Hi! Before I get on with my writing today, ICYMI I'm trying to help your inbox by sending you writings you actually want from me. I'm going to start sending topic-based writings in April so before that, please let me know:
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Ok! Now that we're done with this part, let's talk about what I mean by Post-Creative world.
When I was growing up, I remember my parents solving household problems (like cars breaking down, something needing repairs, etc) via the Korean network in the United States.
Sure, some of them did a great job at fixing things but many of them were... Questionable to me. Their quality of work was questionable but more questionable was, 'why are my parents hiring these people?'.
Then I grew up and became an adult, and I found myself having household problems. Then my parents gave me advice on how to solve them, and I realized why they hired the people they hired: they didn't want to get second opinions about something because it was so much work.
So I started acting like them, working with the first person I found. Then I found myself going through what my parents went through: dealing with crappy job results. Over time I learned how to negotiate and discuss things with multiple vendors to find the right vendor for me. I chronicled a lot of this during my plumbing problem and rat problem days.
In the past there were these people and companies that held the professional agency to solve problems. Mechanics would just "make up" problems on the spot to make more money, or contractors would just quote up some bogus work to overcharge the customer. I'm not saying everybody did this, but this is a general consensus we have about professional workers for a reason.
Then came a wonderful new era: an era of user created content. Anybody could talk about anything, and with blog posts and YouTube videos so many people learned life hacks and ways to solve simple home problems. It's truly been great to not have to call handymen for trivial things I can solve on my own.
Soon came an era of having too many YouTube videos. Which one was the right one? Then people started having fatigue over the volume of content out there, and started congregating towards influential creators or influencers. Now they just hold the same power as big companies from before, it's just in a different format.
Now we're in a time where everybody is finding out that huh, turns out the formula for creating content that looks good and "influential" is more or less solved for. I could give an AI agent a video topic, well actually scratch that. I can say recommend an entire video for me to shoot, then it will give me the entire script and editing directions.
I don't do this kind of stuff, but suppose I was interested in generating videos of myself. I give the agent access to my YouTube channel and train my face, and now with the script from above I can create the raw video that just features me speaking.
After that, I could tell the agent to take certain actions in the video during certain time frames. The video transcriber can tell when I'm speaking a certain sentence. I can tell the agent to zoom in on my face (or just have a 130% scaling) for timestamp 00:20 to 00:24. And so on and so forth, I can have an entire YouTube video from scratch that features generated Billy or Gilly.
I have no intention of doing that, but there will be people who take advantage of this capacity. But my point here today is,
this is an old way to operate because you're using new technology to succeed in an older version of success.
You know that famous quote that's supposedly said by Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse". Generating YouTube videos that sound like Mr.Beast + Me is like, trying to beat the fastest horse at the Kentucky Derby with a Ferrari. Sure, you could do that; but it's not the best use of that car.
In that case, what is the modern way of success? What do we aspire for now as a society? Well, I think the next step is closely related to the previous definition of success. It's generation of information.
The previous era focused more on having existing knowledge that wasn't on the internet exist on the internet. Now we're more in the era of having interdisciplinary knowledge that never existed outside of a human's brain exist on the internet.
Generic advice and tips are already known to the internet, and if it's of good quality it's probably been reposted over and over. AI is a combinatory generator of existing knowledge and it yearns (more like, companies yearn) for more human data.
The forward-facing humans are responding by NOT stopping what they're doing, or creating more generic work that's qualitatively on par with what could be generated. They're adapting by creating distinctly human work in a direction never explored before. This is a great example of this phenomenon:
βhttps://www.instagram.com/p/DRvRC-vktYv/β
The slop backlash, anti-slop. Extremely inspiring.
But if we generalize this observation, here's my conclusion. Everything new is a combinatory result of components that existed before. We are rediscovering our human capacities and leading the next step AI should take.
I said earlier that AI is a combinatory generator of existing knowledge. So isn't that what we're doing? Yes, but what AI is doing is more akin to a monkey with a typewriter with infinite time. Could the monkey produce the entire works of Shakespeare? Yes, but it is meaningless to the monkey as it's just another possible output among other infinite possibilities.
We have the power now to drive combinatory result from ourselves AND AI. We're in the post-creative world, and we're in the generative world.
The human generative power can be developed. Just like how AI agents can now generate text, image, video, audio, and other things, you have the generative power to create text, image, video, audio, and other things. You just now happen to have more toolkits to amplify your generation even more.
And it ultimately comes down to, what do you want to see generated in this world? I want to generate a world free from suffering.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
Use my new resources at resources.julylifecoach.comβ
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