Bleep, Bloop: AI and Creativity

Thoughts on creativity and artificial intelligence from this past week.

A digital collage I prompted called “Bleep, Bloop”

Hey friends! This week’s post is all about creativity and generative AI. You know, that thing that’s about to take your job. Let’s talk about it.

DALL·E 3:

This is my favorite text-to-image generation model. It currently powers Bing’s Image Creator which is the very tool I used to make the digital collage above. It’s free to use if you have a personal Microsoft account. Just describe an image you’d like to see, wait a bit, and receive four variations of the image you described.

Sometimes I am amazed at how accurately it produces the vague image I had in my head. Other times it’s clear it doesn’t know how many fingers hands have.

A question I have is, how long will it be until image prompting becomes a full blown art form in and of itself? Could you imagine an art gallery where every piece is prompted?

In the meantime, I will continue using it for the following reasons:

• Creating “digital collages” for my Substack posts

• Generating assets for Photoshop composites

• Brainstorming aesthetics for design work (kind of an alternative or complement to an inspiration/mood board)

• Trolling my best friends with images of the dumb things they say in private text threads

• Illustrating children’s books for my kids (see below)

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Some Bears:

My wife and I wrote a book for our kids! ‘Some Bears’ is an early childhood picture book with fun imagery and rhyming wordplay. Take a sneak peak inside below, or read it here for free:

A valid criticism might be, “You should have paid an illustrator to do this. You’re stealing opportunity from them by using AI,” which, as a creative who has monetized his creativity in the past, is a sentiment that I understand. I really do. But the reality is, I was never going to spend money on this project.

For me, the alternative to using AI wasn’t paying an illustrator. It was not making the book altogether. Furthermore, my goals for this project included:

• Producing a book that my kids would enjoy reading—they love it.

• Having fun doing something creative with my wife—we’re writing another.

• Exploring the state of text to image generative AI—it’s impressive, but incapable of producing persistent characters (hence “Some Bears” instead of a story about “Some Bear.”

• Better understanding the Kindle Direct Publishing ecosystem—it’s a little clunky, but easy enough and with reasonable profit margins.

At the end of the day, this project went from idea to market in a matter of days instead of weeks or months. It cost me nothing more than my time, and it introduced my wife and me to a joint hobby that we enjoy. I wonder how many new creative projects will get to see the light of day that would have otherwise never left the idea phase thanks to AI.

Creative work isn’t a fixed sum game, and AI isn’t stealing your job. It’s giving you a super power that you can leverage to do amazing things. The only limitation, as far as I see it, is your creativity.

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ChatGPT:

I just read ‘The AI Essay Crisis’ by

Maalvika

, which explores the prevalence of AI generated writing in schools, academic integrity, and rethinking learning in this new age. In it, she writes:

Imagine a world where students don’t just regurgitate information but engage with AI as a true collaborator — using it as a catalyst for ideas, a sparring partner for arguments, and a co-creator of knowledge. In this world, we’d nurture a generation of thinkers who don’t merely consume information but masterfully synthesize it, orchestrating new ideas from the vast sea of data at their disposal.”

This feels directionally correct to me.

As we move towards ever more powerful, and ubiquitous, large language models, it’s probably time to give some serious thought to what school looks like in this new paradigm. If ignored, the allure, for students, to use AI to complete their homework will just be too strong. With intention though,

Maalvika

’s vision for a future where students work alongside and with super intelligent computers could become a reality.

I don’t have all of the answers right now, but I imagine this is a topic I’ll return to frequently in this newsletter. In the meantime, here’s my modest proposal: teachers, administrators, and parents should spend time getting to know these tools. Our policymakers aren’t coming to save us—it’s up to us to figure it out.”

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Udio:

I haven’t thought about this one long enough to share anything particularly insightful, but what I do know for sure is this is one of the most fun tools in the AI toolkit that I’ve played with yet.

Udio is an AI-powered platform that generates and edits music from user prompts. Here’s a prompt I threw at it when I got stuck writing a song the old fashioned way.

Upbeat fingerpicking country music In A minor with the following lyrics:

“I was born under a summer’s moon in 1985. To this day, I thank the Lord that I am alive. My daddy taught me how to work and mama how to pray. In that town that I call home that’s where I found my way.”

The result?

Better than what I could do.

It’s interesting to see what of the prompt it honored, and what it made up on its own. I personally love the chorus, “Under the old oak tree, my roots run deep.” That was all Udio.

The tool does give you the ability to generate additional verses, intros, and outros, but I’ve found that with each addition, it seems to drift further away from the original vision—sometimes resulting in complete gibberish.

Will Udio artists become a thing? I still don’t know what a DJ does, or why someone would want to see one, so maybe?