An Enso is part of the Zen practice of drawing a circle in a single stroke and the resulting imperfections of the sphere represent a person’s inner emotional and creative life imprinted on the canvas. The Black Enso podcast, hosted by Mikaal Sulaiman, is an audio Enso that reveals and reflects on all of the interesting imperfections of our creative community by way of sonic essays and special guests. Black Enso Media is a sacred society for creatives, offering evergreen reflections for artists seeking clarity, depth, and creative precision in their work.
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Artists are understandably worried about being replaced by AI, but the real threat isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s your fear of your own idiosyncrasies. In this meditation on rigor, imitation, and presence, Mikaal dissects the quiet resistance we build against our most original selves. From Move 37 and James Brown to Elmyr de Hory and Spike Lee, this episode is a manifesto for artists ready to transcend the algorithm, not by competing with it, but by daring to be unmistakably human. Creativity isn't solvable.
Host: Mikaal Sulaiman Studio: Black Enso Media
Black Enso is a sacred society for creatives, offering evergreen reflections for artists seeking clarity, depth, and creative precision in their work.
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In 1997, Gary Kasparov, the greatest chess player of his time, sat across from deep blue IBM supercomputer. His hands trembled slightly as he made his final move aware that he was on the verge of losing, but it wasn't just because of a loss on the board that made this significant. It was something deeper, a moment when the foundations of human mastery began to crack. I'm Mikael and this is the Black Enso. Let's talk about the hard part first. Let's talk about becoming irrelevant. The idea of pouring years of your life into something, becoming excellent at it, only to watch a computer do it in seconds. Creators around the world, just like you and I are facing their own version of that chessboard. AI has leveled the playing field, flat, tearing down the gatekeepers of expertise and access. Artists aren't confined to specific moves regulated by where they studied or who their parents know, less pawns, more knights and rooks. What once took years of painstaking practice is now totally accessible to anyone with a laptop and an idea, but this is important to remember. AI isn't the death of creativity. It's the beginning of art's. Most radical evolution. AI doesn't threaten creators. It threatens the predictable, the typical, the sequel, the carbon copies we see in the creative world. It forces us to really evaluate artistry. What makes a piece of art feel truly alive and original? Making you ask yourself, when I make my art, do I feel truly alive and original? In today's AI age, being completely idiosyncratic isn't optional. It's essential. The quirks, the obsessions, the bold imperfections that make something unforgettable. AI, like all new technology has started off as an imitator. The printing press mimicked ornate manuscripts. Photography borrowed from classical painting and synthesizers aim to replicate orchestral sounds. Yet what feels different this time is that those earlier technologies all started out pretty whack. Just like early AI and progress very slowly over years and decades, incrementally got better over time. We all remember the early days of the internet, Katie Couric and Brian Gumbel trying to understand the at symbol and although most generative AI art isn't that amazing right now, it's improving at an unbelievable pace and it's unsettling and clearly unstoppable. But the reality is technology doesn't replace creativity. It challenges. It demands. We refine what it means to be human, an artist to create in ways that no machine ever could. Now, you may resent that challenge with all the ethical complexities of ai. I completely understand, but the high speed rail has left the station, and AI is going to force us to evolve. AI in the hands of creators who understand both human nature and machine potential will create art that's truly transcendent. AI can generate infinite possibilities, but it will always require the fuel of personal inspiration because every incredible output from an artist begins with profoundly human input. Okay, let's talk about false reality. What if originality and authenticity itself is a placebo, an art, love, and life? We chase after things that make us feel like we found something authentic, but is that chase, that desperate need to discover something truly original and authentic? What makes things worthwhile? When you're moved to tears by a story or a painting, but discover it's just a remake or a counterfeit, does it make those tears less real? Does it make you feel cheated? Why in Orson Wells 1973 film F for fake master art forger El mere de Uri reveals how his fake masterpieces fold the world's top experts and hung in prestigious museums all over the world, not because they were perfect copies, but because they captured something deeper about what we believe authenticity should feel like. Just like the medical placebos that can heal us when we believe in their power. De URIs art worked because he understood human perception in hindsight, making us question if the distinction between real and fake matters more than how deeply something moves us. This paradox sits at the heart of all creative work. Authenticity isn't about originality, it's about transformation, your internal transformation. In 2013, spike Jones released a film titled her. It begins as a tender exploration of loneliness and love, but leaves us with a haunting question. If something mirrors our deepest perfectly, does it matter if it's synthetic? Samantha, the AI assistant and romantic interest in her doesn't create love. She pulls from a collective history of human intimacy processing centuries of patterns to reflect back in a logarithmic version of connection of love. It's breathtakingly precise, but is it authentic? Does it matter when it pulls someone out of a dark? Depression? I don't know. Same goes for originality. This debate of it mattering is unpacked masterfully. In Kirby Ferguson's documentary, everything is a remix. It lays it out clearly originality as we like to imagine it is a myth. Star Wars drew heavily from Carisa was hidden fortress. Apple's iPhone leaned heavily on Xerox's innovations. Even Shakespeare stitched together his masterpieces from preexisting plots and sources. James Brown, the godfather of soul, began as a little Richard impersonator even serving as his stand-in at concerts. James Brown was a photocopy at the beginning, but his relentless drive and raw emotion transformed the borrowed style into something unmistakably his own, still like an artist as they say. His path from imitator to innovator reveals a universal truth about creativity. What begins as impersonation can evolve into something unprecedented, which brings us to move 37 a moment when a computer playing an ancient game on a board against a human stunned the world again, but instead of IBM's deep blue, it's Google's deep mind. In 2016, DeepMind played the centuries old Chinese game of go against Lisa Doll. Alpha Go, DeepMind's, go. Software made a move so unconventional, so brilliant that experts thought it was an error, but it wasn't. It was a revelation, a move outside the vast library of millions of moves humans had played and goes The 4,000 year history, a move, no human bound by tradition and teachings had ever even considered, but move 37 lacked something essential, authenticity. It didn't carry the weight of Al's. Years of practice, the intimacy of learning from his elders, the joy of his victories or the crushing disappointment of his defeats. The move was a calculation, not an act of discovery. Right? Right. Or maybe it wasn't just computation, but genuine imagination. I know computers having an imagination sounds crazy, but hear me out. I've been thinking a lot about the idea that with AI being unburdened by the evolutionary guardrails that constrain human thought maybe maybe AI can show us possibilities are rigid epigenetic code and cognitive biases might not let us see. Ultimately, we tell ourselves AI is just synthesizing existing human thought and patterns. But isn't that exactly what humans do? Isn't that the whole point of Kirby Ferguson's? Everything is a remix documentary. This is the paradox of AI creativity. Machines can remix human ingenuity in ways we've never imagined. Like move 37, they can compute, combine and surprise us, but meaning doesn't come from patterns or does it? Let's unpack the importance of rigor and art. Rigor is the real differentiator among artists. In any creative field, a rigorous artist will always stand out. The thing that scares me most about AI is that many will see the mirage of ease with ai, when in fact rigor will always remain. When we look at transformative art, the most powerful works often come from those wrestling with constraints, not eliminating them from pushing against challenges, not avoiding them. For instance, the original spike, Mr. Lee being forced to scrap his expensive riot scene and do the right thing only to create the now iconic, direct to camera montage that hit even harder. The film's brilliance wasn't despite its limitations, it was because of them. Often more money means more oversight, more revisions, more voices drowning out the one that matters the most. The artist's intuition. AI promises to remove friction to make everything effortless, and while that sounds like progress, it misses something fundamental about how great art is cultivated. Steven Pressfield puts it perfectly in the war of art. I'm paraphrasing. The more resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art is to you and the more gratification you will feel when you finally do it. He's not only being poetic here, he's identifying a core truth about creativity. The resistance you feel isn't separate from the art we make. It's an essential part of the process. The rigor. AI is a powerful tool, but it's also a seductive shortcut. It's tempting to let it smooth away the rough edges to eliminate the struggle, but those edges that struggle, that's where the magic happens. That's where art transcends craft and becomes something worth fighting for. The question isn't whether to use ai. The question is whether we'll use it while maintaining the rigor. This is a turning test. An enso is a circle drawn in a single breath by zen masters deceptively simple one brushstroke complete. In an instant, an AI could easily replicate its form with mathematical precision down to the quantum level of ink. Dispersion yet show two people ensos, one drawn in deep meditation, one generated by code. It wouldn't surprise you and I that they would choose the Zen masters work not for its perfection, but for its presence. Neuroscientists call this interoception our brain's ability to sense internal states, both our own and others. It's why we can feel someone's eyes on us in a crowded room. We've evolved over millions of years to detect humanity through almost imperceptible cues. Our mirror neurons fire not just at actions but at the intention behind them. Like the Hindu concept of Darshan, the spiritual electricity that passes between viewer and artwork. We're not only seeing with our eyes, we're sensing with our entire evolutionary history. When we look at an AI generated painting that won a state fair in 2022, we might admire its technical brilliance, but something in our ancient brain whispers a human isn't there. Proof of presence, the tremor and the brush stroke, the hesitation in the line, the moment when human vulnerability bleeds through In 1986, when reflecting on the essence of creating music, miles Davis said something important and timeless. You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself. It's a reminder that while it's important to follow formulas at the beginning of one's creative journey, true artistry demands the courage to explore uncharted territory and discover your own voice. Here's something to note. Between 2020 20, the average billboard hit used just four chords, not in the same order, but the same chords. It wasn't because musicians forgot the other chords, but because predictability sells the same phenomenon appears everywhere. AI can generate an infinite number of variations on any formula One another superhero movie. It can write a thousand scripts before lunch, another crime procedural. It can generate enough episodes to fill a century of TV once stocked footage. It can generate any generic image or video to your heart's content, which puts us all on notice. Playing it safe is no longer safe. This is where survival gets counterintuitive. When AI can master every formula, the only safe path is to be radically original to make the choices in a logarithm would never think to make, to create the things that make an audience say, wow, I've never experienced anything like that. I felt that way when I saw everything everywhere, all at once. A film about a Chinese immigrant doing her taxes becomes a multiverse. Meditation on existence, featuring hot dog fingers and talking rocks. It crowed 140 million and won seven Academy Awards including best picture. Why? Because it dared to be undeniably itself. The future won't belong to those who are trapped in tradition and color within the lines. It'll belong to those who lucid dream beyond the page and paint with their essence. The age of rinse and repeat is over. The margins will become mainstream. The fringe will be the focus. In 1997 when deep blue defeated Kasparov, the world gasped. It felt like a moment when human mastery gave way to machine inevitability. Surely it felt catastrophic and paradigm shifting for many at the time. But the truth is chess didn't end after that game. It's arguably still one of the most popular pastimes. There are YouTube channels and Twitch streamers with millions of views and millions of subscribers. There are still people in parks playing chess for hours. Even though we all know that chess with its rigid rules and infinite possibilities proved solvable by ai art, however, thrives in the unsolvable. There aren't any rigid rules. It isn't a puzzle be completed. AI can mimic remix styles, even generate flashes of brilliance, but it will never take the risk of being misunderstood or rejected, and that's where our competitive edge lies. Artists who lean into their idiosyncrasies, who refuse the cookie cutter in favor of the cookie monster will shape the future. The beauty of radical creativity is that it doesn't just break the mold. It makes the mold irrelevant. So create something truly unique like only you can let your intuition lead you to your deepest, fearless self. Machines may refine, replicate, and scale, but the future isn't about outdoing the machines. It's about living a life so vivid, so authentic that it reads like an incredible autobiography, slums and salutations. I'm Mikael. This is the Black Enso.
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