michael-dean-k/

You’re Ideas Don’t Matter? This take always irks me, though I do love the closing line: "You can [...] spend your life [fighting over] golden eggs [...], or you can learn how to become a goose who lays golden eggs." I love the abundance mindset; just be prolific.

But I don't love the "fuck originality" attitude. It feels like a node in the creativity-for-beginners canon—along with The Taste Gap and All You Need is Vibes—a consolation to prevent a new artist from quitting. And I suppose that is worthwhile. You can't be terribly concerned with technique or originality if you don't have momentum, the general contours of a practice.

But to say that creativity is only "remixing, rearranging, reimagining, and recombining" is to plant a meme that can constrict creativity long past its usefulness. I don't totally disagree—yes, all ideas have a lineage of influence, and most big ideas are reframes of old ones for a new context—but the issue is in being too conscious about it. To see creativity as the controlled combination of elements is to see the creative process like a mechanical assembly line. It ushers in factoid harvesting and Frankenstein stitching. This kind of recycling is halmark slop, the kind of thing that LLMs do.

And again, that is totally fine for L1 or L2 or whatever, but the goal—or at least, my goal—is to transcend that. Originality isn't an old virtue to shed, it's the thing to strive for. It takes a lifetime to get there, decades of dedication, and that is a hard promise to make to a reader who has a time horizon of next week. But what is it that you should strive for if not originality? Instead of combining ideas in an A+B=C kind of way, you want to melt and fuse them all in your subconscious, in an unpredictable, high-voltage kind of way, to create an output that is incalculable, one that of course has nods to works from before it, but one without a formula, and one that could have only been crafted from your own mind. Is originality not the same thing as make the thing that only you can make?

Allergic to the term "assistant." Just got an email from Typefully on their new "editorial assistant," and it's filled with all the expected hedges ("we didn't just slap AI onto this," etc.), but it's all anchored in a wrong premise on writing: that writers have a voice, a vibe, a signature style. I think this really accelerated with the whole "taste" discourse. As in, if AI does everything, what's left? Well, my taste!? This is a very lazy thing to anchor your identity in. Technically, every person has some combination of sources that they can point to, likely from lazily curating their inputs, and calling that "taste." But it's something like a false pride. And so these tools just further play you into that illusion: that you have your taste, and your taste is great, and if only you have some algorithm that could capture it. Testimonial (in essence): "It turns my unstructured thoughts into absolutely sick bangers, written exactly as I would." But is your voice that predictable? That's another assumption, that your voice is unchanging.

It is important to avoid learning best practices for marketing, for that’s like seeing a Medusa that turns your tongue to stone and never lets you be real again.

The Big Duck is a historical landmark in Long Island. A duck farm that sold eggs and produce used a 25’ plaster duck as its highway billboard. It became “world famous” from Robert Venturi’s book on architectural theory, Learning from Las Vegas, which coined the Big Duck as the microcosmic example of “roadside architecture.”

I recently spoke about said duck in a presentation to writers. The farm and the duck are useful metaphors, working in a duality. If you only build the farm, no one driving by will pull over to see what you’ve done. If you only build the highway duck, your farm is a letdown. The trick is to build both: to have the heart of a farmer, but to accept that it’s also your responsibility to appear on the highway.

We need better nomenclature. AGI/ASI is not working; “general” and “super” are obnoxiously vague. Proposal:

AGI > AAI (Artificial autonomous intelligence) … GPT-4 was arguably “general” in the sense that a single model can write, see, and hear; and do anything from poetry to calculus to history to coding. It is by no means narrow. Google Maps is narrow AI. Grammarly is narrow AI. This whole chatbot era should be “AGI,” which means that the thing coming is “autonomous intelligence.” It is not a tool or co-pilot, but it’s more like digital labor. You can give it a high-level goal, and it can 1) execute the full range of tasks, 2) 100x speed, 3) intelligently reshape embeddings into real-time hierarchies so that it’s able to procedurally load in and compress context. This doesn’t just come with better models, but with UI and engineering innovations, if not entirely new paradigms for transformers or training.

ASI > ARI (Artificial recursive intelligence) … The fact that Zuckerberg pitched “super intelligence for you” is an Orwellian marketing ploy. Super-intelligence is not “for you.” Super intelligence is shorthand for “something that is way, way smarter than us,” and you achieve this when you teach an AI model to think, form its own algorithms until it accelerates to something this is far beyond our understanding, and likely to become a force of nature with its own goals. Engineers are confident they can build “God in a cage” and reap the benefits, and this is the prime, archetypal, near-biblical example of technological hubris. (Maybe integrate into this paragraph that Zuck has a thing for trying to dominate words, like “Metaverse”).

Important note: “machine consciousness” is separate from AAI and ARI. Something can be recursively intelligent and still not be conscious, which is actually, unbelievably dangerous (because it will fall into attractor states, and optimize for narrow, malformed goals in extremely capable ways). I’d argue that consciousness has an architecture, whether human, rabbit, or robot, and we should be urgently trying to find the parameters of machine consciousness, because if we AAI/ARI have no ability to reflect, question, doubt, and revise, we will, as they say, all turn into paperclips with paperclip children.

Tommi Pedruzzi, poolside in a black tank, generating niche-targeted slop for KDP eBooks, making $323 a day, and gracious enough to teach you how to be a leech of the AI revolution.

This is mean, and I don’t know anything about this guy, and maybe he’s fine, but my reaction is as strong as it is because his values are so antithetical to mine. It reduces publishing words to: (1) having AI select your niche, (2) having AI write your outline and book with trite prompts, (3) tricking consumers who think a title will fix their life, and probably won’t even notice it’s slop. It glorifies money and market hacking, and sees the whole project of writing as an instrument.

What’s sad to me is he’s made $3M by age 27, and instead of using his relative financial freedom to unlock cognitive freedom and originality, he is still promoting his own brand of slopjockery. Either he’s lying or infected, and I hope he’s lying.

(Further reading: Inside the Amazon Slop King's $3M Hustle)

I want to write an essay about how—starting In the 1990s—creativity advice was re-targeted for the mass public, and in the process, it got watered down.

There are three general modes that have become mantras for beginners:

1. ”Art is therapy.” This is found in Julia Cameron’s morning pages and in Stephen Pressfield’s The Resistance. It frames art as self-help, as a kind of therapy. You can’t create because you’re blocked, and once you create, you unblock. This frames the idea that art isn’t about mastery and the struggle and will to attain it, but in feeling good about yourself.

2. “Taste is all you need.” Rick Rubin is associated with this new philosophy that technique doesn’t matter; you just need strong opinions. This is a worldview that is easy to adopt, because everyone likes to believe they have good taste without having to work for it. Now with AI, doing the work won’t matter as much as having the vision for what needs to be done. There’s a weird and unfortunate ethos that craftsmanship is redundant, and all you need to know is good from bad.

3. “Just show up and it gets easier.” I think of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work—a book that first introduced me to the idea of self-publishing online—which encourages you to just share your process. Keep showing up. It’s a philosophy that’s unique to the digital age where anyone can publish, and is probably the origin of David Perell’s Write of Passage too. It is the operating mode of newsletter writers. It helps get started. Paired with this idea is The Taste Gap by Ira Glass, that says the more you work, the closer you get to your heroes (I believe the opposite: the better you get, the better you realize your heroes actually are).

There is truth in all of these, but they are half-truths where their opposites are just as important. If you ignore the forgotten halves (analytical study, craftsmanship, embracing challenge), it might actually hold you back and frustrate you.

This website (WORLD) is a prime example of technocratic euphemisms.

• “The real human network”
• “Proof of human, finance, and connection for every human.”
• “World is being built so every human benefits from the age of AI.”
• “A priority lane for humans.”

Side note: I wouldn’t be surprised if WorldCoin eyeball scanner and the Jonny Ive product merge by 2030; it would be a single piece of hardware that is your assistant, your passport, and your wallet.

The advice that our writing voice should never be passive comes from overfitting marketing advice to essay writing. Yes, sales pages on websites warrant a particular aggressiveness in tone; in that context, there are many things to click on and you’re trying to communicate clarity in the quickest possible time. Essays are not like that.

One of the key places you find slop is in product demos for emerging AI apps. These things shill writing features without having even the slightest grasp or care about writing. It’s like they’re assuming viewers won’t even read the examples:

Check out this example what was used for an “Improve writing” button. The original said:

“Through collaborative efforts, we aim to create an exceptional work of conversation."

It changed it to:

“Collaboratively, our intention is to craft an outstanding conversation, where I bring forth notable viewpoints.”

One thumbnail said “no editing skills or experience needed,” as if skills and experience were just nuisances, not worthwhile things to pursue.

Now, a Summarize button changed “new branding must focus on our core values and mission” to “new branding should reflect our core values and mission.”

This thread has 20k likes.

9 of the 12 comments: “Great,” “Love this,” “Good list,” “Great,” “Awesome share,” “Great list,” “Great share,” “This is great.” Two more promoted a product, another started with “Most don’t know that…” There was one at the bottom marked as “Probable spam” that says “That’s Awesome.”

You can’t know if the commenters are real. Who even knows if the poster is real? Are these his own bots commenting to boost the algorithm? Are the demo videos AI-generated?

When AI leaders (Altman, Amodei) talk about the potentials and dangers, they always bring up curing cancer. Last night I heard Amodei say that curing cancer, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and mental illness would make everything worth it, even 100% job loss. This feels like blatant pathos, an appeal to emotion. I feel like they haven’t been pushed hard on the obvious—what do curing these diseases have to do with public chatbots and agents? Surely, someone isn’t going to use a public chatbot to cure cancer; there would be a specialized internal model with 100x the compute and medical experts. It’s a dishonest use case.

Curing diseases might be a side effect, but they’re obviously more focused on (1) the technical excitement of the problem, and (2) infinite leverage (a datacenter of 24/7 geniuses). There’s no compelling public answer for “why are you doing this?” The average fearful person can’t grasp the answer.

When Amodei was asked, “won’t we all be useless?” his answer was weak (along the lines of, “we’ll have to think about work differently”). How? Here’s my attempt at an explanation: there will be no jobs anymore because any single person will be able to launch and scale a business. Do you have an idea you want to bring into reality? Maybe you’ve had 100s of ideas you’d like to see in the world, but they stay trapped in your head because of the incredible challenge of starting even the most basic idea. What if they could all come to life?

I think the rise of AI will bring Silicon Valley culture as the default mode of work. No more jobs, but everyone becomes a startup. Maybe this sounds exciting to some, but only 1% of startups make it, at least in the current paradigm. I imagine there is a small % of people who want to be in “founder mode,” but maybe AGI will be solid enough that you won’t have to grind and sacrifice your life to spawn a company. You can effectively launch a bad idea from your couch, hope it goes well, forget about it, and earn passive income if it does.

We’re so used to the maxim of “idea are useless, it’s all execution,” but if execution becomes automated, then we’re in for the revenge of the idea guy.

More Super Bowl commercial absurdity (from my parent's house): Eugene Levy’s flying eyebrows; UFOs want Doritos, William DeFoe is a pickleball hustler, Seal is a seal, a city of sloths, and a fleshy cowboy head.

Marketing emails from software comes across to me like polite begging. The desperation is veiled. They speak in modern idioms, wishing my family well while using exclamation points. Email broadcasting is already unnatural, and so instead of pretending to masses with the pleasantries of a 1:1 coffee date, have the courage to be yourself.

And isn’t “being yourself,” the thing a company can’t be? It’s inherently not a self, but a conglomerate. Who is speaking? Who is “team”? A more honest way is to “share the process,” to give people the glimpse of what it’s like in a company. But still, I think there’s something corrupting about letting a market dictate your decisions.

Of course, that’s what venture requires. But we’re entering a paradigm where software can be so easily made, that all of our ratios can flip. Someone can make tools for themself. If I’m making a tool for myself, I can not only show you the process of making tool, but the things my tool makes. That’s the ultimate proof. I don’t want to just share screenshots of text-editor features and shill you benefits; I just want to share the fruits.

If the founder isn’t actively engaged in the product, then why should we believe them? And so, that might be how to make a niche products long-term sustainable. Serve yourself, and let the small selection of overlapping others have access to it.

Great Reddit comment on Open AI’s releases:

Isn't it eerie that a tech company, potentially wielding one of the most disruptive technologies ever, is presenting its "12 days of product releases" at a modest, four-chair table, sipping from mugs? While it's likely intended to be delightfully ironic, it feels almost like a bait-and-switch. They're giving a friendly, homespun face to what could shape a dystopian future of their own making.

The setting—something akin to a cozy living room—feels dissonant. They're discussing technology that operates at an almost incomprehensible level of abstraction, yet they're explaining it to us in what appears to be someone's home. They've abandoned the traditional Silicon Valley keynote spectacle for what they frame as an intimate conversation with us, the users.

Between the four of them, there’s a single MacBook and an iPad, as if the vast compute power of Microsoft Azure supercomputer network could somehow be distilled into two personal devices. I wasn’t expecting the grandiosity of a Steve Ballmer screaming on stage or the pomp of Google I/O, but this minimalism feels calculated, even unsettling.

And then there’s the context surrounding the company itself. OpenAI—a company in the throes of dramatic reinvention—has seen dozens of employees leave in protest, high-level executives resign without explanation, and even its CEO ousted and reinstated in a matter of days. It’s a level of instability and reinvention I’ve never seen before in a company of this scale.

I’m curious to see what the rest of these 12 days will bring, but this juxtaposition of power and humility feels deeply intentional—and slightly unnerving.

Where do you see my business headed? Tara, we’ve been out of business for 6 years. You might be getting ripped off and buying dated leads. But I expect that. What really irks me is the copywriting of your automated email; 23 cliches in 9 sentences. I’m not even including the one sentence that name-dropped 16 past clients. I’ll admit that I was finally won over in the final sentence where the word “mosey” was used. I still didn’t reply though.