How We Got Here: The Real Reason So Many Creators Worry about ChatGPT and Generative AI
This moment just hits different.
Understand, I don't typically do "moments." I don't love talking about the headlines or the trends or the hot new tech. Friends have joked that I'm too punk rock and need to be more pop to reach a bigger audience. (These are the same friends who tell me I'm too warm and fuzzy sometimes. Little do they know: I'm fuzz rock.)
No, I don't typically talk about the current moment.
But this moment just hits different.
Thanks to generative AI tools like ChatGPT, this moment has brought to a head several things I've staked my career on teaching, spending literal decades cajoling people to do better than the norm. These are things like creating content, building brands, serving audiences, and generally making things that matter to your career, company, and community.
The thing is, I'm not really talking about a hot new trend today. I'm talking about something that's been a problem for awhile. It just feels way more urgent.
So let's talk about The Moment, because for the first time in awhile, it decided to break into MY house.
And I will protect this house
What do I make of ChatGPT? Will it replace us? Enhance us? Is it dishonest to use it to create whole pieces of work? How can we incorporate it into our projects or our marketing? And where will it all go from here?
Great questions which I am absolutely not going to answer. #fuzzrock
Instead, here's what I want to know:
How did we get here?
How did we arrive at a place where so many creators view AI tools like ChatGPT as a killer robot coming to beat down their doors and crush them?
Why do we worry these tools are greater masters of our craft than we are?
I think the explanation is simple.
We're obsessed with only one part of the craft, and it's the exact same part AI is getting alarmingly good at owning.
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The 3 Ps
I think mastery is actually the combination of mastering three distinct things. Let's call them the 3 Ps: posture, process, and practice. Unfortunately, we've overemphasized one of them to our own detriment, and now AI can replicate that part with ease.
But first, let's learn about each of them.
1. Posture
Your posture is how you see yourself and the world.
I didn't include "how you see the work" in that list because the work is a bridge between the self and the world. Or at least, it should be.
When we create content, what we're really trying to do is create connection. To do that, we need the work to convey meaning.
That comes from you and you alone -- or more specifically, how you see. The work then acts as a kind of connective tissue between you and others, your vision and their reality. As Ishiguro said of stories, they're like saying, "Do you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?"
Or, if you're less into literature and more into music, here's how Bowie put it:
"Always remember that the reason you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society."
He's talking about your posture. How you see.
How you see informs a whole slew of things that make you uniquely you: your confidence, your clarity and boldness of purpose, your imagination, intention, memories, personal beliefs, personality quirks, and the internal self-talk running in your mind. Various combinations of these things create your ideas, your personal style, your tone of voice, and more.
All rolled together, this creates a kind of intellectual or creative "fingerprint" unique to each of us.
And so, of course, we want our fingerprints all over the work. Otherwise, it's too sterile. Because we're absent. Enter, similar-sounding pieces spawned by an algorithm.
Your posture is like this big bag of humanity you haul with you when you arrive to the work. Ready to create? Open it up.
What do you see? How do you use it?
You do use it ... don't you?
2. Process
Your process is how you direct the creation of the work.
It's the combination of your techniques, workflows, and tools.
Now, crucial to the italicized sentence above is the part that says "how you direct" the work. Too often, we let the techniques, workflows, and tools we adopt direct us. We're looking for an abstract, absolute answer or some kind of system or technology to save us. We're trying to let ourselves off the hook.
This can be really enticing. It's also taught in school. Find the correct answer, then act. But with creativity, we can act to find better answers. It’s through the practice (we’ll talk about that next) that we should find our process. Not through theory. Because there is no correct way to create.
Unlike your posture (how you see) and your practice (soon, I promise), the process feels so full of stuff others can hand us without us doing much work. Yet it can feel so very productive to learn about things like Pixar's 22 rules for storytelling, Campbell's hero's journey framework, the Pomodoro technique, a list of "viral hooks," or 10 clever ways to use ChatGPT. Simply learning about these things have become a very convenient place to hide from sticking our necks out and shipping creative things.
Because it feels so productive to immerse ourselves in ideas about the process. Meanwhile, what have we produced? Anything?
Anything worth producing?
The thing is, YOU are the master. YOU are the chef. Things like techniques, workflows, and tools are mere ingredients.
In what world does the chef ask the carrot to cook?
But that's what I see happening when people think they can use a tool or follow a checklist or adopt anyone else's process and expect it to produce work worth doing. It's like the ingredients are running the kitchen. It feels like that level of weirdness or madness to me.
Me, I like my process like I like my babies: born after labor.
(If you agree to forget that line, I will.)
I'm very bad at citing books about our work that you should read -- mostly because I've read almost none of them. I'm too busy throwing myself into the work, tinkering, learning, finding little angles and big new avenues ... finding myself ... through the act of creation.
Maybe I do it this way because I'm privileged. (I am.) Maybe because I'm delusional. (I am.) But I always thought, well, I can probably mold my own process and figure out my own approaches if I just ship a ton of work. Maybe that will be better for my process, because it'll be something built by me, for me.
Tony Stark created the Iron Man suit around his person specifically. That made him a super hero. If I want to be a super creator, shouldn't I do the same thing?
If I get stuck, I figured, I can always go out and grab a piece I need. There are infinite parts lying around the internet, mostly for free.
That's how I view all the external ideas about technique and workflow, no matter how legendary (like Campbell) or new (like social media tips). And that's how I view tech, including ChatGPT. (I'm sorry, but the tool just does not solve any problem I have.)
The externalized understanding of “process” feels more incrementally useful than understanding our personal vision and execution. It can be useful, for sure, but those heuristics and tools are best pursued reactively, only after we've gone as far as we can while relying purely our posture and the next part of mastering the craft: our practice.
3. Practice
Your practice is the act of repetition and reinvention over time.
It's how you apply your process -- though, as I suggested, it's also how we might find our process. A better process. One more tailored to each of us, capable of bringing out more resonant, more super work.
Your posture is how you arrive to the practice. Your process is what guides your practice. But then it's time to do the work. Consistently. It's time to practice.
A healthy practice is a combination of what you ship and the cadence of shipping. Publishing once is one rep. Publishing every Friday is a practice. It's a collection of repetition, reflection, and reinvention -- all of which you control. Nobody can tell you NOT to create, and over time, your practice develops your body of work. Your making muscles get stronger.
We each need a practice all our own. You're currently experiencing part of mine. I might write TO you, but I write FOR me.
In building momentum and skills, we create a virtuous cycle. Our practice improves our posture, and our posture improves our practice. How we see can shape the work, just as practicing the work can shape how we see.
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There's No Killer A.I. Robot, Only Human Glitching
The reason so many creators are worried about being replaced is they see so much of their own work in the content produced by A.I. already. And the reason that's the case is they've become too reliant on the most replaceable part of this work. They've over-indexed on learning process. In doing so, they've removed the self too much to produce work that's singular.
When your brain goes "just read a blog post, just find a template, just find an expert" before you do something? That's a sign. You're being pulled towards process at the expense of posture and practice. It's messing with your mastery. It's a robot-voice telling you to find the exact combination of 0s and 1s that will solve your problem. You're seeking an external solution, when really your answers are found within.
There's a word for that.
Intuition.
(Literally, the word comes from the Latin intueri, or "to consider," or the middle English word intuit, or "to contemplate.")
Instead of proudly telling others how many books you've read about storytelling, what if you were too busy ... telling ... stories?
"Got any favorite books on story?"
"Nah. I'm too busy telling my own."
Mastering process is not full mastery of craft. It produces replaceable work. Commodity content. It lacks the parts that require YOU, and therefore, someday, you may not be required.
Most of the process stuff is incrementally useful at best, a distraction at worst. Then, there's all the stuff that is actually the worst.
Information arbitrage. ("This Famous Guy didn't book his first acting gig until age 45. Here are his top-five quotes about persisting.")
Oversimplified nonsense. ("Brands who don't adopt X will be left behind.")
Keyword-stuffed articles. ("Everybody knows the importance of X. Today, we talk about five ways to do X.")
Studies in being perfectly average. ("We studied 653 of the world's top blogs. Here's what we learned.")
Gee, that number is awfully specific. Someone must have told you odd-numbered headlines get more clicks! But do proceed...
"The most-used type of headline was a question."
OoOoh! But what's the character count of those headlines?
And while I have you, how long should an article be? How long should a podcast be? What's the best time to post to TikTok? Twitter? YouTube? How do I turn my big crap into 20 tiny bits of crap, and what's the best tool for smearing that crap across the internet?
The problem isn't that bots will replace humans. The problem is that humans are acting like bots.
The more templated something becomes, the less defensible it is to own. Tech will do it eventually -- and faster. So where are YOU in all this mess?
If you know how to imbue your work with things that feel personal, then AI is your intern. If you create things that are formulaic, that just about anyone in your space could have created, then AI is your replacement.
It can already do what you do. But it will never do what YOU can do.
* * *
If you read my work, I want you to read MY work. It can be no one else's. ChatGPT can't know that my friends think I'm too punk rock and ought to be more pop. It definitely doesn't know I'm really fuzz rock. It could never write that. These are my lived experiences, written in my voice, pressed through my own lens on the world — my vision for the world and my relationships to it. I don’t want to create content. I want to create connection. Maybe we need a word for making stuff like that.
How about fuzz rock? #FindYourFuzzRock
Ensure your own perspective, lived experience, beliefs, tone of voice, and personal style shine through. Let your quirks out from where they're hiding. Be proactive about your posture. Don't publish anything without your creative fingerprints all over it.
YOU are the master chef. Everywhere you go, you haul a messy bag of humanity with you. You can choose to reach into it freely, gratuitously, and constantly.
It can be hard to even recognize that your posture is a thing. I get it. As with most of my years creating stuff, I think we leave it to chance. But maybe that's yet another mistake.
Mistake #1 is removing the self, whether or not we do so intentionally. Mistake #2 is never learning how to consciously deploy the self. But now, we have no choice.
The problem isn't bots replacing creators. The problem is too many creators act like bots.
So now, we go inward, or we go nowhere. All work either becomes more heart-based, or it gets eaten by creatures made of code.
One such creature already approaches.
But this is YOUR house. And you will protect this house.
At the door, a killer robot threatens to break in and crush you -- or is it a friendly intern, back from an errand you assigned?
As with all of this work, how you see determines what happens next.