When new creation technologies arrive, they make the best a little worse and the bad a lot better.
Desktop publishing made every local garage sale sign a lot more legible, but can’t quite replace the hand-kerned and tweaked typography of the era before.
A smartphone in your pocket takes far better video of the family cookout than a super 8 camera ever could, but it’s no match for Hitchcock shooting in 35mm.
Autotune makes an average singer much better, but a world fueled by autotune might not have room for Tom Waits.
Of course, all of this matters more than ever, because AI is the great smush.
Most forms of human expression are smushed by a decent AI. None of it is as good as genius-level human work, and much of it is better than what was average a generation ago.
The smush creates volume, volume that often redefines our understanding of quality. And that volume establishes a new standard, until it gets smushed again.
You would think that the smush creates more demand for distinctive, handmade, human work. And that’s true–remarkable works of genius and originality have a chance to do better than ever. But the smush harms the market for pretty-good or even very-good human work. Because there’s less of that, less genius slips in as well.
Avoiding the tools is optional. Pushing harder than ever for the top tier isn’t.