What do you want?

I just watched Jack Conte's SXSW presentation on "The Death of the Follower." His overarching message:

Build real relationships with true fans, and never forget what YOU want. His mission is to give creators freedom and the ability to create sustainable businesses around their work.

The major social media channels no longer support this kind of living -- they don't care about a creator's true fans. All they care about is maximizing reach and attention. It has become harder and harder to monetize on these platforms, and more than that, it just feels wrong to so many people.

"What do you want?" That's what Jack asked. As a creator, what do you want?

Whatever that thing is, you should have the freedom to chase after it. You should be able to create the thing that gives you most joy. You should be able to follow your interests or tell your truth. You should be able to find others that connect with your work and are willing to contribute to your continued creation. Those fans should be able to find each other and build real connections.

I have been diving deep into AI this year. I'm working on three books that revolve around AI. I have been using AI to turn manuscripts into social media content. It has given me a major edge in productivity, I can now create content twice as fast. At the same time, I'm finding my attention span shrinking, my ability to write waning. I catch myself wanting to take the easy route of asking Claude or ChatGPT to do the thinking for me. But if I do that, am I really creating? Or am I just... prompting?

There is a major contention around the ethics of Generative AI. Do the artists, whose work trained ChatGPT, deserve compensation? Or, by nature of putting their work up for free on the internet to grow their following, did they relinquish all rights? Should artists use AI to create work at all? What happens when all work is created with AI? What happens when AI begins to train itself on its own output? What sort of inbred creations will be made? Does any of this even matter?

What will happen to social media when all content is AI-generated, all ideas are recycled off old ideas? How do we recognize someone thinking for themselves vs. those generating "engagement posts" with Claude?

And where do books fit into all this? My long-time love, my profession. The things I feel I have less and less time for. How do they fit into a world of AI-generated content? A world driven by attention and reach? Is there any way to bring together readers around works they love, closer to the authors who wrote the work by hand, and build meaningful connections again? Would anyone even care if we did?

I do. I care a lot. Why? Because I am not happy with myself when I spend 4 hours doom-scrolling on Instagram. Responding emotionally to Tweets, just to feel part of the conversation, drains me. It doesn't fill me up. Not the way writing does, or the way reading an insightful book does. It doesn't feed me like a vigorous in-person conversation does.

That's the irony of this monologue--the most engaging conversations I've had this year have been about the future of AI and the future of creativity. And yet, when putting those ideas into practice, the result often feels hollow. Once you get past the awe of a computer writing better than you can, all that's left is a void. You don't get the same satisfaction, and I wonder if the reader can feel that too.

I wonder if, deep down, we will know when we are reading or watching or listening to something that wasn't fully made by a human -- not because it's not technically perfect or engineered to engage --- but because of... something else. Something not understood by humans, or AI, or anything.

And that is the scary part... if we can't pinpoint the thing that makes human creation so special, how can we ever hope to save it, cherish it, and help it thrive?

We have a duty as creators and as humans. To find that thing that makes our work OURS. To identify it and name it, so that we can embrace it.

Then, if we use AI to help us with our work? So be it. At least it will come from somewhere real.

But by skipping the hard work of understanding ourselves and connecting with our inner nature, we will lose our humanity.

So, what do you want?