Unleashing creativity or more of the ordinary?

...the importance of being weird

I have been thinking about chatGPT. Well, not just thinking. I started interacting.

In the last few days I asked a quick coding question and received a correct and succinct reply.

Just now, I asked for a sonnet about my work and immediately was served up:

Amidst maps and data, I do spend my days

Analyzing patterns, hidden from the crowd

Uncovering insights, new ways to pave

A path towards solutions, clear and proud

My eyes are trained to see the bigger scope

The interplay of earth and human form

The shape of cities, the flow of slope, the forces that govern, in a steady norm

I use technology, both old and new

To make the invisible, visible

To bring the abstract, into the view

And help my clients make decisions critical

I am a geospatial consultant

A guide in a complex world, persistent.

These are fun indulgences. I don’t fear this AI stuff. I fear the people that don’t understand what happens under the hood.

The magic of chatGPT is speed. It can quickly write and create by scanning the ordinariness of abundant and potentially waste-strewn content.

Think about the evolution of our U.S. education system. It was created to calibrate a population for productivity in an emerging industrial society.

To make us interchangable.

• Do this the same way over and over and after 30 years, retire

• Live in this area with people that value and do things the way you do (housing developments)

• Go into debt for an education that rewards sameness and didactic recall

• Strive to buy the things that lock in the need to keep the tedious 9 to 5 job

Because we were all taught to follow the same rules when writing (topic sentence anyone?), countless rubrics in research methodology, musical hits in the top 20, bestselling books—are you still surprised that AI can replicate “us” and even improve our output with the vast resources available to train the model across giga-platforms?

Think of Marvel Universe or DC movie enterprises. Oh you liked that thing? Here are dozens more just like it…

I agree with Percival Everett, acclaimed professor and author. I don’t care to make everything easy or even attainable.

The point quite often, is to reward the thinker, the curious, the determined.

I don’t put my finger on the scale to sell more books or participate in multiple-platform promotions beyond simply saying, here is this thing I made.

Maybe its for you, maybe it isn’t…