Your creative
career is dead

Everyone wants to know the future, but there's never been a time in history when you're more likely to be wrong about what's coming. What we currently call AI can surely lead to catastrophe, but not the rogue robot kind... yet. Today's threat is already beyond containment, and no slowing of frontier development will prevent bad actors from using everything they already have.

What we have today will seem quaint in comparison to the forms AI tools will take in the coming years.

As a result I've started to see the "end-times" conversation as a time-wasting bore. I want our children's children to have a chance at a livable world, but trying to pretend we can slow development of this technology is a dangerous delusion accompanied by cynical political motives and propaganda. Why not look on the bright side, where the acceleration of AI can do things like incentivize nuclear power innovation, on the only viable road to energy independence?

Go on, disavow, regress! Capture every image to silver emulsion, draw every frame, write that code from scratch. Live on the homestead, make everything by hand. Grow food, sell artisanal wares. You can do that, but it's for your comfort. Are you Amish? A peasant in a poor country? No? Well then, it's a hobby. Hobbies are wonderful, but they don't do a thing to change the trajectory of a world fueled by AI.

A few years ago, I’d have said we’re obligated to refuse and sabotage it, and to ignore anyone droning on about inevitability. When I dove in and started using the tools, that view changed: today, I no longer see any benefit in the refusal to engage with AI. What I see differently now is how we can steer—not to escape undesirable ends, but to soften the blows and get some good while we can.

It serves no purpose to theorize about AI futures from the ivory tower of academia, or the bubbles of frontier lab leadership. You have to be at ground zero with this transformative and obliterating technology, burning tokens, offloading your legacy brain to the robot, getting consumed by companies that resemble casinos. Otherwise you can’t truly know what this thing is, because you can’t feel it happening. You won’t understand what can and will be accomplished with it or what must change, including the leadership of the frontier labs themselves.

Despite the endless "slop" discourse on social media, what you learn through engagement is that the commercial creative class will be using these tools an awful lot.

Modern animation is run by rigs, particle systems, simulations, characters following procedural rules, and this process pre-dates AI by decades. Armies of men or alien ships, oceans rising and falling, entire atmospheres and worlds beneath them residing in code. Rest assured, no one drew all of that by hand. Is it less human now in the age of AI tools than it was when people sat in the dark for hours watching it render?

Instead of howling at the moon about how AI can't ever be as brilliant as I am, I'll take a stand as an artist who believes in the positive potentials for disruption in these industries, where the creative class is long overdue for an enema.

I care about a future for my family, country, and the world, in that honest order. But the time for the conversation about how to pace this stage of progress was many years ago. I tell every creative person I know: It’s too late for dooming. Engage with the system while there’s still time to influence what it becomes.