Judgment | Seth’s Blog

AI pushes us to do what we actually get paid to do: make decisions.

Craft used to drive our hours or even days. Get the pen lines just right. Source the Letraset. Get your instrument in tune. Sweat the details, because the details are everything.

Now, I can choose from 1,000 typefaces, and they’re all optically correct. Autotune has transformed commercial music, and the new AI grammar tools make it trivially easy to make edits or find errors.

The part of us that’s focused on getting it done so we can move on to the next thing accepts the defaults and settles for what the algorithm offers.

That ignores the real work. Taking ownership of the decision.

This or that. The system tees them up. We decide (or answer with “none of the above.”)

Reclaiming agency pushes us away from, “I’m just doing my job,” and into, “I made that.”

PS I made this art in a few moments with AI, but I’d like to be clear that every word I publish, in every book or blog post, is written from scratch, by me. No team, no AI. If that changes, I’ll let you know.

October 16, 2023