Creation Without Witness
‘History SideQuests’ was an abandoned podcast project I attempted back in mid-2024. I read quite a bit of history, and in particular enjoy going down obscure rabbit holes, especially 19th-century American history.
Anyway, I made three episodes before giving up.
I was partly demotivated by what I realized was going to be possible in the near future with AI: instant, engaging audio content on any obscure topic you want. This kind of thing, such as on NotebookLM, is already pretty good, and in the next year or two it is going to become very good, as good as the very best people can do, perhaps even better.
So that changed the equation in my mind.
Not that I think creative endeavors are rendered meaningless in such a context, but I do think the underlying motivations for certain types of projects change quite considerably, the whole “why” factor. To some extent, I think many creative people are stuck in a kind of commodified mindset, where their work has value because it somehow results in money. In the modern world, this is even more acute.
In this future AI world, I cannot imagine our creative efforts having any real value in that sense. If everything can be optimized for your own individual consumption, why would you “consume” the creative efforts of someone else? I might be misreading how things are playing out, but I doubt it.
Imagine you liked some crime drama from the 70s, but you have seen every episode. Now more can be made. Or you want a biopic about an obscure historical figure that only you would find interesting. Now you can have it. Or indeed, endless episodes of this defunct podcast. And so forth. You get the idea.
A potentially infinite well of bespoke aesthetic experience: how the story is told, where it leans in, how it looks, how gratuitous it is, and so on.
Maybe the taste of others will continue to have value. I am not sure. Is human taste intrinsically better than AI? I doubt it. Maybe we will be biased toward it for the simple fact that it is human, but I doubt that too. Ultimately, I think the better experience will supersede those considerations.
Our creative efforts then become something for their own sake. Something intrinsic, a compulsion you need to satisfy. Then there is taste, curation, the spaces you inhabit.
It seems entirely possible that, as a result of having many of our livelihoods stripped away, you or I become more creative, not less.
For posterity’s sake, I am uploading these three episodes here.
I think part of what it will mean to offer individually tailored experiences is that these AIs will come to know us, perhaps better than we know ourselves. My website, in part, serves this purpose: a system for encoding how I think into something AI can learn from.
