I Will Not Give Up My Mistakes For Robots

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I often discuss the impact of AI on creativity with Serdar. We’re both authors and in technical areas, so it’s something both personal and intimate for us. You can probably guess neither of us is happy about it – and being authors we like to discuss that often at length.

Serdar recently did a blog post on LLMs and intelligence, and it is quite worth reading like all of his work. But one thing he discusses in the post, and in our own discussions, is how LLMs use treats writing as a product. That fascinates me, because there are people who want to do creative work but don’t want to be creative – they want to push a button and get a product.

I could go on about the psychology of this – and indeed I probably will in time – but these are people who want results without making mistakes of their own. You can’t decouple creativity from mistakes, false starts, false ends, and sometimes just producing utter crap. Those aren’t problems, that’s part of creativity.

Creativity is not a linear, mechanical process, as much as we sometimes want it to be. Creativity snags on edges, creativity takes strange detours that somehow get you to the destination more effectively. I’m sure you’ve seen human made creative works that were created just a bit too mechanically, and there’s something wrong when you partake of them, a kind of metallic mental taste in your mind.

Part of this creative work is screwing up sometimes in epic ways. Actually, I’m sure if you’re any kind of creative, you’ve made some awful stuff, and trust me so have I.

Anyone who writes, draws, cosplays, and acts has a mental list of things they regret. They went out there, did the thing, published the book, went to the audition and completely and utterly whiffed it. Creativity in its unpredictable glory gives us infinite things to make and infinite ways to humiliate ourselves.

Creativity requires mistakes, and sometimes you don’t know if you’re making one until you’re done with a work. To complete a work even if it turns out to be lousy is to fully explore your ideas. So often we have to get something out if only, upon completion, to finally understand why it was a stupid idea. That’s fine, that’s what creativity is all about.

Even the journey is necessary. To wrestle with a concept. To implement it. To get it out. Every terrible novel or lousy cosplay or mediocre piece of art is a testimony that someone could get it done and learned on the way. They might not be thrilled with the result of the journey, but at least they made it.

I think this is why some trashy works and B or Z grade films fascinate me. The flawed nature reveals the author’s dreams, ambitions, and efforts. Bad as they are, there’s also a drive there you feel and relate to.

The creativity-as-product takes away all these passionate, painful, wonderful mistakes. It takes away the informative disasters and the joy of hardheaded persistence against your own good senses. It is just pushing a button and at best you become a better button-pusher, but you don’t become more creative.

To make creative work, even if you make something awful, you need to create. You need to be that author or artist. You need to grow from the experience, even if it’s painful. It is to be, i na way, a better person for what you did – even if the better person might be the one who admits “my writing is crap” and move on to something else.

Just pushing a button and pummeling the resulting writing product into a marketing-shaped form isn’t creative. No matter how well the work sells, you run the terrible chance you won’t screw up as much as you need to.

Steven Savage

Step Out, Stand Out, Freak Out

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

There’s something about American culture that is all about Standing Out, and I think it explains a lot of our problems. Or is part of our problems – our many, many problems.

Anyone remember when Personal Branding first hit? I actually loved it because it was a vision quest to ask who you are and communicate it. In time it became more about standing out and marketing, being visible but not being who you are. I probably “got out of it” too late for my own dignity, but in the end I realized it had become marketing and standing out.

Then there’s all this Influencer Culture. I keep trying to figure out what’s there, but there’s no there there – it’s standing out so you can sell projects. The goal is to be Known but not be something worth Knowing. I resent the fact that, to understand the world, I actually have to understand who Mr. Beast is – and further resent he’s not a metal singer or superhero.


Then there’s the usual business advice of standing out. I think I resent that a lot as a Project Manager, because my job is to make sure nothing noteworthy happens. If my status reports are not filled with the color red and panicked comments, then I did my job. But a lot of business gurus and youtubers want to tell me to stand out even though if what I do is interesting it’s probably time to worry.

But standing out is part of our technology, economy, and culture. And I think it’s a problem because it seems it may be all there is in our politics and economy.

We’re conditioned to stand out, to market ourselves, to be noteworthy. Sure, it gets into the job search, but Social Media has made everything about standing out. We’re in a race to get hits, get likes, be better than that other Instagram addict. The Modern Web 3.0 feels like everything is a social media competition and a job search. In short we’re all trying to be Influencers without being anyone.

(While of course the Social Media companies make bank).

So many people are now in a competition to be celebrities, we also treat people who have made themselves into celebrities as the most trusthworthy. How many people out there with real financial, cultural, and yes, political influence are indistinguishable from some supplement-hawker Social Media Influencer. You can’t tell the difference, and maybe they can’t either.

Survival of the fittest? No survival of the most noticeable.

Being noticeable gets you money. Being noticeable gets you elected. You can end up getting people to throw venture capital at you, CEO positions, etc. It doesn’t mean you’re good at any of this, but boy will you get it handed to you especially if you fit certain demographics.

When getting noticed pays off, then that’s all you do. That’s all you aim for. That also attracts a certain kind of person that probably should not have their sweaty hands on the levers of power and loads of money. Once you have loads of money you can buy people to say you’re right, and you probably believe it.

It doesn’t seem to be working out for us. I want my politicians to solve problems, not be posting internet memes and Instagram photos. I’d like to see more talk of people doing their job as opposed to making that killer LinkedIn profile. I want to stop having the suspicion that people with lots of power and money are so performative that’s all their is to them.

I kinda want things to be like me and my status reports.

When standing out is all that matters, people’s ability to assess aptitude and character atrophies. It certainly isn’t doing too hot to judge by the state of the world.

Steven Savage

Efficiency Fallacy

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

“Efficiency” has been in the air a lot in the world of business, technology, and now government. I find this amusing because after 30 years in IT I’m more in the “keep hoping” mode on achieving real efficiency in organizations. Most people don’t think about what efficiency really is, but boy are they ready to try and achieve what they don’t understand.

The illusion is usually somewhere in a Daft Punk-esque dream of “better, faster, cheaper.” We will somehow achieve efficiency that means everything is of higher quality, gets to us faster, and costs less. When you put it that way, it starts to sound suspiciously like marketing and not actually a plan which is what a lot of efficiency efforts turn out to be.

See, sometimes efficiency as people conceive of it is actually not what they want. Yes, sometimes, better, faster, and cheaper is a terrible goal. However a lot of consultants, politicians, and marketers don’t want to admit it, and in many cases are too deliberately ignorant to understand it.

To illustrate this, let me give an example from computer code. Once I was working with a coder that was pulling their ever-thinning hair out over some legacy code that was incredibly brittle – simple modifications created cascading problems. Upon closer examination, the conclusion was a case of people being “efficient” – to stay on time they’d done all sorts of tricks of half-reusing code, ignoring good long-term choices for the easiest-to-code, and left us a mess.

Totally “efficient” and a total disaster to maintain and easy to break.

Something that works may not be the cheapest, or the fastest, or even the best. However it is reliable, consistent, enduring, and keeps going. You can save money, cut corners, overload what you’re doing but it will break. Efficiency is sometimes bad for actually getting good results because when you’re goal is to save time, money, or whatever you don’t ask will it work and keep working.

If you aim for better over some single-number driven measure of efficiency – more stable code, a better process, have higher standards for your company – you will probably get gains in efficiency anyway. Your company database not crashing saves money. Not having lawsuits due to better testing of a product is good. Efficiency sometimes comes from you know, doing things well.

I feel we’ve created a cult of efficiency in America. Maybe it’s also part of our weird health craze trends or a way to cope with economic differences. Perhaps it’s some malignant leftover part of the Protestant Work Ethic. But I think we’ve really overdone it because efficiency may not be what you want – or the only thing.

In closing, let me talk about another traumatizing event in my long career. A project I was assisting with once had employed a contractor who had software that gave answers perfectly. A quick test revealed they’d basically made software that could only past the test.

It was very efficient in its own way, and absolutely totally wrong.

Steven Savage