Go out and create something. Put time and effort into it. Sometimes, you may find yourself to be in a rut that is difficult to come out of. But, do create something and put your soul and effort into it.
We are finally in a weird late stage capitialism point wherein we have successfully monetized everything, on a rolling basis. Mediocre products are sold at exorbitant pricing, and even our sanity and emotions are being taken away from us. Social media has monetized being famous, and gives an equal voice to everyone regardless of their qualifications or backgrounds. Your value is only based on ephemeral metrics and numbers, and the joy of creating has become transformed into a dread of meeting deadlines that fulfill sponsorship contracts.
I have felt that the world has become actively hostile to the very idea of spending time and effort into a craft, and our attention spans + emotions have become increasingly points of monetary benefit for tons of companies around. There are a couple of experiences I would like to mention here.
AI Tools for Writing and Art
Now, I'll be real. I will not sit here and pretend that writing an email to defer your presentation from this week to the next is some bastion of human creativity or adds anything much in our lives. In all honesty, most AI writing tools probably help all of us make our work more streamlines and a bit faster.
But I am seeing an increasing sentiment of people trying to replace human creativity, with the argument of how much more difficult the barrier of entry to creativity and expression used to be. Upon further expanding. most arguments delve into some form of aversion to the difficulties of sitting down to think of ideas, or going through multiple periods of writer's block. People fail to realize that the struggle, effort, and ideas put by real people is what makes art touching.
"Oh, AI art is getting there and it's soon going to get more human and emotional.", no it probably is not. There are logical fallacies to this argument. Firstly, AI cannot create anything new on it's own. It is solely trained on whatever texts have already existed, and it cannot just come up with new things on the fly. You need human experiences and input to create something new, out of the box.
Two: you genuinely have the wrong ideas if you believe art should be done for monetization purposes. I agree that getting paid for your craft is every artist's dream, but even above that lies a love for storytelling, documenting, and interacting with people that you have never met through all sorts of mediums.
Digital mediums have definitely democratized art and creation to a huge extent. Even what I am writing right now is much easier thanks to my Mac, BBEdit, Docusaurus, and GitHub Pages. You do not need a whole studio to create music or edit videos anymore, and anyone can blow up on YouTube. But at one point, if you are just telling the computer what to make, and the computer makes it for you: you are not creating art. You just had an idea, and you did not put a single ounce of effort or time into it.
Do you expect people to put in effort to consume media that the producer put zero efforts, emotions, thoughts, or humanity into?
Personally, I use AI tools for my work to an extent. But at most, they make me more efficient writing a quick email or getting code boilerplate. For creative work, the output of AI is so awful. And not in a "this human looks distorted" way. No matter how good stable diffusion gets, it will never be able to replace human touch.
We were supposed to create digital tools to expedite our boring day-to-day jobs, so that we could create more music, literature, paintings, movies, and collectively raise our creative output. You know, the crux of the human experience, experiencing feelings and finding universal connection.
We already have AI that does the former. Let's focus on that. Why are we trying for it to create music or videos? Seriously, if you just had an idea, and you input that on a computer: you are not improving as an artist (let alone be considered one). The journey to art is supposed to have blocks. That is what forces you to think out of the box, and really put who you are in it. Otherwise, it is devoid of expression.
Where did we go wrong?
On Social Media
I am quitting it. It has far outlived it's utility timespan of connecting people together, and for the most part it is not just a circlejerkfest of people trying to personally attack one another and gain the upper hand.
This is not just reflected in politics. I, for a while, stopped writing in here and started treating Threads as my outlet for "writing on the Internet purposes". I mainly focused on my niche for Operating Systems, Programming Languages, and new and emerging technology.
And despite that, the amount of keyboard warriors I had to deal with was absolutely insane. It turns out, people do not care for your opinions all too much. Rather, what is more important is disagreements, even if there is none to begin with. It is important to disagree and try to play "devil's advocate", or one up the person, even if the post being made is something so simple as "I like that the new Mac can charge off a 20W phone charger".
My entire time on Threads, except for the 5 or so people who I genuinely loved interacting with, was mainly filled with people trying to disagree with me on my takes (ok fine) and then personally attacking me for not thinking correctly (not fine). I even did experiments:
- Positive post on Apple: I am an Apple sheep
- Negative post on Apple: I do not know what I am talking about
- Small clarification on kernel dev: I am a novice who knows nothing about kernel dev
- Small question on kernel dev: I am an expert (links post above) so I should already know this
- Shitpost: ok fine this does well regardless
Again, I genuinely loved my time on Threads. But most posts would do average numbers (like a couple thousands), and then any time I had an opinion on anything, it would do millions (with keyboard warriors personally attacking me and my knowledge in the comments section). I essentially had all notifications turned off on Threads.
I met some really cool people on the platform, and had some genuinely insightful conversations. If they're reading this, they know who they are. But for the most of it, the keyboard warriors were insane, and the algorithm would only push posts that had content aligned in a way for said warriors to engage. Some of my Threads have millions of views. They are also the ones where I have engaged the least.
So it sucks, but I am back to writing long form content to save my mental sanity, and just write for the love of writing.