The Bootstrapping Phasethe day beforeI think I have a slightly better way of describing a particular…Flexibility of the medium

Composing graphs with Breadboard2023If you even occasionally scan these chronicles of my learnings, you will…Thinking to write2024I’ve had this realization about myself recently, and it’s been rather useful…The Bootstrapping Phase2024I think I have a slightly better way of describing a particular…I did this fun little experiment recently. I took my two last posts (Thinking to Write and The Bootstrapping Phase) and asked an LLM to turn them into lyrics. Then, after massaging the lyrics a bit, to better fit with the message I wanted to come across, I played with Suno for a bit to transform them into short, 2-minute songs – a sort of vignettes for my long-form writing. Here they are:

Thinking to write on Suno

Unbaked Cookie Testers on Suno

Catchy, content-ful, and in total, maybe 20 minutes to make. And, it was so much fun! I got to think about what’s important, how to express somewhat dry writing as emotionally interesting. I got to consider what music style would resonate with what I am trying to convey in the original content.

Limits of applying AI2023I’ve been thinking about the boundaries of what’s possible when applying large…This got me thinking. What I was doing in those few minutes was transforming the medium of the message. With generative AI, the cost of medium transformation seems to be going down dramatically.

Making Fifty2022This one will be a bit unusual. Instead of my typical sermons…I know how to make music. I know how to write lyrics. But it would have taken me hours of uninterrupted time (which would likely translate into months of elapsed time) to actually produce something like this. Such investment makes medium transformation all but prohibitive. It’s just too much effort.

Casino Creativity2024However, I can’t sing. Like, not at all. Like, don’t even ask…Midjourney2022I recently got an invite to play with Midjourney, one of the…However, with the help of a couple of LLMs, I was able to walk over this threshold like there’s nothing to it. I had fun, and – most importantly – I had total agency in the course of the transformation. I had the opportunity to tweak the lyrics. I played around with music styles and rejected a bunch of things I didn’t like. It was all happening in one-minute intervals, in rapid iteration.

Jamming with Udio2024Udio tries to match the prompt’s tempo and the style, expanding it,…Teaching AI to write lyrics2024The structure of the team also became much simpler. Instead of multiple…This rapid iteration was more reminiscent of jamming with a creative partner than working with a machine. Gemini gave me a bunch of alternatives (some better than others), and Suno was eager to mix bluegrass with glitch, no matter how awful the results. At one moment I paused and realized: wow, this feels closer to the ideal creative collaboration than I’ve ever noticed before.

Reinventing Organizations Redux2024This one is a bit out there, if only to connect some…What’s more importantly, the new ease of medium transformation opens up all kinds of new possibilities. If we presume – and that’s a big one – for a moment that the cost of medium transformation will indeed go down for all of us, we now can flexibly adjust the medium according to the circumstances of the audience.

Say it in many different ways2021Shared mental model spaces are challenging to grow and expand. Mental models,…The message does not have to be locked in a long-form post or an academic tome, waiting for someone to summarize it in an easily consumable format. We can turn it into a catchy tune, or a podcast. It could be a video. It could be something we don’t yet have, like a “zoomable” radio station where I listen to a stream of short-form snippets of ideas, and can “zoom in” to the ones I am most interested in, pausing the stream to have a conversation with the avatar of the author of the book, or have an avatar of someone I respect react to it. I could then “zoom out” again and resume the flow of short-form snippets.

Once flexible, the medium of the message can adapt and meet me where I am currently.

Becoming a setting2022For a less made-up example, let’s look at Midjourney. If asked to…The third option37 days afterI facilitated a workshop on systems thinking recently (or “lensical thinking” as…The transformation behind this flexibility will often be lossy. Just like the tweets pixelate the nuance of the human soul, turning a book into a two-verse ditty will flatten its depth. My intuition is that this lossiness and the transformation itself will usher in a whole new era of UX explorations, where we struggle to find that new shared way of interacting with the infinitely flexible, malleable canvas of the medium. Yup, this is going to get weird.