Summary
Earlier this yearWillem Van Lanckerargued thatproductive friction—the struggle of learning through failure and critique—is what AI threatens to take away.Jack Chengpicks up that thread and pulls it further: When AI makes surface creativity easy, what becomes valuable isn’t just the struggle, but the specificity of your lived experience. Call it “thisness”—the details only you can bring to your work. As creative fields shift faster than ever, personal experience is your most durable edge.—Kate LeeWas this newsletter forwarded to you?Sign upto get it in your inbox.“The disease you have to fight in any creative field,” says the musicianJack White, is “ease of use.”Though White asserted this in 2008, today’s AI startups and stalwarts touting creative democratization might take heed. His insight is that creativity is fluid—andaligned with difficulty. When technology changes what’s difficult, what’s creative changes too.I first came across the quote as a young advertising copywriter in New York City. Since then, I’ve worked across a number of creative disciplines. I co-founded and led design and front-end development at a product studio whose clients included Napster co-founderSean Parker. I launchedone of the first literary fiction projectson Kickstarter and wrotetwo award-winning children’s novelspublished by Penguin Random House. In 2023, I completed a postgraduate architecture diploma, and last year I builtan iOS notes appusing the first wave of AI coding tools.I’ve seen over the last 17 years what’s difficult, and thus valuable, in these creative fields. As I now watch generative AI infiltrate each of them and smooth away some of those difficulties, I’m also starting to see what might stay difficult and grow more important in the years to come.Creativity is a metagameOne way I think about the moving target of creativity is through the lens of the competitive gaming term “meta,” short for “metagame.” The meta is the current dominant or “best” strategy among a game’s community. It’s the game around the game. As new updates roll out, characters and items are introduced or amended, and new tactics and countertactics are discovered, the meta changes.In chess, the meta long emphasized attacking at all costs—until the late 1800s, when the first official World Chess ChampionWilhelm Steinitzreinvented the game with “positional chess,” which focused instead on collecting small advantages while your opponent attacked without purpose. Positional chess became the new meta, until eventually it gave way to even newer strategies.Each creative field has, at any given time, its own meta. In hindsight, this appears broadly as movements or schools of practice. In Western art, realism gave way to Impressionism, which was succeeded by Post-Impressionism, then Expressionism, and so on. In the moment, though, an individual artist or group of artists might notice that a certain kind of art is becoming overdone, and respond to it by trying to make something new and different.Here’s a writing example. At Every, we use an AI editor as extra eyes on the human-edited articles we publish. One thing this AI editor looks for is “tells” common to AI-generated writing (a poker term, if you needed any more proof of the game). If I write, “AI doesn’t make every hard thing easy; it makes some hard things even harder”—that’s what’s known as a correlative construction. Use them too much, and they grow stale. It doesn’t matter if the author is a chatbot or a human being.Become apaid subscriber to Everyto unlock this piece and learn about:As spinning up products gets easier, the harder question founders will have to ask themselvesThe architect whose alternative framework feels like the future of creativity in an AI worldThe quality Jack tells his MFA students makes writing feel universalSubscribeClick hereto read the full postWant the full text of all articles in RSS?Become a subscriber, orlearn more.Book information
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Business and Economics
