I'm firing myself

There’s a debate about putting in the work. This is another quick one about AI: putting in the work, and what that means.

I’m in a unique position, maybe, because I’ve been putting in the work for decades with all of the creative products out there. The full Adobe suite, all the Apple tools, Logic for music, Final Cut, so many other tools, and all the coding tools. I’ve been coding by hand since I was four or five years old, whenever I could type.

So I’ve been putting in the work. And I understand that the next generation, or people who haven’t put in the work, start using these tools, and the argument is: you should put in the work, or hire someone to put in the work.

Well, I’m firing myself. It’s really weird, because I’ve been putting in the work. I’ve been building my own graphics and designs for years. Years. I’ve hired other people at times, but generally I’ve been learning. I’ve been watching the YouTube tutorials and building things for decades. Whatever tool I need for the job, I try to learn it, and I’ve been doing that forever.

Somehow, with AI, I can replace some of that work. I’m firing myself. And in some ways I’m kind of glad, because that’s a struggle. It’s been fun, but it takes a lot of time to learn those things. Years to learn the tools really thoroughly, and hours just to learn some of the details of how they work.

I don’t think I’ll ever go fully automated with everything I do. But it’s freeing up the time to actually create. A lot of things are repurposed. Creating something from nothing, that’s difficult. Sometimes you’re just meshing ideas together.

But creating a song, a melody? I don’t want AI to write a melody for me. I’ll never do that. I’m not interested. Those come from the soul or something. That’s not something I want AI to do for my art, or for the genesis of the ideas. I don’t want it to create those for me.

What it can do is take my ideas, accelerate them, move them quickly, and keep me from having to work on the tedious little things that have already taken so many hours of my life. That lets me create more. The genesis of where these things come from: that’s where I’m trying to get.

It’s all an experiment. This is the newest thing ever, in the last year or so, and I’m learning so much, philosophically, about workflows, about everything. I’m having great discussions with my kids about it, and their trepidations are completely validated. They didn’t put in the work for decades, so they don’t necessarily like the cheat code that’s going on here. I get it. It’s confusing.

I’m not sure there are any answers right now, but it’s a train that’s not stopping, that’s for sure. We’ll see where it goes. I’m really curious.

I’ve been thinking about all the work people have put in over the years, and I realize I’m one of them. So what does that change mean? It means different things for different people.