AI as intern

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

In the studio talking to my imaginary assistants pic.twitter.com/P7lgqVZQBN

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) March 22, 2023

When Kevin Kelly visited me in the studio last week while he was in town for his SXSW talk, I asked him to tell me about AI, something I am not terribly interested in. (One of the pieces of advice in his forthcoming Excellent Advice for Living is: “For a great payoff / be especially curious / about the things you are not interested in.”)

He told me that AI right now is like having a little assistant to boss around and make you some stuff so you can say, “Most of this is garbage, but I can use this part, and you’ve given me something to work with or against.”

Quoting him from elsewhere:

This first round of primitive AI agents like ChatGPT and Dalle are best thought of as universal interns. It appears that the millions of people using them for the first time this year are using these AIs to do the kinds of things they would do if they had a personal intern: write a rough draft, suggest code, summarize the research, review the talk, brainstorm ideas, make a mood board, suggest a headline, and so on. As interns, their work has to be checked and reviewed. And then made better. It is already embarrassing to release the work of the AI interns as is. You can tell, and we’ll get better at telling. Since the generative AIs have been trained on the entirety of human work — most of it mediocre — it produces “wisdom of the crowd”-like results. They may hit the mark but only because they are average.

This, so far, has been the most convincing case I’ve heard.

But then, I’ve always resisted having an assistant — in my experience, doing the “grunt work” of researching, writing a first draft, etc., is where a lot of my good discoveries are made. I want my hands on the work, because that’s how I find it.

(Though I do like bossing Siri around and telling her to remind me of stuff and I do like being a good assistant to my future self.)

More notes from our visit:

Slow learning

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

I like this “Slow Learning” project that Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson took part in and shared in his (excellent) weekly newsletter.

He and a group of around 15 authors, artists, and teachers came up with a “Manifesto for Slow Learning,” which includes a “Bill of Rights” for the slow learner. (Start each of these with the phrase, “You have the right to…”)

1. Focus on direction, not destination
Immerse yourself completely in the journey and you will reach your final goal gradually.

2. Raise your hand
Asking questions is a fundamental human right.

3. Learn at your own pace
Find your rhythm, find your flow. Don’t compare yourself to others.

4. Unplug
You have the right to disconnect and move your attention towards what’s essential. Learn unplugged, far away from digital distractions.

5. Change your learning path (and mind)
Don’t get too comfortable in the habit zone and start with changing the aversion to change. Think differently and learn new things.

6. Take a break
Micro-breaks, lunch breaks, and longer breaks will all improve your learning performance. You have the right to rest.

7. Make mistakes
Don’t fall into despair but Fail Forward.

8. Leave it unfinished
We live in a super busy, multi-tasking, results-oriented society. Step away from your long to-do list and enjoy once in a while the beauty of an unstructured day.

9. Unlearn and forget
Harness the power of unlearning. Reboot your mind, abandon old knowledge, actions and behaviours to create space.

10. Slow down
Sometimes slow and steady will win the learning race. Make haste slowly.

You can read more in a free book the group put together.

Tom reminds us: “The ancient Greek word for ‘leisure’ or ‘free time’ was ‘skole’ which turned into the Latin word for school.”

I’m a big fan of another manifesto by Tom: “Manifesto of the idle parent.” (Also: Daniel Pennac’s “The rights of the reader.”)

A good assistant to your future self

Monday, March 20, 2023

This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journal that illustrator Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (I’m a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)

He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”

I have a new studio routine where when I’m unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each year on today’s date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but I’ve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. That’s where a lot of gems are buried.)

Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)

Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreau’s diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.

(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirth… When babies are new, they babble and make noise without language… do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)

Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.

This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:

Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work, all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.

I’ve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self who’ll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.

Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working – those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your “assistant self” in motion, the self that will be there for your “future-self.” Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.

Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. You’ll thank yourself during & afterwards.

I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.

Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.

Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.

Errors in Western Language

Monday, March 20, 2023

Flipping through an old diary this morning, I found these words copied from an interview in Burroughs and Friends: Lost Interviews. William Burroughs talks about some of the ideas he gleaned from Alfred “The Map is not the Territory” Korzybski’s Science and Sanity:

He pointed out that “either/or” is one of the basic flaws in all Western thinking, like “either intellect or emotion” instead of “both… and…” Because every action is both intellectual and emotional. For example, your cat wakes up and he feels hungry—that’s an emotion, an instinct, but then his front brain goes to work to show him where food has been, there food will be. This is still the basic guiding principle of Hollywood: what has made money will make money. But as soon as that happens, the cat’s front brain is going into operation, taking him to where the food will be—same way with people. So, trying to chop the human body into intellect and emotion… I mean it doesn’t at all correspond to what we know of the human organism and the universe.

So there’s a basic flaw. Another is the definite article, as though it was a permanent: The God, the way, instead of a God, a way. And another is the is of identity, as though this were a permanent status. “He is my servant.” Now, the Egyptian’s glyph: “He as my servant.” At this moment, he is acting as my servant. “The ‘is’ of identity,” Korzybski calls it.

Burroughs attended one of Korzybski’s seminars in 1939. He said in a press conference in 1974, “I think that everyone, everyone, particularly all students, should read Korzybski. [It would] save them an awful lot of time.”

A quick flip-through of Science and Sanity turns up charts like this: