Honour your creativity

In many ways, I feel fortunate that we built Poolsuite, Vacation® and other projects before AI became as accessible as it is now. That time gave me a runway to hone the skill of being creative. But the other day, I found myself slipping into a terrible new habit, and turning to ChatGPT before I even gave my brain 30 seconds to consider the task at hand.

I see creativity as a muscle that you have to stress to get stronger. The more you use your brain to solve creative problems, the better it gets. And the less you use it, the more that muscle atrophies. And that's a big problem when you start to hand every challenge that comes your way to your little robot friend.

I don’t think it’s possible for us to lose our creativity altogether. Even if we spent decades firing prompts at a machine, it’s human nature to be creative. And you can absolutely use these new tools to extend your creativity in exciting and novel ways. But I do also think it’s plausible that we could miss out on years of expanding our creativity. Without growing that muscle, we’ll return to the same references we had ten, fifteen years ago, or worse - regurgitate the same dog shit ideas that current AI models feed to everyone else. Lately I feel like almost every email, every Instagram caption I read, Twitter thread I stumble upon, has been written by ChatGPT. They all sound the same, there's a certain lack of humanity to it that I can't quite put my finger on... some days I feel like its turning my brain to mush.

For me, creating stuff that feels like you, is a huge indicator of a good life. I refuse to believe we’re put on this planet to make bad art and send AI-generated DMs to our friends, clients and collaborators. And while there’s no way of truly knowing the meaning of life, creative expression would be my best guess.

If, like me, you fear that AI has the potential to become a creative crutch (and you want to avoid that) here are some new rules I’ve set myself that you might find helpful too.

Prompt yourself

Okay, but seriously, when do we ever brief ourselves the way we brief AI? To write down exactly what we want to achieve or create, with as much detail as possible. That should be step 1 of any creative process. And what’s crazy is that our brains already start forming ideas whilst writing that prompt. Sure, write the prompt, but try answering it yourself for a while before smashing that enter key.

Get all your bad ideas out first

In anything I create, I want AI to be a secondary option. And so, I have a new human first rule. Before I turn to AI - if I need to turn to AI - I write a first draft. The intention is to get all the bad ideas out of my brain, with no pressure for it to be polished. Inevitability, this process initiates critical thinking, and new (better) ideas start to form.

Have an eccentric creativity ritual

Maya Angelou left her home at 6am each morning for a hotel room she booked just to write. Yancey Strickler, the god-tier-creative and founder of Kickstarter starts every project with a sixty-foot roll of butcher paper. Lots of successful creative people have specific conditions that prime them to do their best work (I'll drop a very relevant book I'm reading right now further down) so why not you? It’s too easy to turn to AI when sitting in front of a screen with ChatGPT in the next tab. There has to be some form of separation when we create. I’m in the middle of figuring out my creative ritual right now (more on that soon).

Thoughts on Thinking

PALM REPORT

Against "Brain Damage"