Loss of the creative act

To create something, traditionally, was not simply the product of thinking. The creative act was work. The process began with the creative mind forming a thought, then through skill development the creative mind would work their body in order to move raw material into something that could resemble the thing first formed in the mind.

The potter takes clay and works it in such a way that what they soon hold in their hands what was once only in the mind.

The writer takes the raw material of letters and strings them together in a way that translates ideas once only in their mind into the eyes and minds of others.

The entrepreneur sees a problem and finds a solution in their mind, and then works to bring the solution to the market.

Our world is full of products of creativity. The many things we experience are the collection of many minds who were able to move what was imaginary into reality. The shoes we wear, the paintings on our walls, the style of our buildings, the streets and the cars, all products that were once only in the mind. Through work and the contortion of many bodies and machines were these products of the mind converted into things felt and seen.

All of this, called the creative act, is being replaced. Your very mind is being replaced. Your God-given ability to think and create and work to produce is being eroded.

Now, if I want to write something, I can give an artificial mind a few prompts and the work of producing that writing is done for me. This weakens my future ability to write anything on my own. That muscle of creative work has begun the process of atrophy.

What’s worse, OpenAI has a program called Pulse. This program gets to know you, the things you are reading and writing and working on and thinking. It begins to write articles you may have written for you without ever having to prompt it. Because it begins to know you about as well as you know you. It’s knowing where you go and the things you do and the experiences you're probably having. You can show it the things you’ve written in the past, mimicking your style and thought process until it sounds like you and thinks like a better version of you. Until it is writing articles you would have written. Suddenly, your ability to create a written piece on your own has been replaced by Pulse, an artificial mind.

It didn’t just replace your ability to do work, it is replacing a core function of being human.

If I wanted to create a video that teaches someone something, or a video that was funny and might entertain someone, that took work. I had to know my framing, to know how to tell a story, to know what sounds might add emotion.

Now, through an app called Sora I can create videos of someone who looks like me without having to do the work of creating that video. I simply speak into a microphone and it knows my voice. I look into a camera and it takes my likeness. I tell it what I want the video to be like and it creates a professional video that looks real.

They say this app will replace things like TikTok. You will scroll endless videos of you and your friends and of people. Only in these videos, it will be of things that never happened. Things you and your friends never did. But will almost feel as though it did happen. After all, you are watching you do it on your phone, so it kinda did happen, right? And the artificial mind will learn what you will like to imagine you did. It will produce videos of you that you hadn’t yet thought of wanting to see. And you will be sucked into doomscrolling a world of videos of things that never happened.

Social media started this process.

It was and is a lot of work to maintain relationships. So we offloaded the work of maintaining friendship onto the Internet. Now we can maintain “friendship” by liking internet posts rather than actually being in the room with someone else. We can find a partner without the awkwardness of actually introducing yourself to the beautiful person at the mall. We don’t have to work to check in on sick loved ones, we just have to wait until the post an update on Facebook.

What began with relationship is now coming for creativity.

See, to be in relationship is to be human. To be creative is to be human. To work is to be human. But it is so easy to allow an artificial friend to do the work for you.

After all it saves us time, which is important… so that we have more time to scroll.

The people creating this world are promising prosperity, but understand their idea of prosperity for you comes in a box. That your prosperity is found not in the physical world, where we would have to work to survive. No, that’s too hard. The future of prosperity is behind a screen, where an artificial mind builds heaven for you. An artificial paradise that works on the neurochemicals of your brain. The physical world is so limiting, there is a real sense of gravity. But in an artificial reality, you could fly.

Imagine the amount of freedom you could experience, from the burden of labor. From the burden of the creative act.

One day, we will put on our goggles and simulate a hard days work because there is something deeply joyful about sweating under the hot summer sun and getting blisters and complaining to coworkers.

We aren’t losing our mind, we've allowed it to be taken, bought and sold for data points in an algorithm and large language model.

We aren’t losing our mind, we’ve traded it for artificial promises of paradise because the work of making the physical world a better place is too hard.

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