervous system that can independently signal coherence of self. Probably the secret sauce was never the originality but a system that feels and responds, a system that can work without clear answers or closures, a system optimized not for the answers itself but the journey.