Your creative
career is dead

Everyone wants to know the future, but there's never been a time in history when you're more likely to be wrong about what's coming. What we currently call AI can easily lead to catastrophe, but not the rogue robot kind... yet. Today's threat is already beyond containment, and no slowing of frontier development will prevent bad actors from using what they already have: models that are plenty dangerous with help from their handlers.

As a result I've started to see the "end-times" conversation as less interesting, even unproductive. I want our children's children to have a chance at a livable world, but trying to put AI back in the bag is the more dangerous delusion. When it comes to the snowballing data center and safety debate, my only response is that it's mostly propaganda. Hopefully the acceleration of AI will incentivize nuclear innovation. (I'm more likely to oppose unchecked wind and solar farms.)

Go live on the homestead, make everything by hand. Grow food, sell artisanal wares. You can do that, but it's for your comfort. Are you Amish? A peasant in a poor country? No? Well then, it's a hobby. Hobbies are great, but they don't do a thing to change the trajectory of a world fueled by AI.

A few years ago, I’d have said we’re obligated to refuse and sabotage it, and to ignore anyone droning on about inevitability. When I dove in and started using the tools, that view changed; today, I no longer see any harm reduction in refusal to engage with AI. What I see differently now is how we can steer: not to completely avoid undesirable ends, but to soften the blows and get some good while we can.

It serves no purpose to theorize about AI futures from the ivory tower of academia, or the bubbles of frontier lab leadership. You have to be at ground zero with this transformative and obliterating technology, burning tokens, offloading your legacy brain to the robot, getting consumed by companies that resemble casinos. Otherwise you can’t truly know what this thing is, because you can’t feel it happening. You won’t understand what can and will be done with it—or what must change, including the leadership of the frontier labs themselves.

Despite the "slop" discourse on social media, an awful lot in a creative career can be done with the new tools.

Modern animation is run by rigs, particle systems, simulations, characters following procedural rules, and this process pre-dates AI by decades. Armies of men or alien ships, oceans rising and falling, entire atmospheres and worlds beneath them residing in code. Rest assured, no one drew all of that by hand. Is it less human now than it was when people sat in the dark for hours watching it render?

Instead of howling at the moon about how AI can't ever be as brilliant as I am, I'll take a stand as the artist who believes the creative class is long overdue for an enema.

I care about what happens to this world. Being a parent, how can you not?  But the time for the conversation about how to stop it was many years ago. I tell every creative person I know: engage with the system while there's still time to influence what it becomes.