Have you considered the possibility that AI sucks?

Perhaps the biggest impact AI has had over the last 6 months is to remind people of a feeling.

There's a huge group of people who haven't done anything creative since they were 16, and who through AI tools have gotten a reminder of what it feels like to create something new.

Sadly, in the last decade I've written one original song and painted three paintings.

In the decade before that, I wrote 50 songs and created maybe 200 images by hand. In the decade before that, it would've been about 250 songs and several thousand images.

The world (especially in adulthood) is too fast-paced, too "productive" (🤮) for most people to find any time to be creative any more. ChatGPT and Midjourney have simply allowed some of us to remember the feeling of producing something where before there was nothing, because you can do it in ten minutes.

Capitalism wants us to be excited about the opportunity. Twitter is filled with people enthusiastic about handing the baton for the creative process to Artificial Intelligence.

I would prefer to be reminded of the joy of holding the creative process for myself. If I can use capitalism to do anything, I'm hoping I can use it to buy the free time to be creative myself.

The sad little robot above took me fifteen seconds to create with Midjourney. I like the image, but I don't feel nourished by the process of creating it. On the other hand, Wonderful Wife Mish set up a painting table in our garage the other day and invited everyone in the house to create something. I took about an hour to paint this crab, and I felt something in my soul shift a little.