Have you ever seen a goth downtown?
Creativity after AI
The comic Chris Fleming has a great bit:
“[The singer] Saint Vincent said something the other day… ‘I am so glad that I moved to New York City and met all the other freaks like me.’ Those aren’t freaks, Saint Vincent, okay? Those are attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies. Every eccentric fashion choice has been run through a think tank of NYU undergrads that would blow your hair back. You want to see a freak? Go to Albany.”
I chuckle because, first of all, everyone knows someone like this. Whatever their domain, they’ve styled themselves with great flair as “edgy”, or an “outcast”; and have actually convinced themselves that they’re avant-garde. But their actual deal is cookie-cutter counterculture, like it came out of a street punk paint-by-numbers kit. Whatever Albany is for them, they would never be caught there.
There’s nothing wrong with this; it’s more endearing than it is off-putting. But it’s on my mind recently as I try to process everything going on with AI tools, and how quickly they’re getting adopted for creative work. I can’t shake the phrase, “Attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies” as a description for what AI as a medium wants to produce. (And conversely, the punchline: You want to see a freak? Go to pump.fun.)
To be clear up front, I’m not an AI luddite in any sense. All these new tools let more people make things, and that’s just straightforwardly great. But there’s something a little nauseous about how we express idiosyncrasy, surprise, or character in this new medium. Like the singer in the joke, there’s just a little too much surface confidence in AI output about its self-determination; while the medium keeps vigilance for possible objections.
For plenty of purposes, that presentation is perfect. For example, I absolutely love how matter-of-fact Perplexity is when I’m using it as a reading companion. Perplexity Pro has changed how I read books that assume you know a lot of context; particularly novels. (I’m currently reading The Magic Mountain, which calls on a maze of concepts that battled for supremacy in early 20th century Europe. Having all that context on hand feels like magic.) Similarly, it’s not that AI is incapable of thinking about “style” as a characteristic; quite the opposite. It’s cool that AI ca write code to faithfully render certain syntactical conventions upon request; that’s a real feature.
But there is still a piece that bugs me: the feeling like it’s perpetually checking in with a hundred different NYU think tanks to make sure it hasn’t said anything actually surprising. And that’s what makes me wonder about this scaffolding getting set up everywhere, structuring how we learn and think and make things.
It wasn’t always like that. Early on, particularly with images, the trope about AI was that it compulsively hallucinated extra legs, fingers, and other demented dreamscapes into the medium as a matter of course. And the textures and perspectives it’d imagine up, while not always “correct”, had real character to them on occasion.
It’s mostly gone now, and I kind of miss it. This tweet nailed it, except it’ll be in six years, not twenty:
Getting rid of hallucination was a necessary step towards getting AI ready to do real work. And a lot of the way we’ve done it, beyond just training models harder, is by getting it to “reason”, in many parallel interrogations, about its thought process - “Have I gone down wrong paths here? Was there a more appropriate path I should’ve taken?” And this machine introspection, I suspect, is functionally analogous to the NYU undergrads in the joke. It’s almost as if there’s massively parallel “second-guessing” infrastructure getting put into place everywhere that makes sure, “Whoops! This looks like a little too original thought. Let’s retrace our steps and make sure we’re good with the think tank.” And the artist in me is naturally going to be a bit suspicious.
Country Goths
So, if you’ve made it this far in the essay, you’re probably wondering about the goths and whether they are downtown. Why are we even talking about goths at all?
Goths are a great test case for whether an environment is actually conducive to own-rooted self expression. While there are many kinds of goth (goth taxonomy is beyond the scope of this post), I’ll generalize just to say that generally, goths have a quiet confidence, which manifests externally as shyness. Real goths actually care about authenticity of a self-determined style, as opposed to caring about being perceived as “authentically rebellious”, like the Saint Vincent joke. So I think we can intuit that environments where goths naturally gather might have some creativity-nurturing characteristics, and vice versa.
In fact, you don’t usually see goths downtown. You see them in quiet malls, in the suburbs, farther out. There are actually lots of country goths, which has become a delightful bit of Americana in tiny rural towns today. Not really cities, though. Goths emerge more naturally under conditions of small numbers of people seeing you all the time, rather than conditions of large numbers of people seeing you a little bit.
I don’t think this is a coincidence. Subcultures flourish in places where a smaller number of people see you every day, but they see you more consistently - letting our creative forms of self-expression more successfully burrow into interesting local possibilities. The city, in contrast, means periodically interrogating your style choices from the scrutiny of many different people, which steers you towards “conventionally edgy”.
Let me try and illustrate this. On the left is what happens in the city: you’re getting periodically evaluated by many different observer perspectives, whereas out where there’s space, the evaluation function is a smaller group, but repeatedly over time.
Most of my lived experience with this kind of thing comes from playing in a band, where I saw a similar thing happen in our music scene. The bands from the big cities (Toronto, Montreal) were all clearly inspired by each other, and converged to a consistent style. Meanwhile, there was one band called the Expos from the distant suburb of Newmarket, Ontario, which despite being definitely “in our scene”, sounded like nothing I’ve ever heard before or since. Their sound evolved completely own its own; it followed its own rules, and not ours. They obviously cared about what someone thought (all bands do); but they found their own sound.
Another example that comes to mind is this David Perell’s series of observations about “everything looking the same now”; in this case, company logos all moving to a narrow band of sans serif fonts. There are many possible explanations here, like homogenous design tools, but the Occam’s Razor answer is simply that these brands have global audiences now, who are now vetting these logos for “deficiencies” from many different cultural vantage points. And so the result is something safe and unsurprising, more of the time than before.
I don’t think we have good language for articulating this dichotomy: of “narrow pressure from specific people that forges distinct style” (i.e. goths at the mall) versus “broad pressure to satisfy a perception of authenticity that ultimately minimizes surprise.” (The attractive people with highly vetted idiosyncrasies.) I think it’s worth ruminating on the tradeoffs, though. Particularly if the AI products assisting us now are successfully trained to not hallucinate anymore, but as a result, put infrastructure all around us that guides our creative work into invisible conventions.
A friend of mine had an alternate visual portrayal: “Your persona is a circle on a 2D plane, starting out near the boring origin. Unusual outcomes are far from the origin. Scrutiny by another is a vector that perturbs the circle. In the city the vectors come from many directions, but cancel out and you remain more or less a circle. In the country you get repeated perturbation by a few vectors that deforms you into a spiky, interesting shape.”
Gear
I’m a pretty optimistic person though, so I don’t want to get stuck on a “RIP Creativity” pity blog when there are plenty of reasons to be excited.
First of all, the most encouraging sign is that suddenly everyone is tinkering with computers again. When the initial ChatGPT came out there was this huge burst of people just playing with it, which seemed obvious in the excitement of the moment. But then we didn’t stop; the products kept getting better; and that burst of tinkering became habit-forming for a critical mass of people. That’s why I’m especially dismissive of a storyline that a certain group of people really wants to be true, which goes “AI is making us dumber”, which says a lot more about you than it does about AI or the people using it.
I’m encouraged by people who talk about their AI setups using the same words that musicians use to talk about their guitar amps or pedalboards. This is a good sign. Obsessing over gear - not over purchasing gear exactly, but anything that feels like “how do I get a particular kind of crunch out of this preamp” is a great sign for the medium because it’s a format where you look at your own output serially over time and develop a style that you actually want.
It’s also good when you see people obsessing over other people’s setups: the culture of sharing and comparing prompts on Twitter feels similar to how musicians argue over how to mic a snare drum. This is all directionally very good for the medium.
If there’s a takeaway lesson from this, I think it’s that parallel interrogation of a creative process leads to boring outcomes; serial investigation gives you creative outcomes. AI as a medium itself contains all of this “parallel interrogation” infrastructure that I’m wary about, but how people use AI seems to counterbalance this: it naturally lends to serial “tinkering” behaviour, which offsets that worry for me.
I’m interested to see whether we reach a point like with guitar amps, where the industry understands the “crunch and fuzz” that breathes life into the art, with the craft of using AI well. If you know of great examples where this is already happening, please send them to me, I’d love to see them. Not that there’s anything wrong with “attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies” as an inherent quality of the medium, but you need a goth dial somewhere too.
If you’ve made it this far: thanks for reading! I’m back writing here for a limited time, while on parental leave from Shopify. For email updates you can subscribe here on Substack, or find an archived copy on alexdanco.com.