Slop has nothing to do with AI. The age of AI in fact has great potential to see the elimination of slop. But it’s up to us.
Slop is made when a formula is followed to create something. All the individual expression and taste is taken out of the final product.
If you press a button and expect AI to create something, you will get slop. AI works by turning the process into a formula.
But slop has been around for centuries.
If you have any pattern recognition, you’ve noticed formulaic movies, TV, music, and writing. You know what’s going to happen and it’s just cheesy and it sucks. It’s slop, and sadly most people don’t know the difference.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid-1800s was rebelling against slop. The art academies in Europe had reduced Raphael’s painting style to a formula. The P.R.B. called it “slosh.”
AI actually has tremendous potential to reduce slop.
Slop proliferates because of rigid systems of organization. When there are three channels, a few record labels, one local radio station, etc. it’s too risky to let artists simply express themselves. Shareholders need to be assured what they’re doing will work. So art gets reduced to a formula.
AI just copies the formulas we’ve already been using to make safe art.
In the ‘90s, we had to decide whether to browse the Action & Adventure or Comedy section of Blockbuster Video. These walls that balkanize taste have been gradually dissolving, and AI is the bulldozer.
Marshall McLuhan called this the shift from mechanical to electric technology.
“He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine.” —Marshall McLuhan
With AI not only can you do away with video-store shelves, but the BISAC subject codes for organizing books. Even hashtags are becoming obsolete. (Thank God, I hate hashtags.)
So write a novel or record an album – with your hands and mind – then let AI tell you how to categorize it. AI can then help others find it just because it has some weird quirk they specifically will enjoy. This flexible sorting isn’t possible in the rigid structures of store shelves.
It is not an exaggeration to say that AI is the most anti-slop technology in the history of humanity.
We only see more slop now because people are too afraid or have forgotten how to express themselves. Slop will only persist if humans decide it deserves to. If we accept it as art.
We’ve been doing that a long time, but admittedly, it’s been hard not to.
Eliminating slop requires us to be brave enough to create (and most importantly, seek out and consume) unique and authentic art.
Cool:The AI Water Issue is Fake is a thorough analysis of why the issue of AI water usage is blown out of proportion by sloppy and disingenuous journalism.
When I reflect on my most-intense periods of time management, it’s all kind of a blur.
Like I can open a book on my Kindle I have no recollection of having purchased much less read, and find it’s littered with highlights – so I clearly “read” it.
I recently came across a term: hurry sickness. The definitions vary, but the term immediately reminded me of the times I was most fixated on doing things faster and more efficiently, and whenever possible delegating those things.
The symptoms of hurry sickness I remember are:
Constantly rushing
Impatient, subject to emotional outbursts over minor delays
Making lots of mistakes
Poor memory
An urge to always be in motion
Thinking about the next task while doing the current one
Trying (and failing) to multitask
It’s easy for me to say of that self that I should have just calmed down or not been in such a hurry, but it felt like I had good reasons then, and it feels unfair and suspiciously convenient to judge that past self.
I was fighting hard to make it as a writer, didn’t have much other fulfilling things going on in my life, and had a less clear idea of who I was or wanted to be.
I still feel on the edge of hurry sickness sometimes but just being aware of it helps keep me from getting sucked in.
I don’t know what the cure was. Maybe it was having some success, feeling I had proven to myself what I had wanted to, less economic and social pressure living outside the U.S., or some deeper existential contentment. It’s probably all of those.
Strangely, I feel like I’m fighting as hard for my business as ever but am less hurry sick. So maybe hurry sickness really works, or maybe the incentives to be hurry sick feel too out-of-reach to bother with any longer. What feels true to me right now is that hurry sickness is just counter-productive.
Have you ever been hurry sick?
Aphorism: “He who defers the hour of living well is like the clown waiting till the river shall have flowed out. But the river still flows, and will run on.” —Horace
Cool: This is a nice heavy curtain (Amazon) which can help control light and dampen sound when recording video.
Best, David P.S. When you’re hurry-sick you’re convinced there’s too much to do.
When you get close to finishing a project, there are two ways you can use your energy.
You can either try to make the current project better, or you can call it done and move on to the next thing.
In my experience, once you reach the point you’re considering it might already be done, there’s a lopsided trade staring you in the face: The same energy it would take to make the current thing 1% better could be used to make the next thing 10% better.
That’s not to say that you can use that energy to go start-to-finish on the next thing, and it will be 10% better. It’s just automatically by doing the next thing, you’ll be able to do it better. And that 1% improvement on the current thing would be more exhausting.
That isn’t to say, either, that because it’s a lopsided trade-off that automatically means you should move on to the next thing. You have real sunk costs in the current thing, and making it better can unlock outsized gains. In this algorithmically-driven world, making something 1% better can increase your payoff 100x.
That of course assumes that with all that extra effort, you’re actually making it better. So when in doubt, move on to the next thing.
Aphorism: “There are few things wherein we can give a sincere judgment, by reason that there are few wherein we have not, in some sort, a private interest.” —Montaigne
Cool:Subtitlecat creates AI-generated subtitles for any show or movie.
The past couple months I’ve set all of my screens to black-and-white: My phone, laptop, tablet, watch, and even the screen in my car.
I haven’t yet looked into the neuroscience behind this, but it feels like it’s triggering far less dopamine than usual. I feel more in-control of my attention. Surprisingly, I’ve noticed I can more easily motivate myself to do simple tasks away from screens, such as clean or wash dishes.
This would make sense because, as Dr. Robert Lustig told us, our dopamine receptors habituate: The more you release, the more you need for a similar effect (until your receptors are shot).
I don’t that often need to temporarily switch the colors back on. I can do basic video and graphics editing just fine in black-and-white, and can quickly check the colors before I finalize.
There’s also a slider to change how strong the black-and-white filter is. I changed the filter for my car’s screen to just under full power, so I can better discern colors on maps.
Every time I switch colors back on, I am shocked how bright they are. It feels similar to tasting the sugar-laden foods all around us after a period without sweets, or exiting a matinee on a sunny day.
In fact, if you search for “dopamine colors,” you’ll see there are lots of articles cheerily guiding designers to use highly-saturated colors to hook users on their interfaces.
If we look at the hues that can be reproduced on a screen, they extend way beyond what can be reproduced with, say, CMYK offset printing.
The only hues in the CMYK color-space that come close to matching the RGB color space (screens) are the pure inks: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow.
As this diagram shows, we’re actually able to perceive hues well beyond even the RGB color space, especially the greens and blues – you know, the actual natural world.
One thing I’ve noticed after two months in black-and-white is that flowers and birds seem brighter and more beautiful. It’s always a good thing when the real world is more interesting than your screen.
I will never again keep my screens in full color.
Book:Amish Society (Amazon) is about the fascinating community that is intentional about technology.
Cool: This is the only sensible design for a Kindle cover (Amazon) and it’s strangely hard to find.
The first version of the idea that comes to us is the last version we would ever be capable of building.
In The Heart to Start, I called this The Fortress Fallacy. We immediately think of a fortress, despite the fact we don’t even have experience building a cottage.
Dreaming big is good, except when it presents a vision so intimidating you do nothing at all.
I keep a spreadsheet of ideas I’m considering building, and I’ve found a powerful way of evaluating those ideas is what I call the Fortress/Cottage Test.
Two columns are dedicated to different versions of the idea. In the first column, I briefly describe the advanced version of the idea. (This is almost always the form in which the idea first comes to me.) That’s the fortress.
In the second column, I describe the most basic version of the idea I can think of. That’s the cottage.
So your columns might look like this:
🏰 A seven-book fantasy series, set in an underwater world.
🏠 A 2,000-word fantasy short story, set in an underwater world.
🏰 An app that keeps various list components you can mix and match to build packing lists for trips.
🏠 A text file with various copy-and-pasteable components I can mix and match to build packing lists for my trips.
🏰 A YouTube channel featuring tours and reviews of restaurants in Chicago.
🏠 A reel featuring a tour and review of my friend’s restaurant, in Chicago.
I find that thinking of the cottage leads me down a trail of just enough cognitive effort to get me going.
If I stop at the fortress, I’m just looking at the peak of one mountain from the peak of another. Thinking of the cottage takes a little effort, but then concrete and achievable steps stretch out in front of me.
Book:A Night to Remember (Amazon) is a detailed account of the sinking of the Titanic.
Cool:BigMailer helps you send emails for cheap through Amazon SES (and have control over your deliverability!)
If you think of your work as a process of stacking bricks, you have some of the equation figured out.
We tend to dream up castles in the sky, and they’re rarely achieved by carving straight from the side of a mountain. More often, they’re assembled one small work at a time, building into a bigger vision.
The trouble with stacking bricks is it assumes you have a workable plan. If you just keep stacking, it will come tumbling down.
More likely you’re collecting bricks. You stack along the way and put up a little wall here and there, notice it’s getting wobbly, then backtrack and start over.
So don’t just stack the bricks – make the bricks. Through that iterative process you’ll build some strange structures.
But once in a while, through the forces of affinity that hold this universe together, you’ll end up looking like brilliant architect.
Aphorism: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.” —Marshall McLuhan
It’s my birthday today and I’m not getting younger. So the thing I experience at the end of every book is stronger than ever.
I was having dinner with a friend also writing a book, and he told me, “If I was in an accident tonight, as I was dying in the ER, I would feel very distraught over not finishing.”
This sounds crazy because you’d expect him to think of his wife and kids. But I understood completely.
The other day, I scheduled a blog post to go out a few months from now. It shares my entire unrevised manuscript.
I don’t plan on dying. But if I do, this post will go live and the world will at least have my book. (If all goes well, hopefully I won’t forget to un-schedule it.)
Scheduling that post has brought me an inordinate amount of inner peace. Because the same desire for significance that motivates us to embark on work that matters makes the final stretch of any masterpiece the most harrowing: You’re in the odd position of feeling you’ve done your life’s work, while also wanting to live long enough to see how it goes.
So the closer you get to the finish, the more you stand to lose.
Yes, it’s supposed to feel that heavy.
Aphorism: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” —Montaigne
Cool: Someone will get rich hacking together an AI-camera and water jets to make a consumer-grade Squirrel soaker 9000
If you’re running a race, you need only put one foot in front of the other, and you will cross the finish line.
As you get closer, you may even sprint. You know how far to go and how much you’ve got in the tank.
But the finish line of a creative project is different.
The desire to express attracts, while the fear of judgement repels
The desire to be done reels you in, while the fear of the unknown resists
The desire to accomplish pulls, while the fear of failure pushes
The desire for excellence is a beacon, the pursuit of perfection a barrier
The finish line is like an ex that texts at 2 a.m., then freaks out about what a mistake last night was.
As the finish line pulls, so it pushes. Unlike in the pursuit of histrionic lovers, though, it’s worth it to persevere through this strange force field.
Book:Open (Amazon) is tennis champion Andre Agassi’s memoir of the paradoxical pain of excellence.
If you’ve ever done something you didn’t feel like doing, or not done something you felt like doing, you already know something about finishing projects.
Finishing projects is unnatural. The world changes constantly and so nothing stays still. The creative process requires an open mind, yet finishing requires a closed one.
But we do many things that go against our instincts.
Maybe you’ve wanted to snap at a colleague, partner, or child, but didn’t
Maybe you’ve been attracted to someone besides your spouse and didn’t act
Maybe you didn’t have just one beer because you knew you’d keep going
Maybe you went to the gym when you didn’t feel like it
To finish is absurd and illogical. As George Carlin said, “Art doesn’t have a finish line.”
But it’s something you do because you value it. When you have a value, you will act in ways that don’t make immediate sense. That’s how an equation works out when one variable has more value than expected.
Finishing is something you choose despite your instincts and impulses. Like exercise, sobriety, non-violence, and monogamy, it’s unnatural, often inconvenient, and entirely up to you.
Aphorism: “To Finish requires a heart of steel. You have to make decisions all the time, and I am finding difficulties where I thought there would be none. The only way I can keep up this life is to go to bed early and do nothing whatsoever outside my work, and I am sustained in my resolution to give up every pleasure, and most of all that of seeing the people I love, only by the hope of carrying the work through to completion. I think it will kill me.” —Eugène Delacroix
Unless you make a change, years will pass and your project still won’t be done.
If you were going to have a baby, or even guests from out of town, you’d change some things. Set up a room, reduce other commitments, etc.
Your life is a glass of water, and all our glasses are full-full, to the brim full. When something new comes into life, something else has to go.
You might feel, Well I’ve had this project in my life so long. With enough time, it will surely be done.
You’ve had this project in your life, but to bring in the finished project, you must make room. You do that the same way you make room for anything else. Set aside time on your schedule, set up a spot for it to live, cancel other plans for a season, and make space to rest and adjust.
Your glass is full-full, and for the finished project to fit-fit, some of that water must overflow.
Aphorism: “Subtracting your dependence on some of the things you take for granted increases your independence.” —Twyla Tharp
Cool:Fatebook is my tool of choice for making and tracking predictions about my goals and business.
