
Not everything needs AI — A view from creativity
I don’t know what bothers me more. The traffic jams on the Amsterdam Ring (bad!), or the mindless implementation of AI in our line of work (bad!). I have no control over the Ring. But AI -lately, I have a lot of thoughts about that. It’s not there yet. And it’s everywhere.
I follow the trends, of course. Behind the scenes, I actively use the more promising tools. And I check out the hypes, with mixed enthusiasm. To be honest, I’m usually not satisfied with the output from AI. Sometimes ‘good enough’ is fine. But not for final production. With generative AI, it often still feels fake, not intrinsic, more of the same. Dazzling results are possible, but fortunately, they still take more effort than just typing a single prompt.
With chatbots, it’s often no different. ChatGPT, for instance, gives you answers to all your questions. The possibilities seem endless. Emphasis on seem. Ever tested it on topics you know a lot about? In my experience, that’s when ChatGPT gets it wrong most of the time. When I give feedback, I invariably get responses like “You’re right. I gave an incorrect answer.” Or if I’ve provided a detailed correction: “Yes, that’s correct,” followed by a whole summary of the knowledge I just gave to the model.
The big danger here is that an LLM starts reasoning based on faulty info it just generated itself. And you don’t notice that when you lack subject knowledge. “What a clusterfuck,” to quote the film Burn After Reading. I get better results with chatbot agent MiniMax, but that one actually takes a few minutes to think and substantiates every step in its ‘thinking process’.
Because of AI’s immaturity, I actually feel more urge to create for real. To embrace my own impulses and truths. To sit behind the piano and experience the wondrous process of ‘writing music out of thin air’. It doesn’t get more immersive than that. Or to go outside, take photos of real life. Observing, pressing the shutter—almost without thinking—immortalizing moments in a beautifully composed image.
And yes, sometimes AI has its place in that too, but only when it truly adds something. Not as the starting point or sole method, but as a tool. Some touch-up when the sound wasn’t optimal, or a bit of photo de-noising in low light shots.
Sometimes I feel a bit of FOM-FOMO. Fear of missing Fear of missing out. “Why don’t I feel like I’m missing anything, while so many people seem to see this as the new truth?” But the FOMO never really kicks in, because I now know the balance that works for me: relatively little AI, and a lot of personal creation.
Tentative conclusion: AI is powerful, but let’s not make it bigger than it is. Appreciate AI like you appreciate your own creative choices. Not good enough? Delete. Does it work? Keep.
But most of all: keep truly creating.
PS: This article was created without AI, thanks to many hours of thinking while being stuck in traffic.