Rehousing Creativity Amidst AI
Settling the dispute between creativity and critical thinking, and automation
Welcome to my new subscribers, thanks for being here! Corporate-related pieces aren’t usually part of my catalogue, but this one speaks to retaining something core to me. I hope you enjoy!
My first corporate job was something of a mistake, a random hook that landed a fish amongst the many that I had cast that year, certainly not what I was aiming for, but as they say, beggars can’t be choosers.
It was for a large video media company, owned by an even larger one and I ended up in the content division. More specifically, their television metadata data-entry team, taking care of all live sports globally. They had a music division too, and I had been waiting to hear back from recruitment regarding that position, but since the sports one came back sooner, I figured I would start there as I could always make a lateral move internally.
The job took place in a tall building on the 16th (or was it 21st?) floor—it’s at least 16, as I took the stairs once out of boredom and just about died—where each employee was given a laptop, two monitors and a sectioned off area of the office wing. There was a lunch room, with no windows and a rinky-dink microwave where you could reheat your food. There was also a small cafe on the ground floor, but serving who knows how many companies in the building, I doubt I ever saw any food left worth buying.
I recall the first week being somewhat tedious, learning some ancient ass software called Ted, that was both slow and didn’t have an update in sight. My trainer, who took on the new hires for the month, was lovely, she taught us all how it worked, kept us engaged, and helped us overcome some of the many obstacles that Ted presented.
The job was all about mapping one system to another so that the data provided by the TV channels made it onto the correct schedule in time for the live viewing. An example of this would be, watching your favourite show, pressing ‘i’ or ‘Info’ and reading the short blurb below—that is what I was writing, or more accurately, editing; some channels provided complete copy, others mediocre copy, and, frustratingly, some, no copy.
We worked with a two week lead on show airing, provided that the channel sent through the listing far enough in advance—some were diligent, giving us as much as six weeks of content, meaning one edit every delivery, while others had me tearing around like a manic emailing and pissing off people because the show would air after my shift. Ever seen a show with no description, yah, some poor bugger wasn’t quick enough.
Note that I said shift, and not close of business, because a business like this runs 24/7/365, so once I ended around 16:45, someone else took over. They usually started around 15:00 and ran until 23:00, sometimes later if overtime dictated as such. And aside from these two shifts, there was also a dedicated “watcher” that would email in constantly, to give us updates on things. I never truly understood who he was (nor recall his name), but he saved many colleagues from mountains of shit.
Speaking of shit. I got into a lot of it. It felt that upping and leaving at the end of shift was frowned upon and even though I was strategic enough to give myself time to finish off programming the next morning, I often got an earful from my manger in a very “I should report this to HR” kind of way. Regrettably, I remember his name, though.
It was irritating. Unreliable channel editors sending through their content at odd intervals, for us to have to correct, or often, write from scratch, on top of mapping in our system, what channel, show, time slot etc. according to their schedule… and since our system had saved data, update it so that other colleagues could find it more easily.
What was annoying though was finding the show in our system in the first place, amongst the duplicates and half-edits from colleagues past. And when the show didn’t exist, well, good fucking luck finding it then—sometimes I’d get lucky and find it on Google, build it in our system, complete with airing times and broadcaster, but if it was a movie from say 1940, often I couldn’t even find it online. I lost so much time to this nonsense.
Have you ever watched a TV show and noticed that all of a sudden the Episodes are called “Episode 1, Episode 2, etc.” rather than actually named? No? Maybe it’s just me because I know some poor colleague was drowning in work and didn’t fill it in, that’s 95% of the time why that’s there; doubtful that many shows actually have just numbering.
I digress, you now know the work I was doing, 5 days a week, at minimum 8 hours a day, with a 90 min commute each way. Awesome.
I hated my job. And I hated the overtime too. There was nothing interesting, and I was staring at three screens all day. The only company I had was endless YouTube videos through my headphones, and I even ate at my desk almost every day for 10 months. I did, however, take a 15min walk between 14:00-15:00.
Fortunately I was still living with my folks, scot-free, so whatever I banked plus overtime every month went straight into savings (Thanks guys!).
But it can’t be all bad because it was with this job that I started learning about workflow efficiency and how to leverage my creativity to save myself (and mental health) from boredom, and eventual burnout.
I’ve always been creative, having been a musician for well over a decade through school, a ballroom and Latin dancer through university, and a writer now for close on a decade both in and outside of my career, I know a thing or two about problem solving and ‘strategic laziness’.
Bear in mind, I’m not the first person to coin that term. In essence, it refers to someone who priorities their time, and works efficiently to deliver results. They’re not ‘lazy’ in the conventional sense, lacking work ethic, interest, or care; they value saving time, and working smart.
This reminds me a lot of gaming, particularly in roleplaying games where grinding and farming (resource management and gathering) is at its core—something like Pokémon, Minecraft, any sort of building simulator like Civilisation, and real-time strategy games like Age of Empires, StarCraft and so on.
In these games, you can go about resource gathering in two main ways:
Normally
By being strategically lazy
The normal way is obviously intended and is the main gameplay feature, like experience gaining to level your Pokémon, or storing gold to advance to a new age in strategy games. You could do this in perpetuity no problem, it’s fun, and will progress you through the game at the designed speed.
Being strategically lazy, however, requires a deeper understanding of game knowledge, and leveraging that to your advantage. In Pokémon this would be using an EXP-Share item on a maxed out level character to give full experience to a lower level character. Or, using taught moves to take on tougher battles earlier. Similarly in strategy games, you could use the in-game trader to get what you need, faster, or build a second town centre near to another gold mine to pull twice the gold than your opponent. Also a game mechanic/feature, but not immediately apparent.
This is in a lot of games.
Since I was a kid, and to this day, I’ve played thousands upon thousands of hours. And you know what, being creative to achieve this efficiency both in-game and in real-life, has brought me immense joy. So much so, that I applied it to corporate.
Let’s wiz back to my exciting cubicle—I “automated” my job.
I effectively halved my workload on a good day.
While I’m sure Artificial Intelligence (AI) was kicking around just dandy back then, and developers have been actually automating shit for years—given I am neither, I did the next best thing.
Quick interject, I’m aware that there’s a difference between a true artificial intelligence, and blanket machine learning, but for the sake of this article you can assume the terms are used interchangeably.
I learnt exactly what was required for the normal way, and then built a system that I could navigate faster than Ted and used that as primary resource for filling in the missing information. It wasn’t anything fancy, it was a Google spreadsheet with filters that could be narrowed down for quick navigation. The generic metadata had its own column alongside all the shows.
Since I was in the small team (of 3) that handled the live sports channels, you couldn’t really have something more informative past “South Africa plays New Zealand at Newlands Stadium, Cape Town, ICC, live from 11:00”. And yet even with that, many channels would only give you “Live cricket game” or something similar, and you’d have to apply that to several hundred airings.
The normal way is what my colleagues were doing next to me, hammering the keys to get that into each airing—make no mistake, they were highly efficient at it, but even still with their workload being a bit higher than mine, they just about worked overtime every day, or at the very least worked right up to the end of shift—very rarely did I see either of them leave before I did.
I took pride in that document, making it look pretty with formatting and including as many shows as I could to continually speed up the process. And several months later, even took it to the training manager to use as a way to help new colleagues onboard faster. What I couldn’t say, however, was the effectiveness that it had for anyone else, and whether it was ever used after I left.
Given that it was all company data, I obviously don’t have it anymore, but the mindset that was applied back then has been tinkered with and improved several times over in the years since.
Suppose that brings us up to today. I work as a Content Lead for an IT company, similar industry in some regard, but far more complex in every task that comes across my desk. Excuse me, not my desk, damn these open floor offices… inbox then.
Over the past almost three years, I’ve been doing everything manually. Every blog, ebook, infographic, and voiceover; every white paper and report, many of which surpassing 40 pages; web copy, backend and front. Everything. And there has been great joy for me in this.
My writing capabilities have skyrocketed. I’ve further honed my critical thinking. My meticulousness is a nightmare for all who work with me, and the speed at which I read, and analyse information, frankly, its quite frightening. I’ve templated documents, built writing standards, argued at length about em dashes (the long one is superior—if you’re ever in doubt), and rewritten several hundred pages of web copy for user-experience, amongst a multitude of other things.
More than that, I can tell who has written certain works based off their styles, recognise when there’s been too many cooks in a written report, and sniff out an Oxford comma at an alarming distance. A word on that, I like them, but, annoyingly the company style guide, does not. Ce’st la vie.
Inevitably though, as the work piled up, I ended up thinking back to my early days of automation and how I could leverage that to my best capabilities, only this time without damaging my love for creative copy. Enter, monday.com and personally redesigning the workflow for the entire 20-ish person marketing team. This meant building ‘boards’ for teams that didn’t have, organising each of them with standard (lets call them) tags, and then painstakingly, within the limitations of the software, used IF/AND/THEN automations to link all the boards together, following my logic, using the software presets (as opposed to custom code).
It works… not everyone’s a fan, and I understand that. The software has its limitations, and there are others that would have their advantages, but to have everyone on the same platform, there’s always going to be some give and take. At the very least, people have a smidge more visibility, and one less email to look at. Yay.
With my knowledge, that’s probably the closest I was ever going to get to supportive automation in my job… right?
Wrong.
I want you to reflect on the above for just a second—consider that my goal was to optimise my workflow at two different organisations to free up more time for my sanity at my first job, and creativity at my current. Now consider what happens when automation consumes the supportive role and becomes the entire process.
Back-peddle to 30th November 2022 where the first public version of ChatGPT was released—a Large Language Model (LLM) capable of (not so) “accurately” predicting the next word in a sentence, harbouring a proprietary text-to-image generator, and several other tools under its hat. To say that this has instilled a sense of dread into every creative person’s body, would be an understatement. In the almost three years since, its only gotten smarter.
Oh God.
There’s a repeating rhetoric in the gaming industry, "Players will always optimise the fun out of a game”, whereby they will stop at nothing to ensure that they get an edge over their opponent… or in other games, spend as little time as possible playing the main game, in order to progress through the challenges as quickly as they can. So much so, that the combative argument is “Then it’s not fun anymore”.
Anyone who has played GTA San Andreas in a flying car and infinite health knows that after a few hours, you’re back to driving at the speed limit and stopping at traffic lights… in a video game. Let that sink in.
We’re in an interesting time where suddenly the tables have turned. Where once automation was to increase the efficiency of workflow, many are blindly using LLMs to generate ‘content sludge’, and achieving laziness without any of the strategy.
Why should I spend time writing the article if AI can do it for me?
What’s the point in constructing an argument if I can generate one?
Why should I make it fun to read if AI can fake it?
What about job satisfaction? Delivering something you’re proud of? If AI can do it all, what need do I have of you? I want to see what you can do, tell your story through the page and give us all the pleasure of following along! I want relatability.
It’s a slippery slope that I feel many don’t fully understand the ramifications of. I’ll give you a recent example. Last month I read an article that was blatantly AI, it had that generic “in the world of” introduction and that “cutting-edge” adjective slop that seems to be a staple with just about all LLMs; headings were a mix of sentence and title case, and, imagine, caps lock, and the way in which acronyms were defined switched throughout the page.
Mortified I was.
How can someone be proud of delivering that? While I’m sure that it has some sustenance for the information delivery, and was well intentioned, I can’t help but feel sad. It seems that in the constant push for more, the standard of what is deemed acceptable has dropped significantly in order for quantity to supersede quality; laziness has prevailed and critical thinking plus all the benefits have flown out the window. It is, however, efficient. Far too efficient.
Where’s the content authority? Where’s the desire to tell a story? Carry the reader through the buyer journey? Be the human behind the brand? Respect for one’s work? Has it all disappeared already? Or is it because the vast majority of folks I’m surrounded by are not writers (nor creative for that matter)?
Perhaps these folks need a bit of guidance and learn to love the written craft. Then again, that’s only half the battle won—we’d need to demolish the quantity over quality narrative, in favour of human writing, which is both authoritative and more engaging.
Or perhaps there’s a middle ground?
I have to think that if present in all other aspects of life, moderation can be pulled in as a mediator here too. There is more than enough scope to suggest that using LLMs and text generative tools can be useful, particularly for summarising and proofreading (although I’d still advocate doing that yourself too as means to learn attention to detail). And for non-native writers—although you could argue it also hinders language learning—a way to become more familiar with sentence structure, spelling, and grammar. I’ll pick my battles.
What if we just don’t use AI for everything? There’s got to be a supportive use case for it too that doesn’t have all creatives in a constant state of panic for what may become of their jobs. And its here that I’ve been doing my digging. I want to know what the models are, how they work, how they’re influenced, which ways are most effective to train them, and how I can leverage them for that juicy strategic laziness (keyword being strategic), all without losing the reigns completely and being sucked into the sludge machine.
Perhaps its about prompting it correctly—treating it like a junior team member on their first day, and giving them a longwinded explanation on how they should write their first article. Suppose then it can be of some benefit, allowing for adequate and experienced editorial to deliver something of value, at a slightly faster capacity. On that note, I saw a job crop up on LinkedIn just the other day, looking for a full-time Prompt Writer, thankfully it required at least five years as creative writer (as opposed to none). What a time to be alive.
While I strongly believe, and thoroughly enjoy, the process of both creating and automating for workflow efficiency, knowing where the fine line is will help ensure that I retain love for my craft, and stay relevant as the era of the machine-mind begins. I fear that without some level of adoption, we’re at risk of being “left behind” or being made redundant.
I say with the greatest of respect to all creative writers, designers, musicians, and artists, as one myself, just stay informed, explore it… you don’t have to use it, but having the know-how will at the very least keep you one step ahead.
Throughout your explorations, maybe you find it somewhat useful, and you and your AI assistant can co-exist, live on together so to speak, working on an enhanced creative workflow. That doesn’t sound half bad—until you ruminate on who is the assistant, you, or the AI.
Thanks for reading, as always, your time is most appreciated. This topic has been on my mind for a long time and to a large degree, feels like its being jammed down my throat in the media. If there was ever any doubt, I will continue leaving my mark through personal and AI free writing.
Want to see what else is in my catalogue?
If you’d like to show your support, I won’t turn down a (virtual) coffee!
I’ll see you in the next one.
~M.
I really enjoyed reading this article - you definitely prompt a bit of thinking here! There must be a midway here we can follow…
What an incredible article. It’s going to take a while to unpack it all. Interestingly as a writer I don’t like using AI at all. But when I have to write for work, oh boy do I use AI at every turn lol. So now I have a love hate relationship with it.