"Overall, I rely on on AI to help me design more and design faster."

"Come up with a ton of ideas Choose a promising set from within those ideas Riff on those ideas, even if creating more in the combination and variation of them Converge those ideas until arriving at a promising solution (or set of solutions)"

"Step 1 takes forever. It always does."

"Midjourney sucks at step 2."

"Why doesn’t Midjourney do variations automatically? Aside from business reasons, it doesn’t have a way to determine which of the original ideas to riff on."

"Once it’s directed to riff, though, Midjourney is great at step 3. And it goes back to sucking at step 4."

"AI is great anything quantity-related and bad and anything quality-related."

"snap judgments of intuition are rarities in the history of world-changing ideas. Most hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames."

"They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there’s an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength"

"But that long incubation period is also their strength, because true insights require you to think something that one has thought before in quite the same way."

"But maybe what we need is a slower generation process, with room to ruminate and let ideas collide on their own."

"Said differently, the combination of her own experiences is the training data for how to generate this so quickly."

"diffusion—the kind of model Midjourney and other image generators like it use—works by understanding the relationship between an image and the text used to describe it, at scale."

"So, if it finds millions of images that relate the word “cyclops” to an image of a face with only one eye as opposed to two, the likelihood is high that a prompt containing the word “cyclops” desires a one-eyed face as a result. In other words, it leans heavily on averages"

"the closer the training data matches an average, the higher degree of confidence that the result is more “correct,” or at least desirable."

"The problem is that this is the polar opposite of what we consider creativity to be. Creativity isn’t about averages. It’s about the outliers, sometimes the one thing that’s different than all the rest."

"Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you’ve made is meaningful to you."

"So the only way for AI to figure out something that we haven’t is for the creation to surpass its creator."

"We don’t need AI to make art. We need AI to write emails and clean the house and deliver the groceries so humans can make more art."