You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.

I wouldn’t want an irregular AI in my bank app, but in a creative workflow, hallucinating feels like the point of it all.

The TV show The Wire had a phrase about how people navigate the risk of failure inside more traditional institutions: “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” In the tech world, the logic reverses. The drawbacks of a collective fallacy are smaller than not participating in the next innovation, so the rule becomes, “You only lose if you don’t play.”

When I first saw this, I thought “Did anyone read this?” That’s always the question when encountering something that you think is god awful. But in the AI era, I found myself asking a follow-up question: “Did anyone write this?”

A good prompt doesn’t need to function like a blueprint. They can also behave like a horoscope or a fortune.

In other words, the push to join the AI rush comes from the sense that it’s the only game in town right now, and everyone else is already playing. The hype gets louder, and the bubble gets bigger.

As the tools evolve, the metaphors we use to understand them must also be updated. Herndon and Dryhurst describe this next phase as the move from sampling to spawning. Sampling was the logic of the 20th century. You took a slice of a record—a James Brown breakbeat, a horn stab from a jazz LP—and folded it into a new track. It was transformative,... See more

Spawning is different. Instead of lifting fragments, you train a model on an artist’s entire body of work and generate new material in their style. Clear lineage, but fuzzy origins. Sampling dealt in citation. Spawning touches the DNA. This distinction matters because spawning raises the stakes in ways that sampling never did. When your work trains... See more

An average email or line of code is fine. Average art isn’t.