Articles from metaphor
Sprouts: Nurturing and Filtering Ideas in the Age of Generative AI
This post is inspired by a delightful New York Times column by Madison Malone Kircher titled "The Beautiful Chaos of Apple Notes." Picking up on a recent TikTok trend, Kircher asked her readers to share their most "unhinged" Apple notes to themselves . As Kircher points out, "The Notes app occupies an odd perch in the digital landscape. Since its contents aren't usually intended for consumption by anyone else, we are under no pressure to make sense." I began sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of my Apple Notes stream, searching for traces of my own now-unhinged thoughts. However, given my interest in generative AI, I decided to take it a step further and explore what GPT-4 could create from the scraps I discovered, using my reading notes and newsletter articles as its primary data sources. I wondered whether I could use generative AI to rejuvenate these notes and reconnect them to my current network of interests, thoughts, and writing. Here’s result of my experiment and my thoughts on nurturing and filtering ideas in the age of generative AI.
Reverb: Voices and Vibrations in Generative AI
At this point, it’s somewhat of a cliche to state that generative AI systems serve as a mirror, reflecting our collective cultural heritage. However, the notion that these systems reveal the ideas, patterns, and biases deeply ingrained in our culture is still apt, particularly if you shift your perspective from thinking of generative AI as a reflection of ourselves in a mirror to a different sensory perception—what we hear, which is most often the voice of others. The auditory experiences of echo, reflection, reverberation, and resonance can help us understand the essential question raised by the brief appearance of the persona Sydney in Microsoft’s early preview of Bing Chat: Who is speaking?
Amplify Your Intelligence
Generative AI is not just a new tool: it’s a new medium. Our interactions with generative AI produce tangible artifacts that express our creative intentions. Like other mediums (oil painting, for example), each generative AI system has its own characteristics that you have to consider as you work with it to express your intentions. And like other expressive mediums, generative AI systems have inherent limitations that you can only overcome with insight and invention—just as the Old Masters had to learn how use vanishing lines, shading, and techniques to create the optical illusions that create a sense of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface.
The Mirror and the Lens
How do you see the world? The literal answer is that you see through your two eyes. But it's not that simple. The pictures of the world you carry in your head are fabrications assembled from what you see with your unaided vision and what you see through the myriad lenses that alter what you see with your naked eyes. Generative AI, and especially generative image creation tools, are something new. But the connection between image making and technology is not new. In fact, it’s older than we’ve previously believed.
Learning How to Un-See
Learning how to think with images begins with learning how to see, or perhaps more accurately, learning how to un-see. Your open eyes are always looking, collecting images and sending them to your brain. And your brain is always processing the images it receives—comparing new images to what you already know and creating connections between different sets of related images and ideas. But most of us rarely stop to think about how we gather, sort, categorize, and group the visual elements that make up the images we’re constantly assembling in our brain.
The Emerging Presence of Digital Thought
Digital content is becoming more and more like thought itself. It exists in a space that is both real and not real, fluid and ever-changing, both ephemeral and permanent. We increasingly interact with our content using tools designed to capture and manipulate our thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are not always fully formed or logical. In other words, we are now thinking with digital information in the same way we think with the thoughts we store in our head.
Unbundle Your Attention
It’s not an overstatement to say that our attention is under siege and we are losing—losing our ability to focus. Our struggle to focus is both a personal and a cultural problem. Individual and legislative action can mitigate it, but taking action requires a cultural change—one that begins with the development of a more nuanced understanding of attention itself. Once we better understand the nature of attention, we can decide how and when we want to share it and protect it.
Five Essential Things I’ve Learned About Creativity
This is the 50th article from my newsletter metaphor. When I launched the newsletter in October 2020, I used the tagline “Tools for a productive creative life.” I didn’t know where my initial intention would take me—and that’s been the fun of it! This article presents five essential things I’ve learned about creativity from writing the last 49 issues: over 85,000 words. More to come soon…