Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
In design, AI inspires me no more than elevator music or a business presentation. However, it often shows me what I do not want. When I ask Chat-GPT how I could better phrase something, I almost always get the most uninteresting, boring, often meaningless answer. As an author that writes to say something meaningful, get upset about this, and in resisting the emptiness of the generated response, I uncover what I previously could not articulate. I do not want to demonize AI, but it works well as a devil’s advocate.
Kafka urges the young man to stay present with his difficult emotions:
Just be quiet and patient. Let evil and unpleasantness pass quietly over you. Do not try to avoid them. On the contrary, observe them carefully. Let active understanding take the place of reflex irritation, and you will grow out of your trouble. Men can achieve greatness only by surmounting their own littleness.
I relate to this energy of audience, I used to get it from teaching, and now in a remote world I feel the deep lack of such energy infusion in my life. The days feel more empty and dull, more of a drag.
The reward of that one hour on stage is the highest potency nutrients that you could possibly imagine when it’s good, so you keep going back out because you want to get that. It’s not about adulation. It’s really not. It’s the exchange between yourself and the audience. So, I don’t know how to manage those things, those needs with the practicalities, the desire not to take more than I give. It’s tricky.
“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
—Terry Pratchett