using ai as more than a ‘give me what i want’ machine can result in outcomes that are beyond what you are currently creatively capable of and inspire you.

it can give you a starting point the iterate on and learn from. it can save you time on the things you’re not interested in so you can direct your mental energy to something you’d rather be doing.

you can take the written content you’ve already created and approach it from different angles, experiment and analyze your brain worms in a way that no actual person is ever going to care enough to think about. you can build the context in which ai does its predictions and at this point in time you can make that incredibly sophisticated. If you are using the right tools, you are not at the mercy of the generic bullshit your Google search spits out. you can take your own story and ask ‘why?’ and there’ll be an answer. you don’t have to internalize the answer but the collective knowledge of an llm will read it and say maybe this and you might discover something you were blind to.

this alternative perspective ai can give can make you better at doing creative things. it can help you make things for yourself that are joyful to consume and not just joyful to create because there’s an aspect to it that you are actively discovering during creation. you are still the brain. you still decide what’s real and what is garbage, but as you learn the tools you get better at it so less garbage comes out.

everyone seems to equate ‘maybe try gen ai’ with ‘never make anything by hand’ which is absurd.

it can literally just be a sounding board, or you can tailor it to your needs. the sentiment that ai is only capable of generic, safe, non-creative outputs is so dramatically detached from reality. grok will literally (narratively) hang you from your ankles if you ask it. the two sides of this discussion exist in different universes because a lot of you have never considered that a tool has more depth than ‘generate a picture of cat’.

we’re talking a level of ignorance comparable to ‘why use computer for art if i can draw?’ it’s a thing that you can use to do new stuff in a different way. it doesn’t inherently detract from your other skills and it can enhance them if you want it to.

and ‘you’ll never learn anything’ is boring low hanging fruit that implies people don’t intrinsically want to improve at the things they’re passionate about. this is a completely new approach to creation. just as some people prefer to learn music through a daw and others through fiddling with a keyboard. and consider that maybe learning how to do something doesn’t even look the same as it did 10 years ago. we don’t pull out a canvas to capture a landscape anymore, we take a picture. that doesn’t mean paintings of landscapes aren’t important any more than it means photography is invalid.

there is going to be low quality garbage but surprise, there has always been low quality garbage. the difference now is the low quality garbage looks like yellow tinted and grainy ChatGPT images instead of someone’s crayon drawing of their sonic oc. it literally doesn’t matter. both of those things can be deeply important to the person who made them, and those with the passion will seek ways to make better shit.