Notes on AI
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Notes on AI 〰️
Three years to ten days
Thomas Knoll needed about three years to get Photoshop to version 1.0. A single developer just rebuilt seven Creative Cloud tools in ten days, and HSBC downgraded Adobe the same week. I built a small app of my own in an hour. Craftspeople have always made their tools – the hurdle just collapsed.
Every medium has an uncanny valley
In 2004 The Polar Express was called dead-eyed and pushed the uncanny valley into everyday conversation. Five years later came Avatar, and people talked about Neytiri, not about how she was made. AI is at that stage now. When something still looks like AI, it isn’t the AI anymore.
The tools just became universal – curiosity didn't
Leonardo's imagination ran centuries ahead of anything available to execute it. With AI, our limit is the exact inverse: we can build almost anything now. But breadth was never what made Leonardo Leonardo. The skills were downstream of the curiosity. Never the other way around.
First it was craft, then creativity, now taste
The creative industry has found its comfort word for 2026: taste. The logic is reassuring – AI does the execution, taste separates the good work from the slop. But taste isn't a gift. It's a trained muscle. And anything that can be trained can be taught.
Creative debt
"Fuck AI. Destroy it. Kill it." Ronny Chieng's advice to Harvard graduates is really a plea to use your head. Cognitive debt is what happens when the brain stops practising. Creative debt is what happens when the next generation never trains the muscle at all.