If there's a voice in your head saying, 'You can't paint,' you must surely paint, and silence that voice.

- van gough

I’m an AI hater, and it’s not because of the environmental impact.

Yes, I think it’s bad that we’ve put almost every egg of our economy in the AI basket. Yes, I think it’s bad that we’re using it to designate the targets that we bomb. Yes, I think it’s bad that we’re invading countries to get the resources to manufacture more chips. Yes, I’m mad that SSD and GPU prices have skyrocketed because of server farms. But I don’t think that any of those things are why I’m a hater:

I hate what it’s done to our brains.

For most people reading this, the things I mentioned above do not affect them directly (yet). But every single one of us can look at a creative brief we’ve just been handed, feel daunted by the task, and upload the entire thing to the free version of ChatGPT to get twelve starting places—or even entire final products—without engaging a single brain cell.

I hate that I feel compelled to write bad sentences just to prove AI didn’t write it. I hate that I can’t write punchy sentences without thinking “they’re going to think Gemini did this for me.”

That’s not freedom. That’s chains wrapped in the glitter of productivity.

See? I wrote those words, but it it might as well have come from Chat.

The issue is that LLMs do not create anything. They’ve been trained on a trillion hours of other artists’, musicians’, writers’ work and they pull that work together with a nice little bow that has perfect entry and endpoints, a nice little package to present to an algorithm tuned to find products with perfect entry and endpoints.

That’s not creation. That’s aggregation.

See? I did it again.

“But Hamilton,” they’ll say, “don’t all artists pull from other’s work? There’s nothing new under the sun.”

Yes, it’s true. Everything I’ve ever made has been influenced by everything I’ve ever made, everything I’ve ever heard, everything I’ve ever read. I am inspired by and occasionally emulate other people’s masterworks. The difference is in how.

Sure, the process of creative iteration makes your final product stronger, but I don’t even think I care about that anymore. It also strengthens your neural pathways. It wells up a spring of wonder inside of you. It lets you learn how to break through blocks and obstacles not to get to some final destination, but to teach you that you can break through blocks and obstacles.

Creative iteration makes you a better thinker, a better maker, a better human. It gives you a map of where you’ve come from so that you can better identify places others have gone that you might like to visit, also.

It takes longer, but everything worth having does.

Apollo 11 landed on the moon. But the tragedy of Apollo 1 taught us about pre-launch checks. Apollos 4, 5, and 6 taught us that the Saturn V and Lunar Module would work. Apollo 7 taught us that the Command and Service modules would work in Earth Orbit. Apollo 8 taught us that we could safely leave Earth orbit and enter the Moon’s. Apollo 10 taught us that the Lunar Module was operable by humans. And THEN Apollo 11 taught us that we could safely land on and take off from the moon.

Creative endeavors require creative iteration: they’ll give us good things, yes, but more importantly, they’ll make us into wonderous things.

By all means, retain your wonder. Foster your curiosity. For all that’s good in yourself, please please please do not hand all of that over to the machines.

I’ve been sketching a lot of things lately, and I wanna a take the rest of this time to chat about a few of them. Thank you for your attention!

Listen here.

This one began because I was trying to build a synth to sound like what Lorn’s Acid Rain synth sounds like. I didn’t quite get there, because I got distracted by how this one sounded, and that’s kind of the point anyway.

I built it in Massive, with these settings and this mapping, in case you want to try it out:

I put a stock Logic compressor on it, spread it some with the stock Logic ensemble, and gave it stock Logic Chromaverb. I have become very interested in only using stock Logic plugins whenever I can.

Listen here.

This one started with the string line that begins the piece, and it literally just iterates and builds on it over an intense and meandering chord progression.

For those interested in the notation, here’s the entirety of the section that repeats and changes from violins to violas to piano to synth.

One of the things I like about sketching is that I don’t really care about making any of these full, complete, finished ideas. If I were to “finish” something like this, there’d be a different mix, some more drama, perhaps a B section, some more movement between instruments, that kind of thing.

But the point is that “finishing” something like this will be so, so much easier because I sketched it first.

Listen here.

This sketch began because I wanted to do something that went from floaty and ambient into an abrupt groove. So I doodled the little piano part in Cm and dropped it into a new tempo in Dm to give the feeling of departure and forward motion.

Then I chopped up some stock Apple Loop vocal samples going into the end, which actually ended up being my favorite part.

If I’m being honest, the thing that excites me the most about this is the hard groove that it finds at the very end. I consider this sketch not a piece in itself, but more a linear representation of what iterating on an idea looks like. I had to make the little ambient thing at the beginning (which I don’t love) to figure out where it was supposed to go (and I like that feel fine), but they all led into what I think, in the end, has become the actual good idea that I’d like to build something from. All of that work for fifteen seconds of a drop I actually like.

Arriving at that idea required fiddling with the stuff that came before it. That’s exactly what sketching is for.

Go forth and sketch.

Thanks for indulging me for a moment, and again, I am sorry that there’s been some radio silence on this end lately.

I am extremely grateful for all of you, and I can’t wait to reach out again.

Keep making; fight the machines.