My son made a rocket ship the other day, and the tip of the rocket is a shark’s head.
Rocket shark. That’s sick. I would make that movie. Somebody made Sharknado, and then they made five more.
He draws the way kids do everything. He does it because making things is what you do. It feels good, it looks good, and it’s fun. I’d bet money he never stopped to ask whether a rocket is allowed to have teeth.
The line everybody quotes
There’s a line that gets pinned on Picasso. I can never remember it exactly, so I looked it up: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
Time printed the quote in 1976, three years after Picasso died, and nobody has found where he said it. I’m keeping it anyway.
Most of us read the line as nostalgia. You get older, you lose the kid you were, and looking back at him is sweet and a little sad. I’ve started reading it as something closer to a diagnosis. I think the line describes a tangible thing we do to our own minds as we age. We start grading the work while we’re still making it.
Write a line, delete it
I was talking recently with a man I profiled for the Constellation. He’s a very successful businessman, and he’s trying to blog. His company uses AI, and a great marketing leader is building them a system. “But I have to write these posts,” he told me.
So I asked him: are you talking to your computer?
Regular readers know I’d rather talk to the machine than type at it. The suggestion loosened something in him. I could tell from how he described the way he works now.
“I write a line, I delete it,” he said. “I write a line, I delete it.”
What a fucking awful way to create.
Apply the same logic to anything else. Drawing, designing, shooting video. Delete a word. Delete a pixel, a shape, a frame. Put it back. Take it out again.
Of course you’re going to hate doing it. Of course you’re going to decide you’re no good at it.
To me, that’s what the Picasso line means. We get older and the critic shows up before the work does, until we are literally incapable of creating.
Every tool made somebody greater
AI, sometimes without meaning to, reflects how we already think about creativity. If you believe making things is a test you can fail, a machine that makes things will feel like a threat.
I know beautiful art has been made by hand. We have eons of it. And every time a new technology arrived, some artist picked it up and became greater with it.
Right now I feel like someone walked up to me and said: Hey Joe, you can write okay. But I know you’ve wanted to design. I know you’ve wanted to make videos and build websites and do all these other things. Now you can. It’s at your fingertips.
Put out the shitty ones
So I think the way into AI is the way a kid goes into a box of paint. You play with it. You don’t put yourself in a box first.
These tools will let you make music. You can draw, you can paint, you can build freaking products. Your first ones are going to suck. Mine did. To get to the good stuff, you have to put out the shitty ones.
If we quit the write, delete, write, delete routine and embrace the play, the amount of great art and great products in this world is going to be amazing. More of it won’t make the great work any less great.
There’s a real chance to do something special right now.
The fleet
The rocket shark is a fleet now. Four of them, pinned in a row on the wall of his room, each one a little different: new fins, a new flame, a new face on the shark. He made the first one and liked it, and the next thing he did was make another one. Not fix it. Not start over. Another one.
Sharknado got five sequels. The rocket shark has three, and counting.
My son didn’t delete the shark. He made a fleet.
— Joe
