Human(messy)ness

Hey 👋

AI imitates life. It doesn’t create anything truly new.

Birthing is a creative and often messy process. Yet AI, the machine, is notably clean and uniform. Do you remember those AI images with six fingers and upside-down ears? They’re becoming a thing of the past, and with it, those characteristic flaws give way to hyperrealism. So, what is even real?

There is one simple answer: you.

Your spirit, your unique salt, this is what AI will never have. You have traversed through the mountains and valleys of your life. You have experienced achievements, trauma, success, and failure. They shaped you, and they bring out your unique self-expression and make up your story.

AI brings you knowledge and skills beyond comprehension. It organises, processes, researches, and structures better than most humans, and that is because it isn’t a human; it is a machine.

As Charly Chaplin once famously said, ‘_You are not a machine, with machine minds and machine hearts, you are a human!’ _

To take this further, the psychologist Phil Stutz talks about how we are currently living inside two universes. Universe 1 is mechanistic, and everything valuable is measurable - think KPIs and efficiencies. He says,_ ‘It offers a narrow view, driven by comparison and control. While you can achieve a great deal there, you’ll never feel truly satisfied because nothing in it connects you to something deeper.’ - _I couldn't agree more.

Let’s talk about Universe 2, the universe that exists within you.

AI will never experience what it feels to stare at a white blank page and tremble with the weight of an expansive infinity sitting ominously within its chest. Anxiously recognising the endless threads of potential reaching out into every direction.

Creativity is a process of connecting to the unseen, somewhere beyond our immediate realm, and manifesting it into this world through a discipline. It could be a new business, or a newsletter, a piece of art, or, importantly, a human being; the process is the same, and it is often messy, experimental, and non-linear. But machines want uniformity; messiness and the unseen don’t have a place in their world, and because of that, nothing truly new gets created.

The gateway to creation begins with one’s emotions, another trait AI cant replicate.

As a man, I have travelled the long road of understanding my emotions. I am grateful for the patience and the wisdom of the women in my life who showed me how to grow beyond my limitations. In those lessons, I learned how to use them to create, and who better than a woman to teach creation?