Squad up and take my ideas to greater heights

If humans stop needing to imagine outcomes, we may gradually lose our ability to do so.

Technology is slowly chipping away at our generative capacity. And the more we outsource that function to the computer, the more the soul will drain out of our work.

Perfectly reasonable argument.

Let me address that with a short history lesson.

The camera was invented in the mid eighteen hundreds. Prior to image capture technology, artists had to imagine a subject’s likeliness through drawing or painting. Often from memory or a live model. Portraiture was speculative.

Enter the camera. Now artists could really know what someone looked like. Which freed them from the technical burden, so now they could explore abstraction, emotion and surrealism. Art was no longer about capturing reality, but interpreting it.

If there was a satire newspaper back then, here’s what the headline would read.

Artist stunned by new device that eliminates need to guess what people look like. It’s like god just handed me a cheat sheet, the painter said. Cameras are this strange contraption that capture the precise likeness of a person without any guessing whatsoever. I spent twenty year squinting at jawlines, trying to remember what a duke’s earlobe look like. Now this box just, knows? Pretty sure that’s witchcraft.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a hell of an imagination. I put both of my children through college based on my ability to imagine what my subject’s nose probably looked like in the right light. I ain’t no slouch. But wow, this camera thing is a game changer. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy imagining what my patrons might look like if they weren’t dying of syphilis.

It’s just nice to let the machine do some of the heavy lifting for once in my life. That’s not death, that’s freedom. It’s not a eulogy, it’s a graduation. Speculative is for rookies. Now we can move straight into the testing phase. Hallelujah!

The best part about this death of the guess concept is, your process can’t help but adapt.

I found this to be true with songwriting. Once I hired the software as my digital collaborator, I moved the financial and technical gatekeepers from my process. Now each of my songs didn’t have to deserve a full production. Anything was fair game. So I was more willing to take swings, since missing was now costless.

This dramatically increased my creative output. Because the validation looped back into my motivation. Thanks to my latest foray into artificial intelligence production, I’m now writing more songs, better songs, faster than ever before.

I’ve crossed over to the other side, and there’s no going back.

It’s like a time travel movie. The continuum has been disrupted, creating this new temporal event sequence resulting in this alternate reality. Works for me!

It’s funny, cynics love to proclaim how ai will kill, or already has killed, human creativity. But let’s not shit ourselves. People ran out of new ideas years ago.

You want proof? Go to any movie theater. What’s playing on the big screen? Reboots, sequels, franchises, spinoffs, intellectual property prequels and live action remakes. Hollywood outsourced their imagination long before chatgpt was invented.

So let’s not pretend creativity was some sacred flame that’s only now under threat. People will always find an excuse for why making something out of nothing is harder than ever before.

So it’s a choice. Doesn’t matter what people say is dead or not, each of us can choose to be alive with our work.

Look, I love using my imagination more than anything.

But I’m so naïve as to think I can’t squad up and take my ideas to greater heights.