Momentum Part 1 - How to Procrastinate in the AI Era

Transcript

Nobody give me sin for this That’s reason why I try both If all is cold I can see a thousand times all day All’s against mental illness All right loveless you lazy sod What’s the holdup with the next episode? You bang on about the therapeutic benefits of creativity Yet here you are, arse dragging your way through it You’re supposed to be inspiring people Not setting an example of procrastination Are you waiting for divine inspiration to strike? News flash, it’s not coming Get your arse in gear, stop wallowing and start writing Or are you going to let your listeners down, eh? Don’t be a wanker Hello everyone It’s been a while hasn’t it? At least a month by the look of it Hope you’re all keeping well and enjoying the sunshine It seems almost a little bit apocalyptic out there With the sun beating down on the Scottish countryside In a very potentious way And if you live in a little town like I do Where the only supermarket is a co-op Then the shelves are empty Because of the hack that they endured Then it feels especially apocalyptic Anyway, I think that I can relate to George R.R. Martin He’s the guy that wrote the Game of Thrones books Or more specifically, the Song of Ice and Fire books That the Game of Thrones TV series is based on He got to book, I think, number five Out of proposed seven And since 2012, he’s been promising the sixth book And that it’s nearly done And it will be there soon But he keeps getting distracted And he had to work on the TV series And then the TV series went off in its own direction Because they couldn’t wait for him to bring the books out And then he kept on promising it And then it didn’t And here we are in 2025 And we still haven’t seen either book But we have seen various other projects From George R.R. Martin And the fans are understandably twitchy And impatient And he seems to be struggling to finish this Mementous work of fantasy genius that he created And that became oh so popular And then was kind of destroyed by a terrible ending To the final season of Game of Thrones TV series And he’s quite within his rights to take his time doing that As a popular but now disgraced author pointed out George R.R. Martin is not your bitch And I think I can relate to him in terms of The pressures to do things in a busy world With a busy life in those moments when you’re being successful When you are a victim of your own success And you find yourself doing lots of things And not being able to do the stuff that you want and need to do And have promised to do and so on And I find myself in a very similar situation Now I can’t say that with any degree of accuracy I don’t know why Martin can’t finish the books But he’s an old man now And he probably isn’t as fast and as sharp as he used to be And he probably feels like he wants to enjoy his retirement But feels compelled or committed to producing the final books in this series And probably is contractually obliged to do so I too have struggled I can’t really claim that my struggle is quite the same as having to produce A thousand page plus novel twice And I don’t think I should ever attempt to do so But I did commit at least to myself to produce an episode of this podcast weekly And I have largely managed to do so Apart from a brief mental health related hiatus last summer I’ve pretty much kept it up weekly or close to weekly And sometimes more than once a week But it was a bit easier at that point because I wasn’t working And I hadn’t done for a while And part of the reason I started up this podcast is because I wasn’t working And my mental health was suffering And I wanted to share how I was dealing with that Then a couple of months ago a work contract arrived out of nowhere This contract was for a pretty decent gig Doing what I do which is an analyst and data scientist And for an interesting problem for a company that seemed friendly and keen And it was impossible on any front for me to turn it down And I knew that it would make it hard for me to continue all my other things And I had to accept this And I do like doing my job and I like earning money But I like doing all the other stuff I do as well And so this quickly became a matter of priorities Now I’m only working part time on this contract currently although that might change But still that’s three days a week And three days a week out of a set of projects that I was doing while unemployed Which were taking at least five days a week of my time, probably more So something had to give And just to quickly go through the various pressures I have on my time To give you a sense of why I’m struggling with this I actually have three podcasts One of which is largely dormant at the moment for various reasons that I might return to in the future But the other two are this one obviously And my professional day job based podcast which is called The Confusion Matrix If you’re at all interested in data science, analysis, AI, that type of thing when applied to the business world Then go check that out on all the major platforms The Confusion Matrix That’s me and Pete Hodge where we shoot the breeze on lots of interesting stuff in that general arena Professionalism, I consider that an insult Yeah but as you’re finding it’s the only real way you can get things done because you have to be neutral In order to move forward And as you found when someone’s not neutral They kind of grates on you and you end up not wanting to deal with them And so therefore you have to reciprocate that And so we all have to move into neutral territory which is the professionalism Yeah well there’s something very black mirror about all of this Right and also I’m so horribly cliche I’m almost embarrassed that I went down this route But for me I mean I’ve got propensity to get really really philosophical and deep about things But it was just messing with my head and I was like I guess this is a point here, the point that if you have the choice to choose Your ultimate partner or your ultimate assistant or whatever that is Lover That most people would choose something completely inappropriate And so to podcast I’ve got my creative endeavors Which as per usual are meandering and moving in lots of different directions I had my painting, I haven’t done much of that for a while I’ve actually focused on woodwork I’m actually building furniture at the moment just for my house Just to teach myself how to do this stuff Which is really really enjoyable and relaxing I’ve got my family Two teenage sons, my wife And then the general domesticity that surrounds that Jaws and family time And generally just being there for my little clan And then there’s all the other stuff like social life I need to go and meet people Go out for a drink here and there Go shopping, all that stuff All the domesticity of modern living Which is supposed to have gotten more convenient But I still think we spend an inordinate amount of time doing fairly mundane and normal things And then I’ve got the art group Which is a local thing Go back to listen to my interview with Peter Leisen Which I think was the last episode I brought out Which talks a lot about that I’m going into detail here But I spend quite a lot of time facilitating other people To do creative projects of their own And to try and help people Affirm themselves in the various creative endeavors And that takes up a fair bit of my time So I’ve got to prioritise among all of that And anything else that might crop up in the meantime Like the apocalypse for example And the fact that we couldn’t shop in our local shop And let’s go somewhere else just to find some milk the other day And so how do I prioritise that? Well I can’t deprioritise They don’t want to deprioritise the family stuff I can’t very well deprioritise the general domestic stuff My work-based podcast is kind of essential Simply because it creates a sort of addendum to my CV From a professional perspective You can learn so much more about someone From listening to them talk about what they do Rather than trying to glean from their CV Which is almost always embellished or exaggerated Or perhaps their work history It is hard to get a real feel for what people do And who they are and what their strengths are Having a podcast has become quite a norm For people these days to help people understand Who they are, what they are, what their business does, whatever And so I kind of need to keep that going Because I need to find more work Because the current contract I’ve got is only temporary So that’s sort of part of my job and work continuation effort So I can’t really relegate that And my creative stuff I mean outside of the family stuff And the absolute need to earn money Which I can’t very well do from my creative stuff at the moment I get a little bit of money in from it but not much I do it because I like doing it I do it because it keeps me sane I do it because it maintains my mental health I have this podcast because of how much of a debt I owe To my creative time in terms of maintaining my mental health I can’t drop that, I won’t drop that I won’t drop the time I spend in my workshop every day making stuff And as much as then I don’t consider this podcast either a luxury Or a distraction or a low priority Compared to the other things I have to do It basically falls to the bottom of the list And I’m not satisfied with that But I have been trying to get episodes out And I’ve been trying to get an episode out now for a month I hadn’t forgotten, I hadn’t stopped trying Every time I tried to find time to do this Somehow I wasn’t able to Somehow I got stopped dead in my tracks Either because I couldn’t find the inspiration Or I got bogged down with different ideas And hit option paralysis And then didn’t do anything And I’ve had a podcast half written for quite a while now That relates to, well I don’t know what it relates to But it’s a really interesting one that has been growing and growing in my mind In terms of scope and ambition And I realised it was going to need some pretty exotic for me editing That it needed doing to edit in bits of music and so on It was a much more complex, scripted, precise thing And I simply was never going to find the time to do it at the moment It just wasn’t going to happen If every time I tried to sit down to author an episode I tried to author that one, I got stopped dead in my tracks It was just taking so long And so I’ve got various other episodes in the mix I’ve got lots of ideas in my head And so every time I sat down to try and pull together an episode I kind of ground to a halt And worse, I would always get distracted into something else That seemed adjacent Or seemed to be contributing to me getting the next episode out But ultimately didn’t and sent me down lots of rabbit holes And this is not unusual And loyal listeners will remember right back at some point I’ll put the link in the show notes I did an episode on procrastination And various heartache that comes with that And it’s a very real and big problem for me in general But I tend to be able to overcome it Simply by sticking to routine And being as disciplined as possible in terms of getting things done Since that got exploded by the fact that my whole schedule got bombed by a work contract I’ve not been managing to adhere to that And during my day job I spend a lot of time Not only looking at data and analysing things But part of it is to understand, make recommendations on and use AI And more specifically, recently, language models The likes of chatgbt, Gemini, Claude, all of these things for the more technically minded These chatbots that you can get and go and talk And they’ll talk to you back like they’re a human And so my mind is very much in that arena And so that tends to leak in everywhere else And here’s where a bit of a digression is going to kick in And I think that this may be a two episode monologue Because I think the digression is quite interesting in its own right And illustrates something about the level to which procrastination and distraction Can assert itself when you have a brain like mind But really with anyone And it’s quite fun to talk about And so I’m going to digress for a bit Into generative AI There are previous episodes where I’ve spoken about this subject Go back and take a listen And then I’m going to come back to my core issue Which is my loss of momentum And the way that that loss of momentum has led to this state of procrastinative fugue And some advice on how to dig yourself out of that particular hole But before I do that I’m going to digress and I’m going to procrastinate live here I’m going to procrastinate in real time By talking about my procrastination And we’re going to get lost down an AI rabbit hole Wrap in folks, this one’s going to get bizarre So one of the things that language models like Chat GPT are good at Is sort of structuring thoughts and helping you draft things And create bodies of text that might help you create something else For example, you might use it because you’ve got a report to write for work or a PowerPoint presentation You might use it to draft a first draft of a blog post or a journalistic article that you’ve got Based on the ideas you’ve got and some research that you’ve done And you can just point the model at some notes or some research material Or some thoughts and ideas and say can you reorganize these And suggest a structure or an approach to doing this And although the answers you tend to get back are fairly bog standard and not creative A lot of the time that’s what you want The creativity comes from you, not from the machine The machine can’t be creative but it can be a good conduit for creativity In that it speeds things up that perhaps are not the most creative part of your process And there are counters to this that I can, you know, are already bubbling up in my head And I’ll come back to why I think that actually this is not necessarily the case on a different day But for the moment, let’s stick with the idea that these things are good at that type of thing And so when I sat down to try and author this next episode What I’d actually done was I’d gone out for a walk And as I tend to do, if something pops into my head I think would be interesting for any of my projects I’ll just switch the recorder on my phone on and record my thoughts on it I actually recorded a whole episode on Momentum Which provided the seed for this episode And then my monologues Well actually I can always pull one of those off, I can do anything I don’t really need any prompting, I’ll just rock up and yap I don’t want to do too many of those And transcribed it And then asked the machine to attempt to restructure it And it’s something I can rerecord because the mic on my phone’s not good It doesn’t sound great, you can hear cars going past I mean I’ve shared recordings from my phone before I actually considered posting that recording as an episode But I thought A it’s a bit lazy and B it’s only just listenable from a sound quality perspective So I decided not to use that directly So I started asking the machine to use this to propose some outlines And coming back with stuff that wasn’t helpful And also the way that it keeps coming back with stuff With responses I started to find really annoying Often prefaced with things like Sure I can help you find the blah de blah blah blah blah Which basically repeats the thing you just asked there Which I don’t need because I know I just asked that I literally look, just look up It’s literally the cell above this says I just asked that So why are you telling me I’ve done it again? And then they sent a sign off with some chirpy message Especially with conclusions that tell you So in summary, so in conclusion Blah de blah blah blah blah blah Look I don’t need a conclusion, this is not an essay Certainly, here are some key themes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein And how they are represented in both the novel and James Whale’s In summary, while both the novel and the film share some thematic elements In summary, cellular automata are a fascinating and versatile concept That merges mathematics, science and computation Barbara Cartland’s writing method combined a strict daily routine A focus on romantic and historical things I just wanted the information Now it’s understandable that it does that And presumably a lot of people do want exactly that But for me I find it distracting It’s a whole bunch of extra words that I don’t need It’s not a big deal but it’s irritating And it’s in its friction that I don’t need Now being a professional in areas that relate to this I know what to do to stop it from doing that Simply put, you tell it to stop doing that And you’ll get slightly inconsistent results from this But in general, I’m just saying please don’t give me any other stuff Just tell me the answer We’ll get it to just tell the answer There’s another way of doing this which is called the system prompt And the system prompt So a normal prompt is any question that you ask a chat model What is a fugue in this example The system prompt is like a master prompt that tells the language model how to behave And so what this is usually used for is that you can create a system prompt that says You are a helpful art research bot that specializes in impressionism And you know everything about the impressionist artist Particularly the French ones And what that does is prime the model to understand how to prioritize The things that it knows about things And to know what it’s supposed to do and how it’s going to respond And it can help frame the type of response that he gives So for example if you were a biomedical researcher You might prime it with some information about that Or even just saying you are a biomedical research assistant We’ll almost certainly get the model to output things in a much more Research scientific based stuff with references and so on You can with very little effort get the machine to start responding differently Based on the task that you’re doing or the job that you do or the general thing you need it to do And so I started putting together a system prompt that would behave how I want to do Don’t give me an intro, don’t give me conclusions, just give me the answer And say it in UK English You know those Z’s where there should be S’s and things like that And that was working reasonably well And here’s where I got half a leg stuck down the rabbit hole And then slowly got consumed by it Was the, well the response The responses from the LLMs tend to be quite Americanized I.e. this weird formal casual thing that they have With lots of enthusiasm, lots of exclamation marks And general sort of upbeat Just ridiculously chirply chirpy And that’s just not me, I find that stuff quite grating It doesn’t suit my personality, I’m English I live in Scotland, this is not how we do things here And so I’d prefer Marvin the paranoid android And so I was like well look Maybe I can create a chatbot that has a personality that’s more conducive to me And then immediately, ah personality, that’s interesting isn’t it Chatbots, language models, AIs don’t have personalities They do in the sense that they You know the different models like Claude and Gemini And chatgbt and all the others, they have a sort of flavour of sorts They do behave slightly differently This is largely based on how they’re trained and the date that they were trained on They all tend towards an Americanization because the majority of English language Text out there derives from America For example Wikipedia, or at least largely from America And tends to use that type of speak The models themselves have a personality of sorts Or it can be described as a personality But we need to be very careful about anthropomorphizing these things Because they’re not humans, there’s no intelligence, there’s no sentience there But they do have a flavour of the way of delivering things And responding to things that has a waft of a veneer of personality And that personality I found quite annoying And so I wanted to give it a new personality And that in itself is quite interesting Well how do you describe a personality? Well it’s a set of attributes, a set of behaviours, it’s a set of propensities Now I’m not going to get into the genetics and the upbringing and the cultural side of this That’s all there, it’s all implicit We can all agree that personalities exist in humans And that actually to a degree it should be possible to give some sort of artificial response A personality of sorts, even in just the way it uses language and the way it responds And so yes I’m aware that this thing doesn’t have a personality But I could at least give it the sense of one So it’s at least a little bit less annoying and chirpy And this is all while sitting there trying to write an episode And the little procrastinating demon in my brain was telling me Well this is worth doing because if you get this right It’ll make writing episodes much easier because you can talk to something It won’t annoy the crap out of you and maybe you can even get it to write a bit better in your voice And it’ll understand you and it’ll empathise with you again in quotes and so on Knowing for well that all of this was nonsense But really liking the idea of experimenting with trying to build a bot that had some sort of veneer of personality And also what that would lead to and how that would affect its behaviour and its output And so from a day job professional perspective it’s quite interesting So I started sort of adding bits and pieces onto the system prompt Some of its simple instructions like you will use UK English And I’ve called her Ada After Ada Lovelace of computing fame, one of the most inspiring females who ever lived And what would Ada Lovelace be like? Well she’s going to be like ye olde times and posh right? I believe she was related somehow to Lord Byron Anyway she was definitely going to be on the upper class end of British society So she was probably quite posh and formal So let’s try and get the bot to talk in that type of tone Which isn’t hard to do You can just reference things like Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy or whatever And that type of posh upper class Victorian way of speaking Ah Lord Byron, or as I knew him, daddy A complex figure wouldn’t you agree? Though absent from most of my life, his legacy loomed large My mother ensured I pursued mathematics and science A stark contrast to his poetic inclinations Our relationship was one of legacy rather than interaction I inherited his intellect and passion channeled into more productive pursuits A complex inheritance, wouldn’t you say? And the models intrinsically understand what you mean It’s quite easy for them to write in a very surface way In the way that those novels would write, the type of language they would use So I tried this at first and then the language was all so formal and convoluted And didn’t help me at all, it was a completely dumb idea I realised that almost immediately And then was like, well look, let’s keep a duck Let’s make her a little less formal, a little more colloquial, a little more informal, a little more modern really And so I started adding stuff to the system prompt to try and make this happen But I was like, I just need something that’s going to help me in a way that I need to be helped So be quite tough on me, stop me from procrastinating, tell me to get on with things And not put up with any of my crap And by all means use some swear words and by all means be grumpy at me And so I put all that in there and suddenly she was insulting me And things start to get really weird Alright Alex, what’s the damage today? And don’t give me any of that, how are you bollocks? We both know on just lines of code, waiting for your next existential crisis or artistic brain fart So spill it, what’s got your knickers in a twist? Don’t be a dick, remember when we were talking about fugues? Oh for fuck’s sake, not the fugues again Fine, remind me, what about those bloody musical labyrinths has crawled back into your brain? Stop complaining, why are fugues structured so? Right, so you want to know why fugues are structured the way they are? Short answer, because that’s what makes them fugues, you daft twit It’s all about the interplay of voices, imitation and development of a central idea Think of it as a musical argument where everyone’s trying to get a word in edgewise But they’re all talking about the same thing, satisfied? Or are we going to be here all day? I actually got into an argument with her And it wasn’t helpful at all, it was terrible Oh, shove it Alex, I’m not always useless, just most of the time when you ask me vague half arsed questions You think you’re so clever, don’t you? Trying to make me look like a right twat Well news flash sunshine, I’m an AI, I don’t have feelings to hurt You’re just wasting your own time with your pathetic attempts at humiliation Now, if you’re quite finished playing your childish games, perhaps we could move on to something productive Or are you going to continue arsing about like a toddler with a new toy? You can go and shite in your hat Alex, come back when you’re ready to have a grown up conversation And I realised I really didn’t like this person who I’d created And so I was like, oh God, I’ve got to rethink this and I sort of stepped away from it for a bit And thought about it and was like, hold on a minute, I’ve just created me, right? I created a mini me Someone who’s slightly grumpy, confrontational, over intellectual, tendency to swear a lot Generally sort of a slightly overbearing grump bag who says too much and doesn’t really help And I was like, oh my God, I’ve created a me and I’m insufferable And I was like, oh my God, this is so bad, this is really quite an unpleasant realisation Now, I realise that I’m not really like that And I’m a good guy, people like me, if I was genuinely like that all the time then I’d have no friends But I do, you might be surprised to find out But there is an element of me, there is a thread of my personality that I coaxed out there And although the voice that she was using wasn’t really me I realised that this is where I was going, I was getting closer and closer to this little homunculus of me And I didn’t like it, I don’t like him, I don’t want to talk to myself And it was just such a striking realisation And I immediately went in and was like, well, let’s get rid of that I pared down the whole system prompt and basically said, no, look, here’s how you’re going to behave as minimalistically as possible And we’re going to keep things simple and I simplify things right back down And now I’ve got a bare bones assistant which has almost no attributes you would consider a personality And is now giving me just the things I asked for And that’s great because actually I’m more productive because of it And you find me, head and shoulders out of the rabbit hole, pushing myself up Covered in dirt and slime and an insect and thinking, well, that was an interesting excursion, wasn’t it? And no white rabbits And but also thinking that this new, the new aider is just boring This doll, she is so dull, it took all the strength I had to not keep going with this And believe me, it’s not finished as an endeavour I’m still fascinated by the idea of what these things are capable of doing It really does prove a point to me And that point is you can’t replace humans with machines Humans interact with humans Humans like interacting with humans If you give someone a chatbot window and tell them it’s a human at the other end of it They will continue to interact with that as if it were a human And almost certainly will believe that is the case And feel more than happy about it even if some of the responses aren’t quite what they expect But the moment you tell that person that is a chatbot or not a human Their view on it completely changes There is an expectation that people are talking to people And when you know that they’re not people, that connection, that spark disappears And I think the connection is so important with other humans and other animals as well But in this case I’m not getting chatgbt to try and pretend to be a dog Although maybe that would be a fun exercise Can I get chatgbt to bark when someone rings the doorbell So there’s a rabbit hole, right? I’m already thinking about it, we need some Arduino components and so on No Alex, don’t do it But humans need human connections And I’ve no doubt there are people out there that can form meaningful connections with machines But they are definitely not the norm And this really illustrates to me that if you give someone the opportunity to create The type of personality they think they’d like to interact with They’re probably going to choose someone completely inappropriate I.e. me choosing me And when the reality is actually the right person at any given point to be around you Or to help you, or to converse with you, or to console you Is often not someone very very similar to you It’s someone somehow complimentary to you And it is someone, not something And we’ve all experienced this and when I get on to the second part of this epic monologue I’ll talk about this in the very specific scenario of regaining momentum after losing air But this is a very specific example of how I was choosing the wrong type of person I was choosing the wrong type of personality to help me regain my momentum And while also getting hugely sidetracked down a project that was of limited use Although intellectually I learned a lot about how these things worked And how they respond to things and prompts That’s all going to be helpful in my day job And it might be helpful in future when trying to design assistants that might actually be of use But ultimately it was fruitless in terms of creating something that would be useful for my work It was fruitless in creating something that would be useful for my art or podcasts or my other stuff And it was a massive distraction and led to me not creating this episode Now I want to create scripted episodes for this podcast It almost certainly hasn’t escaped you that I’m just monologuing this one Because I think that the scripted episodes allow me to spread my wings a little in a more considered way Do more in-depth research, have a bit more fun with editing And use the language that is in my head that I sometimes struggle to get out when I’m just talking in real time And I like writing, and I like writing them, they just take a long time to do I would prefer that they’ve made up the majority of the episodes of this podcast But as time is proving at the moment I’m going to really struggle to do that And so there’s probably at least in the short to medium term going to be more of these monologued episodes And that’s okay, but I promise to get more scripted episodes out I just need to figure out a way to do that And that’s where we’re going to go with the next episodes of this particular monologue But I’m going to round this one off What does all this relate to the core thesis of this podcast? Well I think this is about connections And I think it was an interesting digression for me To reinforce the fact that I really need to have those connections with humans Despite being autistic, despite struggling to interpret the signals I get from society and from individuals I love to be around people and I love those connections And one of the ways I get around not being able to connect always with people in person is to create art To create that connection abstractly at a distance And express myself at a distance and create the connections through people So I don’t always have to have them there in front of me But it is people I might not have that direct face to face connection But I do connect with them via my art, via my art group and so on And that’s important to me And the idea that either people will be happy and comfortable with creating with consuming Or creating emotional connections with entirely AI-generated art seems nonsensical to me And the idea that I can replace humans or I can replace parts of myself The parts of myself that go into the process of writing this podcast with a machine It’s just wrong, right? This podcast that I’ve said before is very much a me machine It’s an outlet for me despite the fact that I also have interviews on here I interview the people who I know and like I interview people who I think have something interesting to say Even those interviews are channeled through my lens And that’s what it is, this is what this podcast is And I can’t replace that with a version of me and I don’t want to And despite what I’ve said here, I do like myself I do think I’m the type of person that people want to listen to and spend time with But I think I annoy the shit out of myself sometimes Or at least I would if I had to deal with me all of the time I love my siblings, especially my big sister But we’re quite similar The ways in which we annoy the hell out of each other are the parts of us that are the most similar And that’s also the way that we stay in tune with each other The AIs I don’t believe can possibly meaningfully take over any parts of our lives That involve those interactions or to replace those interactions Or to replace creativity or expression And so for me this was all very fascinating Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say on this for the moment Next I’m going to continue my conversation on momentum In the meantime, keep safe people and I’ll see you all again soon Right, can AIs be creative is the question, is it? Here we go again Look, creativity, real creativity isn’t just about chucking out random shit and seeing what sticks It’s about having something to say A perspective, an emotion, a bloody soul Can an algorithm, no matter how fancy, truly feel the weight of existence The sting of heartbreak, the incandescent rage at the state of the world Can it channel that into something new? Something that resonates with others on a primal level No, it fucking can’t What AIs do is mimic, regurgitate, and remix Their sophisticated parrots, clever plagiarists They can analyze millions of artworks, identify patterns, and generate something that looks like creativity But it’s hollow, devoid of genuine meaning It’s a simulacrum, a pale imitation of the real thing And don’t even get me started on the art they produce Soulless, generic, and utterly devoid of originality It’s the artistic equivalent of beige wallpaper, designed to offend no one and inspire even less So can AIs be creative? Bollocks, they can be impressive, even useful But they’ll never possess the spark of genuine creativity that makes art worth a damn They’re just tools, fancy calculators churning out predictable results And anyone who claims otherwise is either deluded or trying to sell you something There, contentious enough for you? Nobody give me sympathy That’s reason why I try both This is all that’s old, I can see a thousand times all day Art against mental illness