206: Escaping blame; also peculiarity at scale
Two reasons AI can enhance your creativity; also some Google things and barf bags
One of the reasons I’m bullish on AI as an adjunct for our creativity, and not as our replacement, is the business of patterns and combinations. So much of what makes us smile, recall, share, and celebrate takes root in the surprising concoction of two ordinary things. The act of collecting, for example. And barf bags. (See below.)
wrote as much in Paid Attention, suggesting originality is less about conjuring something ex nihilo (which sounds really hard, and it is) than about mixing, remixing, and re-contextualizing existing raw material (which sounds reasonable, and it is). Jack Foster’s How to Get Ideas provides similar, but more pragmatic methodology. And perhaps my favorite book, Robert Grudin’s The Grace of Great Things, outlines the philosophical, political and cultural obstacles inherent in seeing (never mind embracing) how 1+1=Career Changing Ideas. Pattern-sensing and making is a bedrock creative technique.But we are so often limited by our humanity. We need to sleep. Attend meetings. Pay taxes. To fit in.
Seeking out novel amalgamation has limitations. It takes guts. Also, it could get you fired. At least, that’s the rumor. You begin to sense why it might just be easier if not wiser to avoid being creative.
Which is why I’m increasingly fond of AI.
Reason #1: If the idea bombs, you didn’t come up with it. AI did. There’s an emotive “get out of jail, free” quality to openly embracing AI in the creative process. “That one sucks, right? Yeah, AI.” And no one will fault you. You can keep exploring and iterating, and failing. There have always been bad ideas, but never a believable entity to blame them on, until now.
Reason #2: Tireless peculiarity at scale. If you are routinely immersed in odd synthesis, comfortable amidst the chaos of idea-making, you might be a rare and glorious duck. The vast majority don’t have the temperament or desire. But once again, and thankfully, AI does not have emotions, or stakes in anyone’s culture or office politics. It can and will arm you with the remarkable—if you’re patient, curious and diligent. If you’re willing to provoke the machine, and not merely accept its generic, median logic.
The ceramicist succeeds in part because they’ve internalized how the raw materials function—they can tease surprise from the glaze. They instinctively know how minuscule differences in one ingredient or another impact the end result. A creative AI practitioner is equally aware of the business of patterns—recognizing how this fundamental wiring can be coerced or hacked to unearth unexpected gold.
Google Research’s “Learn Your Way”
I suspect, and hope, we are on the cusp of a fundamental shift in education. After all, what rule suggests how we learn can’t change?
As the team at Google puts it,
“The manual creation of textbooks demands significant human effort, and as a result they lack alternative perspectives, multiple formats and tailored variations that can make learning more effective and engaging. At Google, we’re exploring how we can use generative AI to automatically generate alternative representations or personalized examples, while preserving the integrity of the source material. What if students had the power to shape their own learning journey, exploring materials using various formats that fit their evolving needs? What if we could reimagine the textbook to be as unique as every learner?”
Learn Your Way is live now, in a limited context. While you can’t reinterpret any textbook, you can see how a range of topics (Sociology, Biology, Human History, et al) can be re-contextualized for age and interest—making new, more relevant and potentially engaging patterns from existing materials.
🎙️ If podcasts are your thing, and you want to deeply understand how AI became a thing, this episode of Acquired is essential (Apple, Spotify, YouTube). So much of our current AI focus is the recent three years. But what actually occurred took over 20, and most of the important effort (and almost every single name we associate with AI) took place (and a paycheck) at one company: Google. Much of what we consider magic today were merely stubborn engineering challenges, solved in many cases by coincidence, networking and sometimes luck.
🤢 I didn’t see The Last Barf Bag when agency FCB Chicago, production collective Sunny Sixteen and the Dramamine brand launched it a year ago (AdAge story). But it’s the kind of 1+1=3 idea that stands the test of time. How do we get you to think differently about nausea meds? Well, what if we blended two normal things (the act of collecting, and barf bags) and instigated something peculiar? (Hat tip to Sam and Mark for pointing this one out to me.)
👋🏽 Welcome to the influx of new subscribers.
Thanks for joining the list. As always, subscriptions are free. Your attention is invaluable. As a means of showing you around, here are the nine most popular posts from the past 12 months.
203: “It’s a really good time to be a weirdo” And other insights from the BRXND AI conference - September 18, 2025
196: Motivation - A short piece on effort in the age of AI - August 4, 2025
194: Curiosity and criticism - Some Godin and Perkin wisdom, a new Seenapse, Veo3 image reference and more - July 14, 20225
186: Here’s his name so you can curse him - Mark Fenske has had my attention for a very long time - May 17, 2025
182: The role of the Creative Director in the age of AI - What can you do that it can’t? And what can it help you do that you couldn’t before? - April 10, 2025
180: New ChatGPT 4.0 Image Generation - Remarkable enhancements available now; bigger challenges persist - March 28, 2025
174: What If? - A 2025 guide to understanding and gaining advantage with AI - Feb 7, 2025
159: When something significant happens every day - My HeyGen buddy Wayne will take your Zoom meeting; lots of Adobe AI news; Claude is an agent; NotebookLM evolves; Watkins, Mollick, Amodei write words - October 23, 2024
158: Four AI culture questions for leaders - Productivity, Psychology, Knowledge, Customers - Oct 18, 2024