Last weekend, I was roaming through a collection of warehouses and open spaces somewhere in Downtown Los Angeles. House of Kong is an immersive experience created by Gorillaz, the virtual alt-hip-hop group that grew from the minds of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett over the past 30 years. The exhibition is both a celebration of that history and, seemingly, the way they are rolling out the latest album from this band that doesn’t really exist. I was agog at how they constructed a maze of interconnected rooms that revealed both the band’s actual development in our world and the parallel universe where Murdoc, Russell, 2-D, and Noodle exist. A guided tour with each visitor provided headphones that delivered a synced audio experience, moving us from one room to the next. From the very beginning, we were active participants in the adventure, though we didn’t know that yet. Anna spent 45 seconds as a roadie for the band, getting a flight case to its appropriate location. Another member of our group was given a task that seemed normal and mundane but was actually critical to our experience.
My senses were turned all the way on for the entire afternoon. There were sights, sounds, and even smells that could only have been envisioned by a group of highly creative humans working and playing together. I was inspired by all of this but mostly by the idea of a musician and a comic book artist sitting in their flat, riffing off of each other, and with pen, paper, some musical instruments, some talented friends, and some luck they turned a ridiculous concept into a successful GRAMMY award-winning band that continues to be a thing nearly three decades later.
For the rest of the day, I romanticized this analog creation myth as a counterpoint to the AI slop encroaching upon seemingly everything right now.
And then the next morning, instead of happily or frustratingly toiling away at some hobby rooted in the physical world, I spent hours on my laptop screwing around with Claude.
Am I a hypocrite?
At work, lately, my 1:1s with a colleague have mostly been animated conversations about AI tools and experiments. Recently, the discussion centered around how he had spent his weekend playing around with AI coding agents, yet kept running up against token limits. It got to a point where he set an alarm so he could get up in the middle of the night when one of his cooldowns was scheduled to end during the wee hours.
He wasn’t doing this for work. He was utilizing the software in the service of one of his hobbies. He’d made iOS apps in the past, not to get rich but to solve a problem specific to him. With the current advancements in AI, he was now able to take those ideas even further and try new ones. His only customer? Himself.
I’m doing the same.
The first weekend of each month, I analyze my music listening from the previous month. I nerd out on this blog about it relatively regularly. It’s a tedious process. I spend several hours extracting, transforming, processing, and categorizing the data so that, in the end, I can tell myself the story of my music habits. I blog about it, but this is just for me. It’s a labor of love. Really, though, it’s mostly just labor. The part I most want to do, categorize music based on my taste and context, is maybe 25% of this effort. This weekend, though, I changed it up.
After three or four hours of doing my normal process, I opened up Claude and said,
“I want to automate the labor and leave the part I love to me. Here are the tools I use. Here’s my existing workflow. Suggest a plan.”
And it did. I reviewed it, made adjustments, and put it to work. Claude Cowork turned a tedious data analysis job I didn’t want to do (and likely would have done poorly) into something that will make my little music hobby project infinitely more enjoyable. Now I can spend those hours categorizing songs and artists if I want. Or doing something completely different. As I watched Claude manipulate my web browser and work in the terminal on my laptop to output what I requested, it felt like magic.
These little moments of magic powered by AI are becoming ever more frequent. There are work cases, sure, but that’s not what has got me excited. It’s about trying shit, learning new ways to do things, and surprising myself with the results. I’m not trying to use AI to come up with million-dollar ideas or 10x my work output or whatever else some self-appointed industry guru or tech CEO-cum-snake oil salesman is claiming that this technology can do.
I’m chasing the “wow, isn’t this fun” feeling. It’s a hobbyist’s enthusiasm rooted in figuring out how to do something that maybe only you will think is cool, but, damnit, that’s all that matters.
Cruftbox calls it tinkering. 40 or 50 years ago, we might have thought about it as homebrew computer culture. Before that, ham radio enthusiasts.
But is collaborating with my computer in any way close to what might be when humans come together to make things?
I find AI as a “creative partner” distasteful at best and gross, at worst. I don’t want to read things in “AI voice.” I don’t want to be assaulted with your AI-created images, videos, or audio. Especially if the output is for artistic pursuits. Whatever for your slide decks or infographics, but if you’re trying to make me feel something? Get that slop out of here. Prompting is not creating.
I’m not being holier than thou. I’ve tried it myself. There is writing I’ve done where I’ve used AI as a writing assistant, and I can clearly identify when I let the computer replace my words, style, and voice with its own flattened idea of what constitutes good writing. There are a couple of things I’ve published over the last year that are absolutely cringeworthy to read.
Over the last few weeks, though, I’ve been floored by the power of accessible agentic AI software. Charlie Warzel, in conversation with Anil Dash, said the “aha” part of this moment in AI’s development is that we’ve moved on a bit from trying to get AIs to mimic Human conversation and, instead, found real material benefit in talking “Computer” to AI so that it will then do computer things beyond our capabilities. That’s been the thing for me as well.
I’ve gone from being highly skeptical of the rise of AI to enthusiastically discussing what I’d like to try next.
Digital tinkering has a cold-start problem that is often very difficult for non-techies to overcome. You don’t know how to talk computer. Having a tool that can understand you, figure out the computer shit necessary to get it done, and actually execute on those things is incredible.
Still, I never want to see your fake video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt. Please, though, put the latest Gorillaz music video on repeat.
I’m not a hypocrite.
I don’t want art made by software cosplaying as a person. Damon Albarn hasn’t replaced Jamie Hewlett with a drawing program that can simulate his style. Hewlett isn’t asking an AI song maker to create soundalike hits from their discography. There’s no humanity in that. It would have no value. Artistically, they’ve only opened the aperture for more people to contribute to their creative spectacle.
And yet, I’m having fun playing in this digital sandbox with AI agents solving the silly little computer-centric problems that only matter to me.
How human.
