Seeing Creativity Like a Language Model

by Dan Shipper in Chain of Thought

I’m writing a book about the worldview I’ve developed by writing, coding, and living with AI. Last week I published the third piece from it, about how AI will impact business. Here’s the fourth, about how AI will impact creative work. It’s a synthesis of my previous writing on the topic, along with some updated thinking.—Dan Shipper

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In 2023, I was at a low point in my journey with Every. I'd been running the business for several years but our growth was stagnant. My writing felt stagnant, and my co-founder had just left to run another company. I dreaded walking into a party because I knew I was going to be asked about what I do. And when I was asked about it, it would stick in my throat, like a first-time actor frozen backstage after hearing their cue.

I needed to figure out what to do with myself—with my life, with my work, with my company. I'd always struggled with the tension between being an entrepreneur and being a writer. For the previous several years, I had leaned more towards the entrepreneur side of things. It felt more legible, lucrative, and prestigious. My last company had been a startup, too, so I was used to being able to walk into a room and talk about myself as a founder.

I realized that if I was really honest with myself, I actually wanted to be a writer. But I also wanted to have a great business—or maybe a few great businesses. And the two seemed mutually exclusive. I had no examples to turn to. Most of Silicon Valley lore says that a CEO doesn’t have time for personal writing or any other form of creative work. My own experience confirmed as much. Being a CEO was both time-consuming and emotionally taxing. It wasn’t conducive to the space required to be really creative.

This was in the very early days of ChatGPT, when the model was still GPT-3. Hoping to resolve my existential dilemma, I decided to ask for a list of writers who also had great businesses—in other words, a list of people to look up to.

It immediately spat out a few great answers. One was Sam Harris, a writer, philosopher, and neuroscientist who has published many books, has a really popular podcast, and also has an extremely popular meditation app called Waking Up. I'd known about Harris for a long time, but I'd never really connected the dots—that he'd built the kind of career and business that I aspired to.

Another example that came up was Bill Simmons, the famous sportswriter and podcaster who started Grantland and later founded The Ringer, which he sold to Spotify for around $200 million. Again, I'd heard of Bill Simmons, but I'd never thought about him in this way.

ChatGPT came back with a bunch of other names: Ezra Klein, and Nate Silver, and John Green. All writers who I knew about and loved, but who, suddenly, I was seeing in a different light.

In the Google era, I would only have been able to Google for “writers who are also great business people” and hope that someone else had thought to create an article or blog post naming those people. In my case, no one had really done that. My path in life was not yet well-defined.

How technology reshapes creative work

Most discussions about how AI will affect creative work revolve around fears that it might completely replace it. We imagine a doomsday world where AI agents autonomously creating tasty slop push real artists to the side. I don't think that's going to happen. But AI will change art, creativity, and creative work.

Technology doesn't tend to eliminate artists or art forms, but it does tend to change art forms and the skills required to be an artist. TV, radio, and the Internet didn't eliminate books. But it did turn books from a mass medium, the primary way in which educated people learned about the world, to something more niche and aspirational. The same thing happened with musicals. Once the dominant form of popular entertainment in America, musicals still exist, and the aspirational nature of being on Broadway is still a part of popular consciousness. But musicals are more expensive, more special, compared to, say, TikTok videos where young people sing and dance for the camera.

Concerns around AI and art largely boil down to the fear that AI can reproduce exactly any work that an artist does. Taking any paragraph of text from a writer, an AI could probably write that. It’s the same thing with a given painting or film clip. But if you look closely, this is the same old rationalist concern. It identifies art and its value as just the text on the page or the pixels in the image—completely divorced from context and history. But as we've seen in science and business, context is king. The context within which an AI-generated work is created is necessarily different from that of a human creative, and while in certain circumstances those works will be interchangeable, in many other ones they never will be.

Moreover, I think that AI will be a boon to creativity and creative work for those who embrace it. Most groundbreaking art is taboo at first. And the cultural taboo around using AI for art signals that it is fertile ground for the brave creatives who embrace it to produce novel works.

Let's talk about what that looks like.

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