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? 

Men wrestle with emotions and push them away to stay in control through logic and reason (only for them to resurface unexpectedly later on). Today’s society is run like this: repressed emotions run amok (just look at the politics). It enables us to be like machines, ever driving forward; however, emotions keep us on track. Yes, we cannot be ruled by them, but we should also never ignore them; the opposite of crazy is still crazy. Without our emotions, we go through life missing half of the beautifully rich experience of being human.

What I have learned is that emotions are signposts and course correcters. Anger indicates where a boundary has been crossed. Grief shows us the love that we hold, but with nowhere for it to go. Combining the whole spectrum of human emotions together, you have a signpost reminding you that you’re alive.

If we fully lose ourselves in Universe 1, which can happen very easily, we forget that creating anything of true value must have emotional investment. AI, when used blindly, sells us the illusion of ease, creating a false utopia of a life without pain, without uncertainty, and without effort - immediately creating an unhealthy form of comfort and complacency. Relying on AI like this has a cost; your salt - you.

To create, we must feel our experiences, our senses, and our emotions fully, recognising each thread that intertwines through our one wild and precious life (to paraphrase the poet, Mary Oliver). 

If you have ever birthed a business or a baby, you know the extent of blood, sweat, and tears of sacrifice. You have experienced your eyes widen as pain transmutes to arrival. You know that in the end, suffering is a privilege. 

In today's mechanistic world, having time for the slow, the real, and the messy is an act of defiance. 

AI is glossy, and that’s its limitation, for as long as it replicates what already exists and brings everything to an average uniformity. Being human, being truly spirited, makes you an Übermensch. To have gut feelings, to sense viscerally, to know from intuition, to feel the pains caused by wrestling with life's torrents, this is what it means to be human. 

To be born is messy. To be human is messy. To create is messy.

And that’s good.

Talk soon,

Rob

PS. I do use AI for my systems and operations, but never my creativity. The Salt will always be written by my own hand. Here’s how every edition starts:

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