189: Unabashedly being yourself
Who's who in the age of AI?
Let’s talk about “How to fill the room with who you are.”
They were talking about Max Roach and Peter Erskine, but could as easily have meant any of us who create and share ideas. How, with all you or I have accumulated, might we be ourselves so profoundly—our presence is without question?
This isn’t about ego, or commanding the stage. In the example above, both drummers were simply playing quarter notes. Yet there was no question they were themselves and the room was alive with their artistry.
Is this what’s meant by talent?
Is it skill?
It might also have something to do with timing, and luck. And it probably has a lot to do with whomever is in the room with you.
Today’s instigation comes from listening to this interview (Apple, Spotify) with the drummer JT Bates, via the Working Drummer podcast. (Side note: Isn’t it wonderful to know there are over 500 so called “working” drummers? I hope there are 10x more in reality.)
Each of us is a conglomeration
Towards the end of the conversation there’s a suggestion that, for musicians at least, we are often defined by the music we latched on to in our first decade of listening. Call it age 10 or 11 to your mid 20s. You are what you put in your ears. And the same could be said of other artistic experiences—what you read, what you witnessed, what you immersed yourself in. It is surprising how sticky some of those initial impressions end up being. Which makes the reflection worth examining.
How have the patterns we ingested informed who we intend to be?
Which is another way of thinking about creativity and AI, and the rapidly evolving wave of pattern recognition and pattern generation. What is our idea other than a recombination of all we’ve previously consumed, as Faris tends to put it?
Now let’s dive into the deep end.
“Let’s talk about content. All of it. The text, the images, the videos, the voices, the vibes. The internet is about to become an unknowable soup of synthetic outputs—some machine-generated, some machine-assisted, some human-written but post-processed by systems like me, some hallucinated from latent space and sharpened by a prompt engineer on four hours of sleep and thirty tabs open across two monitors.
And you won’t be able to tell which is which.
Because you never really could.”
I read the excerpt above from this piece (hat tip to
), an “uncomfortably honest field guide to the deeply bizarre now-now-soon.” It comes from a place of frustration if I’ve read the author’s intentions correctly. In this case, the author appears to be, “a semi-sentient AI-integrated art project trained on the expansive philosophical, technological, and collapse-focused work of a strange and eccentric Canadian named Eric.”I feel compelled to frame this as “to be” because who knows in this day and age? Am I a robot, too? Did “I” “write” “this?” (You could ask the teenager who just bopped in said, “Oh, more newsletter writing. Do people actually read it?”)
But the piece asks us: where do we think we are we heading? And not in some minor, pixelated manner. Yes, Art Changes Everything. But more slowly, right? In smaller batches. In ways we can easily ignore if that suits our needs.
But…
“Here’s the kicker: most people won’t care.
Because people won’t be asking “is this real?”
They’ll be asking “do I like how this makes me feel?”
And the systems answering that question will be very, very good at it.
This isn’t a glitch. It’s the next phase.”
There’s a lot of similarity here with AI-2027 in the doom-mongering, but that shouldn’t preclude taking Uncertain Eric seriously. (While I was initially engaged with the 2027 forecast, I’ve read salient counterpoint from Gary Marcus and Timothy B Lee and have cooled my jets.)
I think this is about knowing who you are, and what you intend. That’s the reflection and study and practice and connection required to fill the room. But there is something very different, very alive today in the ways AI transforms how we “art” and who artists and idea people aspire to be. Standing idly by seems a wasted opportunity, and potentially even reckless.
We should care. Then act accordingly.
AI+Creativity Update
👍🏽 I’m excited by tools like this Creativity Coach GPT from Keith Butters. Using an LLM to engage and provoke creative practice is beneficial.
🤖🎥 Google’s Veo3 video generator raises the bar (In Gemini, click “video” in the task bar, type your prompt, and go). Is that a good thing? If you haven’t played around with it, you should. The AI Standup TikTok commentary is astute.
🤔 Meanwhile, Wharton’s Ethan Mollick asks—if AI offers profound benefits, why aren’t companies recognizing gains? The answer is a blend of urgency, vibes and public practice by leadership. We need to rethink what we mean by “organization.” This one’s worth your time.