The Cheaper the Making Gets, the Dearer Bad Judgment Becomes

To answer that question rightly, we’ve got to first set aside the notion that creating is only the making of a thing. Creation runs deeper than that. It’s the joining of things that had no business being joined, drawn up out of memory and history and the blood of a culture, out of grief and contradiction and long watching, out of a person’s own foolishness and ambition and the plain hunger to know why a thing is the way it is.

The machine can find the pattern and lay it beside another pattern faster than any mind that ever lived. What it can’t give, because it’s never lived a single day, is meaning. It can’t say from inside itself why one joining of ideas deserves to walk out into the world while a thousand others deserve to be left in the dark where they were found. That reckoning belongs to no one but the person doing the reckoning.

Here’s the one thing worth holding onto in all this noise. The machine can take part in the making. Only a person can say why a thing has earned the right to exist.

There’s an old word for this. Aristotle called it technē, and it doesn’t translate cleanly into English, not as craft and not as art, for it carried more than either word can bear alone. For Aristotle the making was never only the doing of a thing with the hands. It was a making carried by knowledge and by purpose and by some understanding, however dim, of the good the making was meant to serve. A carpenter didn’t merely fit wood to wood. They knew why a chair must bear weight in a certain way, for a certain kind of body, in service of a certain kind of rest, and the craft couldn’t be pulled apart from that knowing without the craft dying in their hands. The machine holds no such relation to purpose. It has facility without end and no telos of its own. The furnishing of that telos remains a human task and no other’s.

There’s comfort to be found in history if we’re willing to look at it plain.

Every tool of consequence, when it first came into the world, brought with it a fear of what might be lost and lost for good. Photography came into the last century and people feared it would be the death of painting. Why labor a fortnight over a likeness when a machine could seize it in an instant. Painting didn’t die. It was set loose from the burden of copying what was already there and it went, quick as anyone could turn, toward impression and expression and forms that had no name yet, and it went there because the camera had taken the copying for its own. Recorded sound changed the economy and the ritual of the players who stood before a crowd, and still the players stood before their crowds, and something in that standing grew deeper for the change. The machine reshaped the maker of pictures nearly past recognition. The cutting of film by light on a screen reordered the whole grammar of the telling. In none of these did the craft go under. It changed its shape and came up again, richer and stranger than it went down.

The question that mattered was never should we use the new tool. That question, asked in fear, breeds only a brittle refusing that can’t hold. The question that history rewards is another one entirely. ‘What can we do now that we couldn’t do before?’ That’s the question worth carrying into whatever we mean to build with a machine.

If there’s a part of this worth reading twice, let it be this one.

The talk of these machines among the makers of brands has settled near everywhere around a single word, and the word is efficiency. Write it faster. Make more of it. Let the machine carry the dull parts. Spend less. Turn out more in less time than it ever took before. These are true benefits. No one’s denying them. But they’re a narrow window to look through at a thing this large.

What might change if we came to the machine curious instead of merely hurried. Consider what opens when the question turns from how do I finish this quicker to what might I find here that I didn’t go looking for.

Use the machine to wander into some study you always meant to take up and never did. Take an assumption people have carried unquestioned for years and put it to the fire. Ask the machine for five ways of seeing one idea, only to find which one unsettles you in a way worth keeping. Build something strange with no market in mind at all. Chase down some forgotten fact of history that might throw light on a problem sitting in front of you now.

The true advantage in the years coming won’t belong to the one who’s built the finest library of prompts. It’ll belong to the one who keeps asking the better question.

This brings us to the matter of discovery, a small word for something larger than it lets on.

Creators ought to be given leave to try these tools without demanding of some immediate return. Play matters here, not as an idleness we permit ourselves but as the ground discovery is grown in. Demand that every wandering pay for itself and you can be certain that nothing worth finding will ever be found.

There’s an old figure worth calling up here, the wanderer of the city that Walter Benjamin wrote of, who moved not toward some fixed end but through the streets themselves, watching and taking in and finding what they hadn’t gone looking for. Their worth lay precisely in having no itinerary at all. What does that same wandering look like now, in the hour of the machine. It might be trying some unfamiliar maker of images for no reason but wanting to. It might be testing a model never used before, only to learn its particular temper. It might be turning the machine against an idea instead of asking it merely to carry the idea out, pressing it to find the idea’s weak places.

Sometimes the true discovery isn’t the thing you set out after at all. It’s what you come upon along the way. Seen only because you were paying attention and not racing toward some hour already fixed on a clock.

Here, the question becomes more demanding. Wandering without a strategy, however good it feels in the moment, comes at last to nothing but noise.

The machine widens without measuring what we can build. It does little on its own to tell us what we ought to build. That telling remains the work of strategy. No cleverness in the machine changes the discipline required to arrive at it. Before we ask for any tool to make us a thing, we’ve still got to walk the old hard road. Who’s listening? What’s the trouble? What’s the insight buried in it? What’s the aim? Where does this stand against all else? What’s the idea? How does it get carried out? How’s it measured after. The machine can walk beside us on nearly every step of that road. What it must never be let to do is walk the road in our place.

There’s a line worth carrying close. The cheaper the making gets, the dearer bad judgment becomes. When every house in a market can turn out a hundred campaigns and five hundred pictures and ten thousand pieces of matter with hardly any labor at all, then making more of it stops being any advantage whatsoever. It becomes a burden. One more voice added to a noise already past bearing. Knowing plainly what deserves to be made, and having the iron in you to leave the rest unmade, becomes the true advantage. And a rare one.

This brings us round to a matter the makers of brands seldom speak of plainly, and that’s taste.

When the doing of a thing is placed in every hand alike, whatever sets one maker apart from another has to rise up out of something higher than the doing. The questions change accordingly. Can you tell the stronger of two ideas when both are made well. Can you feel when a thing is borrowed even before you can say how you know. Can you tell true feeling from mere polish. Can you see when a thing dazzles the eye and says nothing that matters to any living soul. Can you say plainly, no, that’s not who we are, even when the thing set before you is finely made.

The machine makes the raising up of many roads cheap as breath. It’s human judgment that decides which road gets walked. Worked and reworked over years of watching close. It decides which brand a thing belongs to, and whether it deserves to stand at all.

The machine can serve well as a finder of what a team might otherwise have missed. It can test what’s gone too long unquestioned. It can build the rough draft. Sit as a partner in the turning over of ideas. Find the pattern no unaided eye would catch. Edit with real use. Run out the scenario. Carry the dull weight of production.

What it can’t take up, and ought never be handed, is the burden of context. Of what’s right and what’s not. Of taste. Of knowing a culture from the inside. Of feeling for another. Of judgment. Of the answering for what was made and why. These stay, without exception, in the hands of the people who set the work in motion.

The true line drawn here isn’t the tired one between human and machine. That line throws off more heat than light. The truer line runs this way instead. It’s human intention, carried further by machine capability. And it’s no smaller a thing for the carrying.

It’s one thing to say all this and another to let it change the work of a given day. A truer way of building a strategy might run like this. Someone observes something true. The observing raises a question. The question is carried to AI and explored. What comes back is passed through human judgment. The machine builds on what survived the judgment. Someone refines it further. It goes out into the market. And after, someone reads what the market has told them.

Consider the plain difference this order makes. Write me five posts about our product treats the machine as nothing but a hand for hire, and it’ll oblige, and what comes back will serve well enough and be forgotten by sundown. Set beside it another way of beginning. Our people know what we make but they don’t know why it should matter to them. What are we assuming about how they see the trouble we claim to solve. In this second asking the machine is brought in to think before it’s ever asked to make anything at all. That’s the harder use of the tool. And the better one.

It’s a fair wager that the years ahead will hold more of the machine in them. More automation. More work turned out by hands that aren’t hands at all. This doesn’t make the part people play smaller. It makes it larger than it’s ever been.

Not because people will always turn a finer sentence or raise a truer image than what a sufficiently able machine might one day manage. That contest, if it’s even the right one to enter, may well be a losing one, and nothing’s gained by pretending otherwise. What people carry that no machine can carry for them is a different weight entirely. What matters, and to whom. Who’s being spoken to, and why they should give a moment’s care to what’s said. What’s truly meant beneath the words laid on top. What the work should feel like in the hands of those who receive it. What a people actually believe, down under everything they say they believe. And harder than all the rest, what they won’t become, no matter how easy the road appears that leads there.

AI can help us make. Strategy tells us what ought to be made. The soul in us, stubborn as it’s always been and not to be replaced, gives us the reason to make it at all.