Judge the Work

I read something today that wrote a person off because AI is part of how they work. Not the work itself. The way it was made.

AI is part of how I work. I talk things through with it. I plan with it and build with it. I find things with it and learn with it, and it catches me when I'm wrong, and I catch it. I do engineering this way, and writing, and music, and a lot of my learning. Some days it is a partner and some days it is a tool. It is never the whole of it. I wrote down how that works day to day a while back.

The things I work on get mixed up with conversation, with people and with the machine, and with the work itself. Some of it turns into a post. Some posts get updated later. They are a record, but not one set in stone: where I was, where I have been, maybe a hint of where I am going. Mostly it is me walking through the present moment and sharing it, as a person trying to live with open awareness. I want the conversation. I also need solitude, for my own work and for the hard parts of life. I am a contradiction: the weaver and the philosopher, the thinker and the maker.

If you see AI in something and want nothing to do with it, that is your call. But ask what you are measuring. Is the work true? Does it hold up? Did someone stand behind it, and fix it when it broke? Those questions used to be how we judged anything. "Was AI involved" is an easier question, and it tells you much less.

There is a lot of bad AI content. I see it too. But the internet was full of bad content long before any of this, and people made all of it. The problem was never the tool. It was people putting out things they did not care about, and the rest of us reading them anyway.

Most of what I see people make with it is interesting, and a lot of it is creative. I love watching someone use it to push their own work as far as it will go. Not many do. So it is the same as it always was: you still have to go looking for the artists, the pioneers, the strange and brilliant ones. They are there. They are just not the loudest.

What I see under the dismissal is fear. These are tools built to extend how people think, and using them well is a very human practice: curiosity, judgment, taste, correcting yourself, owning what you put out. That is the part worth looking at, and the part I have tried to name as germane friction, the effort that builds you rather than the effort a tool should take away. I have made the case against AI and the case for it, and I still think both are worth reading.

None of this is new. Every new tool gets the same welcome, the hype and the panic both, and people stay people.

Be the punching bag

Sometimes the work gets hit, and right now a lot of people are swinging.

The hits are the moments you feel knocked down, upset, out of sorts. The work is getting through them without losing ground while you do. With humility, with honor, with courage. You gotta constantly watch your ego rising, and work on your inner self.

And you don't let anyone take your focus. You hold it. You go hard. You train, so you can take the hits and keep on going. You don't crash, but you don't take it easy either. Stay away from comfortable.

So be the punching bag. Do the reps. Keep the focus. Experiment. Finish things.

Keep talking

I have been reading and watching the cyberneticians lately, and two of them keep coming back to this. Gordon Pask thought understanding happens in conversation. You have learned something when you can teach it back: derive it rather than recite it, and reach it by more than one road. Now I am getting into Gregory Bateson, who called information "a difference which makes a difference."

That is the measure I would use. Not who held the pen, or what. Whether the work makes a difference in someone else.

So it is a good argument to have, and we should keep having it. Conversation is how learning happens, for me and for anyone. Judge the work, and keep talking.