Borrowing creativity from a machine

In the early 1950s, the Betty Crocker Company introduced a cake mix so that people could readily make excellent-tasting cakes at home. No muss, no fuss: just add water, mix, and bake. The product failed, even though taste tests confirmed that people liked the result. Why? An after-the-fact effort was made to find the reasons. As the market researchers Bonnie Goebert and Herma Rosenthal put it:

"The cake mix was a little too simple. The consumer felt no sense of accomplishment, no involvement with the product. It made her feel useless, especially if somewhere her aproned mom was still whipping up cakes from scratch."

— Feeling of Self, Emotional Design by Don Norman

When Friedrich Nietzsche switched from handwritten writing to typewriting, a subtle change was noticed in his work. After his friends had read his recent writings, they knew something was missing. "This is not how Nietzsche writes."

Yes, every time a new technology comes, it provides something and takes one thing away. With the theories showing up around humans evolving towards a new species called Homo technologicus, we can see that, in the far distant future, we would have smaller brains as we would have to think less, and machines would do it for us.

With the rapid advancement of AI, we are at ease. It sorts out all the boring stuff. It can write software like an efficient engineer. You personally might have produced work with the help of an AI chatbot. ChatGPT in one tab and a writing document in another. How accomplished do you feel after producing that work? Does it bear a sense of self?

Technology's success is solely dependent on the usage and behavioural patterns that emerge after it is introduced. If there is a world full of AI writers, that increases the value of writers who write with their own minds, typing away words for hours.

If AI is developing software, engineers find creativity in building their own things in a different way, be it with the help of AI or not.

We are approximately two years into the AI era. Whether it's going to stay this hyped is a statistical question. Was there ever any technology that achieved this much craze?

Almost certainly.

The success of a good piece of writing, software, or painting solely depends on the reactive preference humanity has towards it.

When you write a piece of code with AI or create a design with it, how proud are you of that thing? And how proud are other people of the thing you just produced?

That'll determine where any technology leads us.

For now, it's just robots replacing people doing robotic jobs.