Issue #45: Are you the head chef or the dishwasher in the AI kitchen?

We tend to worship inventors and originators, designers who were trailblazing and innovative. And we copy them.

This oxymoron of a craft can drive a person crazy. There’s lots of space between originality and industry, authorship and acknowledgement, riffing and ripping. I wrote this very short book to explore that space.

Some people have been frus... See more

creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations.

Creativity, Tinker likes to say, is a function of the “library in your head.” “When you sit down to create something…what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.” What you pour out is a culmination of everything you’ve filled up on previous to that point.