Think about the feeling of happiness and fulfillment that comes when you make things.
You feel it when you spend hours editing words and sentences to convey what’s precisely in your mind.
You feel it when lines of elegant code that you carefully wrote ship, solving a problem for your users.
You feel it when you spend hours on making a video – editing and re-editing until the clips come out coherent.
These are all labours of love. The labour of love starts when an idea pops up in our minds but feels intense as we shape the idea towards completion.
Perhaps they call it labour because the process of making things feels painful – you have to engage your mind and chisel with your hands to get your art form to the state you want.
The joy certainly comes after we go through the pain of shaping the it.
But making things with AI doesn’t feel the same way.
I made a simple app yesterday with Replit. It took me a couple of prompts – in ten minutes, I had a working prototype!
I certainly felt blown away by what AI delivered. I was definitely shaping what AI was doing, but I didn’t feel like I was chiseling it.
Prompting AI felt neither difficult nor did it feel like I was engaging my mind. The creative side of me didn’t feel any sense of fulfillment or joy looking at the final output.
Looking back today, how we made digital things feels similar to how artists handcrafted physical things – handbags, pinnal koodai, delicious food or pastry. There’s a lot of parallels you can draw.
The artists who made those things leveraged tools, of course. But the bulk of the work was done by their own mental and physical capacities. They developed a relationship with their art form while it was being shaped, and the end product felt like it was truly theirs.
How we made digital things pre-AI feels very similar to how artists handcrafted physical things. We had digital tools, sure, but they were more like threads and knives and needles – they were just the means to the art forms we were creating. Our minds were still doing the bulk of the work. We weren’t outsourcing the thinking and the making.
With AI, though, we’re all transitioning from being digital artists to digital factory workers. We just need to insert something into the AI machine and it gives us something back in no time.
There’s less labour from our side and there’s less contact with the art form while it’s taking shape. You get something you wanted, and you are in awe of it. But there’s very little sense of accomplishment and joy – because there’s very little labour from your side. Just the sense of finishing a task.
Perhaps the new art form is now in curating and assembling prompts that get you to what you want, but it feels one abstraction away from the actual art being created.
Hopefully, I learn to derive joy from it.
Shankar is thinking 