Nur-Tur­ing mean­ing­ful craft and con­strain­ing irrelevance

Sad Tur­ing reflects upon his own futility.

Let’s do this like it’s 1999.

Chan­nel­ing our inner Prince charis­ma in 3, 2, 1…

We like our TL;DRs in forty-two words.😏

Wel­come to the Desert of the Real

I’ve always fan­cied dra­mat­ic head­lines. This one in par­tic­u­lar cov­ers many vari­ables. It’s pop enough, like many oth­er Matrix lines, and tar­gets our read­ers’ demo­graph­ics. It appeals to sci-fi lovers that could find us like­able, and spices things up with the meta-dra­ma of a pos­si­ble dystopi­an future, plus a pinch of Bau­drillard and Žižek.

Above all, it pleas­es me, the human writ­ing it, and it speaks to my own per­son­al experience.

That drop of self-indul­gence is part of its charm, too. If I could arrange all these thoughts, con­nec­tions, and feel­ings into a Chat­G­PT prompt, per­haps I should be writ­ing the thing myself. So here I am. And here we are.

This is a time of tran­si­tion, no doubt about that. We’re test­ing this extra­or­di­nary toy that might be able to do so many seem­ing­ly amaz­ing things.

Like mag­ic. Only it’s not.

It’s a prob­a­bilis­tic sim­u­la­tion of what you could have done if you had had the time. A yuppie’s wet dream of absolute around-the-clock pro­duc­tiv­i­ty at the high­est peak of hype most of us have ever seen. Like its under­ly­ing, per­va­sive obses­sion with effi­cien­cy for its own sake, the con­ver­sa­tion is point­less. We’ve all seen the band­wag­on posts. ​“Ten ways to use AI to get more leads”, ​“How to write a per­fect song with Gen­er­a­tive AI”, ​“Grow your baby with AI”.

Per­haps not that one. Who knows? Give it some time.

We’ve also been exposed to much click-baity apoc­a­lyp­tic dri­v­el about machines tak­ing our jobs and fake news and extrem­ism tak­ing over the world. And because the over­driv­en hype goes both ways (on pur­pose), we’ve also wit­nessed its coun­ter­part, the utopi­an mes­sian­ic visions of immi­nent com­mu­nion between humans and what was that thing again?

But the truth is the vast major­i­ty of us have no clue what this means for busi­ness or the future. We can­not know every­thing, and shouldn’t expect to. We know what we know and try to know what we don’t know. And we know AI is here, and it won’t go away.

From our hum­ble lit­tle cor­ner of the inter­net, we’d like to steer the con­ver­sa­tion in a direc­tion we believe might actu­al­ly matter.

Let’s talk about the what, why and how of using Gen­er­a­tive AI. We hope you can jump right in. We love human talk.

— San­ti

The What: Wel­come to the machine 🤖
 

Yes, like oth­er new tech­nolo­gies before it, gen­er­a­tive AI may cre­ate new posi­tions and ​“take” some jobs. It will sure­ly change many. Think shoe­mak­ers, watch­mak­ers, the guys who lit lamp­posts before we had electricity.

Grant­ed, it could be argued that every tool or tech­nol­o­gy may be weaponized to exploit and con­trol, or used to bring more free­dom and abun­dance. It’s up to peo­ple, of course.

Take mar­ket­ing in gen­er­al, or copy­writ­ing in par­tic­u­lar. There’s no way you haven’t been hit by the avalanche of extreme­ly sim­i­lar mar­ket­ing arti­cles, blogs and social media posts about all sorts of things, but spe­cial­ly about AI and our craft. Indis­tin­guish­able from one anoth­er, and not real­ly clear whether nat­u­ral­ly or arti­fi­cial­ly pro­duced. (AI detect­ing AIs seem to be par­tic­u­lar­ly use­less at that, and so are the old ways).

Tur­ing watch­ing his test sales drop to zero.

We skim through count­less posts about how copy­writ­ing is no longer a thing with gen­er­a­tive AI. But it’s actu­al­ly the oth­er way round.

We’re wor­ried about being ren­dered obso­lete or irrel­e­vant. A nat­ur­al, absolute­ly human con­cern, and spe­cial­ly now. But the only way to avoid that is, and has always been, to excel at what you do, to run risks, to col­or out­side the lines and see what hap­pens. Work­ing mir­a­cles. AI won’t replace human insights or cre­ativ­i­ty (are there any oth­er kind?), but it will sure­ly replace mediocrity.

We shouldn’t resign our right to feel ful­filled by the prod­uct of our work. Let’s find the line where automa­tion enhances what we do, instead of tak­ing over our talent.

Hon­or is the great­est gift you can make to your­self. There’s hon­or in a job well done. Hon­or your craft, your team, and your customers.

Tool or Machine?

The crafts­man him­self can always, if allowed to, draw the del­i­cate dis­tinc­tion between the machine and the tool. The car­pet loom is a tool, a con­trivance for hold­ing warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen’s fin­gers; but the pow­er loom is a machine, and its sig­nif­i­cance as a destroy­er of cul­ture lies in the fact that it does the essen­tial­ly human part of the work.

Friedrich Schu­mach­er — Small Is Beau­ti­ful, Chap­ter 1

These times are push­ing us to face the age-old chal­lenge of mak­ing our­selves irre­place­able. We do this by know­ing more about our craft, not less, by under­stand­ing the real changes in our work, and by valu­ing tal­ent and expertise.

Our craft is a human thing. What we do is about peo­ple. Our job will always be the human part of the job. We use tools, that we cre­ate, to cre­ate fur­ther, and to make things beau­ti­ful and use­ful. But those things reflect us and how we behave, what we do. And what we do is exper­i­ment, learn, adapt, go back to what oth­ers did before, and draw from expe­ri­ence. Connect.

In your face, Skynet.

Prompt: The Artist For­mer­ly Known as Inspiration💭

Enjoy these assort­ed prac­ti­cal tips, half-baked ideas, open ques­tions and thought-pro­vok­ing pieces about what AI it means for your dig­i­tal craft.

• Gen­er­a­tive AI Far West days won’t last long. Reg­u­la­tions will come and change how it’s used. Don’t go all in yet.
• Don’t for­get this is unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry and, frankly, there are more ques­tions than answers. Experts don’t even know how to eval­u­ate LLMs per­for­mance (Azhar & War­ren: Part 1, Part 2& Part 3).
• Devs love Github Copi­lot. Of course they do. It’s their code that trained it.
• It will take some time to let the new con­cept of what art is and means sink in. If art becomes infi­nite, imme­di­ate and free, is it worth anything?
• Are we the only ones who remem­ber Ultra­Hal and his raunchy inter­ac­tions? That esca­lat­ed quick­ly.

Next stop: Ethics

If we got this far, we might as well take the plunge. In the next chap­ter, we try to make sense of what this big shift means from an eth­i­cal, per­son­al, and proud­ly sub­jec­tive perspective.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

💟, 🍵4️⃣2️⃣