How Does AI Mess With Our Creativity?

More than a year ago, Melody put a placeholder in our shared podcast planning document: SOMETHING SMART ABOUT AI. We were sick, bored, or frustrated with the way so many podcasts were talking about it — usually because it involved dudes talking with other dudes and universalizing proclamations about whether artificial intelligence was going to usher in an age of utopia (doubtful) or kill us all (doubtful but more probable). We wanted someone willing to get into the gray areas of LLM and chatbot use in particular — someone with real experience with what they can do and real ambivalence about what they do to us.

That person is Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, and one of my absolute favorite thinkers working and writing today. In this episode, we talk about how LLMs short circuit the creative process, how they're changing the way students learn to think and discern, the specious argument that AI "democratizes creativity," really bad AI art, and why it's so hard to talk about AI usage just generally. I loved this conversation and keep coming back to the ideas, challenges, hopes, and frustrations we discussed — I think you will too.

AI comes for the Community Flyer

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Show Notes:

Follow Vauhini on Bluesky here and learn more about her work here

Buy Searches (which you know I LOVED!) here

Read my interview with Vauhini from last year about Searches here