Eleanor Warnock has a great piece up on Chief Word Officer, “The one thing writers get wrong about AI¹”:

When I started working in tech, I was surprised by how much everyone loved the word iterate. Startups iterate by collecting feedback on their dating app or B2B payments software, tweaking, testing and constantly improving. Books like The Lean Startup and The Startup Owner’s Manual helped popularize the idea of building something big by taking small steps forward, rather than with meticulous planning.

A bit later, she describes a strong contrast with writers:

I was one of three people in my university class who majored in Comparative Literature. The classes that I took were a long exercise in critical thinking and taught me to read and synthesize dense information quickly, and how to make arguments by applying analytical frameworks.

I was digging deeper into texts and ideas until I came away with a sharp argument or insight. Stephen King has said that “stories are found things, like fossils in the ground.” I believe the same thing holds for finding the right message in a corporate narrative or through interviews as a journalist.

If iteration is an infinite cycle of test-improve-test again, the humanities approach is digging. You chip away until you strike gold — or dinosaur bones.

I think she is debating the wrong question here. The distinction she is describing isn’t tech vs non-tech.

It’s individual creation vs team creation.

Iteration is how teams communicate

While society loves to romanticise the lone genius creator, we know actual creation very rarely works that way. Instead, creation takes a village, which means coordination and communication. As soon as multiple people share tasks, iteration is inevitable, because no matter how perfectly you communicate, how carefully you adhere to a plan, or how spectacularly you create, as soon as work is split between brains, there will be multiple turns on the process. Team members will learn, inspire, and frustrate each other and the work they are creating together will change as a result.

Those moments are iteration. For many activities — product development among them — collaboration is so central to the creative act that it becomes a foundational part of the process.

LLMs can make anything collaborative

The disruption of LLMs is the very human ways in which they can partner and collaborate with us. While they are still not particularly wise, they are very knowledgeable and often are better at a task than the Best Available Human (tm). Suddenly, any project, any creative act, can be collaborative. Or have a coach, critic, or test audience. This should be thrilling — and to people who are used to collaboration, it is!

Creators collaborate all the time. While Mori/Ampersand didn’t succeed, we spent a ton of time working with professional authors and it was eye opening to see how collaborative — iterative — they were. From my time at EMI, I got to watch first hand how collaboration transformed albums and songs. Decades of video game development where everything was the result of deep collaboration.

So when Eleanor says

It just so happens that this iterative process is also how you get the best out of LLMs. No wonder; they were built by engineers and tech people.

I think the better framing is that iterative processes are how we collaborate and they were built by people who spend most of their time collaborating.

Most people do get this. Mostly.

What’s awesome about her piece is that once past the (false) iteration dichotomy, it is full of really concrete, effective advice about how to be more iterativecollaborative. So much of the coming months and years will be all of us learning — and finding the right products — to leverage the incredible resources LLMs make available to us.

Well, maybe not all of us.

One of my absolute favorite cartoonists is Matthew Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal. His comics — and books — about running and (un-)happiness were deeply impactful during an incredibly transformative period of my life². The Oatmeal is a guided missile that perfectly targets my sense of humor, often to an embarrassing degree.

So, of course he has a cartoon about AI art. It’s epic and worth reading. tl;dr: AI ART BAD, PEOPLE WHO USE AI TO MAKE ART NOT ARTISTS

OK, Matt.

It’s obviously an amazing comic, the kind of comic Scott McCloud would reference if he did a new edition of Understanding Comics³. Personal, beautiful, emotional. Would I take a bet now that AI will never produce something that evocative? That knowing it was produced by AI will forever invalidate the emotional resonance? Maybe for Matt it never will, but — like talking about ikigai and consciousness — we’re entering a very complex future.

But today, I’m a little baffled how strident Matt’s position is — not to mention his GTA 6-quality drive-by of anyone in marketing, gtm, comms, etc. I’m pretty sure nobody is going to eat into Matt’s particular audience, no matter what tools or technology they choose. Even when models training on The Oatmeal’s data start producing Oatmeal-esque creations, they’re not going to be Matt talking to us. He’s the one we have a parasocial relationship with — and brilliantly he’s been directly connecting with his fans and avoiding the need to compete for attention for a few years now.

Will there be artists (and programmers, lawyers, engineers, you name it) who are displaced by AI in the coming years. Of course. And that is something we should be reminding our elected leaders about regularly.

But many great creators in every domain will figure out ways for AI to help them be better at their chosen crafts or professions. Some of those great creators will be creators who couldn’t have succeeded before — I think product development is going to be the most transformed as the barrier of “you must be a code monkey” comes crashing down.

And I think that’s pretty fantastic, because I think there are probably more great creators out there than we know about today.