CSG: THE GREAT DIVIDE

Most choices, all choices are made by you. Even accepting the choices made for you, is a choice made.

You are here. 

You’re present in the moments of your journey as best as your senses lead you to believe. You think you’re aware of your surroundings and you’ve  found a decent footing. Watching the cycles of the sun, the weather and nature provides enough information for you to survive. Everything has its place and its time. Staying quiet long enough and still enough will show you that. Even if you miss something once, you’re almost guaranteed to come across it again. It starts to feel like home, complete with the dangers and the unknowns all around you. Your skills and intuitions have kept you alive up to this point complimented by your commitment to assessing your risk to reward ratio in all of your productive undertakings. This is what shapes you. What guides you. Your confidence is boosted by going at it alone and covering more ground than you ever thought you would. Familiarity begins to creep in, but then so too does the unexpected. 

Becoming one with your environment is the first critical skill of survival. What happens when that crosses into singularity?

As creatives we pride ourselves in our ability to use our tools in ways that exceed expectations. Through the most basic form of creative expression, creators have pushed boundaries and challenged the limitations of their time, tools and cultures. It’s true that we have defied the odds and surpassed crushing expectations, often posthumously cementing our contributions to the astonishing feats achieved by the human species category forever.  We use our gifts as the platform for voices unheard or for the amplification of messages that deserve to be experienced. We act as channels of energy interpreting our environments and temporal experiences in an ecosystem that we call the human experience. Every creative is unique. This is true for the journey as well. However as a community, regardless of how internally fragmented and divided, we all agree that any entity or system that challenges our sense of freedom of expression and uniqueness in our identities is a clear threat that stands in opposition of the values that we live by, mocking the code whether knowingly or unknowingly.

The nature of reality is challenged with every passing moment.

In the jungle of the world, this is where we encounter our first great divide. We arrive at a canyon, framed by cliffs on either side and the obligatory watery death below. This comes after regulating our senses and familiarizing ourselves with what we believed to be predictable and consistent terrains. 

The only way to the other side is usually forward.

Staring out into the open, looking down into the abyss and glancing back at where you came from, you quickly come to the realization that you can’t go back, you won’t go down, but you’re not sure if you want to move forward. The fear of the unknown kicks in. The irony is that the entire journey has been unknown, and yet you’ve traveled and traversed everything up until this point. Why? What about the canyon feels like not just a shift in scenery. It’s the gut dropping feeling of knowing you stand on the precipice of whatever is on the other side, which can at times dwarf the even very real dangers of what comes before it. And if you’re not careful, while you stand and assess your next move, while nature and danger continues to lurk all around you, your greatest threat is actually you.

Your choices shape the outcomes long before you can realize it. Mismanaging, mistiming, ignoring or sidestepping only pushes you closer and closer to the proverbial edge. The cliff that prompts choice. Ahead of you is a rope bridge that extends to the other side. Deep within yourself you feel the tug to begin walking. Each step is a representation of your actions taken toward arriving at the next checkpoint. But somewhere inside, you also experience a stirring, causing your heart to race. It almost enchants you to equip your machete and cut the rope. 

One way in, no way out?

Why cut the rope? Why not?

Creative logic vs common logic is always a silent war occurring in our minds. Your creative senses tell you that you know what you know, that it’s tried, tested and true. Anything that seems to be a one track road forward with no guarantee of going back is a trap. And your common logic governed by your common senses reassures you that the only way to truly progress and grow is by moving forward. It tells you that if you don’t advance, the story shifts and you become history. If you cut the rope and stay, you at least know where you’ve come from, you know where you’ve been and you can survive with surety in this domain. If you don’t cut the rope and choose to cross the divide, you accept whatever comes on the other side even if it means that the bridge is cut anyway after you cross. These thoughts race through your mind uncontrollably while you stand there knowing that the clock is still ticking and any choice you make means no do overs. No retries.

In today’s corporate and creative hemispheres, there is a shift occurring that came on the heels of the birth of Artificial Intelligence and the slew of productivity and creative tools born out of it. As creatives we find ourselves struggling with the weight of justifying the decision to remain a purist, traditionalist or artisan, looking only to preserve the authentic rituals and processes that continue to make our crafts unique and distinct. This is unequivocally challenged by the demands on the creative world by the corporate spaces to create and produce and perform at levels that follow the metrics of business and allow for the maximization of profit. Creatives have always fought with the challenge of asserting themselves in the value they provide to the corporate world, who speak a different set of languages in their operations that just by annex- involves creatives. Trying to translate the total value of your craft at any given moment is extremely difficult. But now with A.I generative tools, it seems to have pushed the conversations around recognizing creator value to corporate spaces back over a decade or more.

A.I generative tools offer extremely complex tasks packaged into plug and play interfaces enabling almost anyone to use it, this level of access undermines the foundational skills necessary to create similar outcomes prior to the public access tools. With companies and entities adopting the same technology that the on the ground individuals that run their well oiled machines use, the internal dialogue around the total value of the human input that we as creatives and creators provide comes into question when held up against the minimum effort-high volume output of A.I tech. This now shifts the conversation from seeing your developed and developing skills as necessary, to seeing you fulfill more auxiliary or supplementary roles to ideas and momentum born from A.I tools. This applies to every area across the creative industries. It becomes even more alarming when the conversation extends into implying that your survival depends on your willingness to integrate the tech into your own operations. You either cross over and have a chance at living or staying and dying a death of “appearing outdated and out of touch”. Both philosophies carry varying levels of good possible outcomes, but the scales are imbalanced when one is being labelled as the true indicator of being a progressive creator.

This way of thinking brings us creators out of our familiar grounds and into spaces that we have no control over or cannot truly survive for long in. With automated technology performing creative and production tasks at blink-of-an-eye speeds, this nudges us to confront yet another set of decisions. To work under A.I, subjecting yourself to flying the A.I flag as a prefix to your creative titles or to work above it, using it in coexistence with your established and developing skills. Either way you look at it, it just means that we must cross the bridge but we get to control how quickly we get there and what we do with it on the other side. 

Looking into the future just means looking all around us.

What’s your first step? Will it be your last? 

In the wild, all we have is our skills, compass and our choices. With the dawn of this new era rapidly redefining every single industry, the creative industry is not exempt. While not all jobs are replicable by A.I, the ecosystems that these career titles rely on to survive will undoubtedly change. The transition and translation across and into software/tool stack based production processes is a wobbly and unnerving process that can have you second guessing your decision to cross that rope bridge. It isn't helped by the fact that every wind of technological progress that blows seems to shake and change the way the new systems behave and integrate, ultimately morphing creative processes into a primarily concept heavy, language based, prompt driven, neural filtered reality. It never feels truly stable. All the while though, the tools rely on the traditional knowledge in order to make the optimized and personalized public access tools easy but “authentic”, further adding a slant on what authentic creativity means and ultimately looks like. With these considerations in hand, you stare ahead across the dangling rope bridge that connects the divide. The choice seems too apparent to ignore, but too obvious to be all that there is left. The journey must go on, so as you light your torch, fasten your travel pack and advance into the future, try to remember some things. 

Make no journey unprepared. Make no decision indecisively.

There is knowledge meant for a time and then there is knowledge that is timeless. As creatives, the skills we learn in the wild, the jungles of the world, are the foundational skills. The laws written by nature, space and time. These skills will always be important and necessary to our species’ survival and story. Its relevance may become obscured by the artificial and cosmetic byproducts of convenience, speed and greed. But like with all cycles, the explosive and invasive introduction of A.I into human consciousness and by extension the creative landscape, will eventually run its course. It will eventually take on its own universal language and lose its hype made recognizable by its lack of humanness. It will become distinct and eventually many may prefer to distance themselves entirely and return to the roots of what it means to be a creative and a powerful being, with a soul. Nature forces every species on this planet to grow, to evolve and to fight for their right to exist.The dense jungles of capitalism and excess will continue to be a network that thrives on the uneasiness of the willing creative soul. But when something as inhuman as AI seeks to passively enslave even the best of us, the roads ahead no longer can be guided by maps made by minds that could not comprehend a time like this to come. All we can do at this stage is walk firmly with our compass in hand and make decisions that preserve our code to creativity.