The Right Questions with James Victore
The Right Questions is designed to help you get paid to do what you love and stay sane in the process.
The Right Questions with James Victore
Episode 56: Robots Can’t Play (But We Can)
If you are a stuck or frustrated creative and want to get paid to do what you love, let's talk. https://yourworkisagift.com/coaching
A headless bronze taught us more about AI than any whitepaper.
We start with Rodin’s Walking Man—one foot rooted in the past, the other driving forward—and unpack why those fingerprints in the base still stop us cold: they’re proof that a person risked something to make something. From there, we trace the tension many creatives feel as generative AI explodes into our workflows—part wonder, part worry—and draw a clear line between pattern prediction and human presence.
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All right, let's do this thing. Cue the fake music. Howdy, this is The Right Questions, and I am your man, your sensei, your guru, your boss. So look sharp, look busy. James Victory. And today I want to get right to it because I am delivering some of the core honesty that you find valuable here on The Right Questions. Some core ideas about some basic truths about you. And about how smart you are and how strong you are and how capable you are. And how you're just going to bring it and keep bringing it. Okay? And I want to allay some fears that you may have, that I may have. Because there is a story developing. It's been developing for a while, and it's uh uh it uh it changes and it's gonna be in our lives. It's big, it's huge, it's uh uh it's system changing. I want to talk about um artificial intelligence. I always used to joke I'd say, uh, why do you need artificial intelligence when I got the real thing right here? Um but I was thinking about AI, I've been thinking and been taking notes on AI, and I've been dabbling in it and looking at it a little bit, I must admit. Um and in thinking about it, in thinking about the future, I always tend to look backwards. And this thought came to me, and it was it was it was a lovely thought, it was a lovely bit of reminiscing. And I realized, um, I remember, I remember this experience I had in a museum in New York when I was just starting out. When I first experienced the work of the um the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rodin. Um uh a piece of his from about 1900. I mean, he worked in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He is most remembered for his sculpture that's turned into a meme or a punchline. Um he did The Thinker, but that's not the piece I want to talk about. The Rodan piece that um that I want to talk about a little bit is what we call his um walking man. And it's a it's a it's a sculpture that looks like an unfinished piece. It is life-size, it's a life-size male nude walking figure, but he has no arms and no head. So this figure, he's taking a very wide stance with his feet. And his back foot is turned a little to the side, while his front foot, which is um bearing the weight, is pointing straight ahead. And is um the way it's made is that it's so dynamic. His hips and his torso are forward and really looking ready to take that next step. The movement and motion in this piece is palpable. Rodin was able to create this this feeling, this kind of step the figure is taking that brings power to the step, like he's really digging in, right? And the um the appendages that are missing, the arms and the and the and the and the and the head, right, the upper upper body, it would actually distract from the powerful combination of mass and movement he gets. So this uh this figure appears to have one foot in the past and be walking squarely into the future, much like us today, especially right now, in this discussion about artificial intelligence. But the reason I bring this particular piece up, and the one thing that struck me most about Rodin's work when I saw it, when I was in my maybe middle late twenties, was the base. The base that the figure is standing on. Rodin's bronze work was originally created in plaster by hand, and then a cast was made of it. So in the base, you can see Rodin's fingerprints. You see the artist's fingerprints in the work. I have never felt closer to an artist than seeing Auguste Rodin's fingerprints in his work. The the the the sheer awe and inspiration, even hope for me, for a young creative. And to be able to say a human being made that. And perhaps maybe I too can make something good or even great. That was compelling and still striking in my memory. So artificial intelligence, the stuff of science fiction, is here today, and we're dealing with it. And since it is kind of the stuff of science fiction, it's been dealt with in sci-fi movies um a number of times. One of my favorite films that deals with um AI is Will Smith, right? And iRobot, right? And and Will Smith eventually confronts this robot and says, says, but but but can you make a beautiful piece of artwork? And the robot says, No, can you? And it's like, ow, damn, Will Smith got burned. It's this awesome scene. So um, the future is here. There AI isn't talking to us, isn't taunting us yet. But there is a real tension about how AI is going to change everything. For you and for me, and for jobs, right? There are people who are staunchly for it. And the people who are who are staunchly for it, um, I've listened to them and I don't really like their arguments. I kind of back the people who are staunchly kind of questioning. And that is because, yes, because I am not, nor have I ever been an early adapter. I think the excitement of it is great, but I think it's it's it's wisely overshadowed by the destructive potential it could also have. So admittedly, there's a lot of fear about AI in the real world, let alone our little creative circle, our little uh costra nosa, right? But oddly, or weirdly, or just truthfully, the rule for humanity is this. If we can conceive it, we make it, and if we make it, we use it. This was true for fire, this was true for the atomic bomb, and it's true now. And new technology is often scary or uncertain. Hell, you know, in in 1967, a man that I really look up to, his name was Fred Friendly, he, along with another character named Edward R. Murrow, these two men practically invented television journalism and news broadcasting. They took TV seriously. And this was early, very, very early days in black and white, right? But in 1967, they wrote a book called Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control. How about that for a title? Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control. And in it, they they they they shared their vision of television as an educational tool for society, a liberator, if you will, to lift it up and bring it together. Much like what what we said about the democratization of the internet. That's what the internet was supposed to bring. Not just cat videos and porn, right? So the book was a warning on the corrosive effect of money on the news business, the sensationalism of news reporting, and what could go wrong. And Fred Fri and Edward R. Murrow were concerned about how TV could be used and what it would turn into. And you know what? They were fairly right. But artificial intelligence is really unlike anything that we've created before. Although the atomic bomb didn't get smarter and it didn't make its own decisions, right? AI is something we don't necessarily have control over. As long as it's running, it's learning. And researchers have found that AI can teach itself things that its designers didn't intend and didn't expect for it to learn. Talk about circumstances beyond our control. Now, we are not here to decry the end of civilization. Certainly not in the hands of computers. But we are here to celebrate and honor your creativity. Because that's what we hear might be a victim of AI. Oh my gosh, what's gonna happen to the artists? Who we computers make art better than we do and faster. So I did what we all do when researching creativity. I went to the dictionary, and the Oxford Dictionary, the good old OED, gives a simple definition of creativity: the use of imagination or original ideas to create something. That's how we create. We use our imagination and our original ideas. In uh 1903, Mark Twain, the American humorist, wrote a letter to, oddly enough, to Helen Keller. And in it, he's talking about this same thing about creation. And he says, substantially, all ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously, drawn from a million outside sources. And quite frankly, that is exactly the same as how a computer learns. Right now, you're thinking, oh man, I wish James Victory could be my mentor, my guru. Hell, I wish he was my coach. Well, you can make that happen. Go to your work is a gift.com. There's a questionnaire that will probably help you out, but it'll also give you access to a free call. So let's talk. Let's free you from overwhelm and creative frustration. Let's build your business and help you get paid to do what you love. Again, go to your workisagift.com. Let's talk. Generative AI involves machine learning algorithms, right? They can learn a set of rules by studying a large amount of existing data or information. And using the rules, it learns to create something based on an input that we now call a prompt. Now, to take Mark Twain's idea a little further and differentiate us from the computer is the difference is that our million of outside sources go through a filter. The computer's does not. Ours goes through a beautiful filter, and that filter is called us. You may call it I. As in I think or I feel. So no matter how impressive a piece of computer-created poetry or artwork might be, it's always built out of blocks of data that were used to train it. In other words, it's incapable of what we would call original thought or having a new idea of its own. How we differ from machines is that the connections we make between things we've previously experienced and the new ideas we come up with have something to do with our humanity. It's the things we've previously seen and heard and read and felt. This is our own training data. Then it's filtered through the lens of our own perceptions, our feelings, our beliefs and experiences, our loves and our fears. In other words, our humanity. So she's going to get reference to draw a turtle. I kind of flipped. I kind of flipped out. And I flipped out for a purpose. You know, my when I flip out, it's a it's a lie to illustrate a truth, right? So I was so taken aback by her lack of trust in herself. Her inability to just make shit up, to just draw turtles, to just just dive in. Just dive in. I didn't ask her to draw a V-twin engine from a from a from a you know uh from a Harley Davidson. I asked her to use her imagination, trust herself, trust her vision and her art. Go ahead, try and fail. And it will be better than any turtle ever drawn. Trust me on this. I guarantee. So time and time again, since then, I have been so amazed at how afraid we are. We the creatives, how afraid we are to get our hands dirty. How afraid we are to to to flub, to make mistakes in the process of creating. You know, our our our our our skills are our our muscle memory, our intuition is a muscle, and we need to develop that, and we develop it by trusting in it. You know, mistakes and riffs and accidents and turtles with five legs, those things make creativity spontaneous and fun. Leave it in. I beg you, leave it in. When I first started thinking about AI, my biggest problem right off the bat, my biggest problem, without knowing much, but being fairly certain. My biggest problem with AI was the lack of fecking perfection, right? I mean, honestly, humans love imperfection. I mean, I guess I could argue that flaws could be programmed or prompted in, but we want to be surprised. Not catered to. We like each other. Humans like humans. We're curious about each other and what makes us tick. I mean, hell, that's why countless magazine covers around the world have photos of people on the front. We're interested in us. We're interested in each other's humanity, each other's flaws. We're interested in the glimpses into another life that we can that we can get from looking at their work. And if you can share that with the world, if you can, if you can, if you can allow that, if you can allow your creativity and your authenticity and your vulnerability to come through and share that with the world, you are a success. And the computer can never do that. AI will never be able to do that. AI will never be able to play. It will never have fun. We, we need to give ourselves that. We need to give ourselves the fun and play and develop our skills, and develop ourselves and our hand-eye coordination, and develop our love of making. AI will only be better than you when you give up your love of making. I mean, my own process is to get looser, not to tighten up. As opposed to any AI program, my own work seeks to be ugly, it seeks to be messy. I try to say the most with as little info as possible. I want to skate to the edge of readability, the edge of legibility. I do not always want clarity or understanding. I want to give the viewer enough information so they can come to their own conclusion in their mind, as if they're finishing off the joke for themselves. And then they can pat themselves on the back and say, I get it. In my work I want to be rougher. I want to still communicate, but in a more indirect way, in a more childlike way. And perhaps AI will catch up to me, to us. Maybe might even be next week. But I'm not afraid of that possibility, because I too will develop. You too will become bolder and more confident. And perhaps AI in this process, this back and forth, is just prompting us to become more human. You know, AI cannot replace that uh uniquely human need to connect with the Creator. As I did with Rodan. We want to see that a human being made this. We want to sit back in awe and go, oh my God, somebody came up with that. I'm always trying to spark some kind of emotion in myself, in myself with the work that I do. So I can imbue my work with that emotion. Some some some humor, some macabre, some pathos. I sit at a large table with a pen and paper and think. Basically just sit there and think until I get someplace really weird. Even someplace wrong. I think, man, that's the wrongest answer. They'd never go for that. And you know what? They do. You do, you accept it. Because I never doubted that you would. Because I never catered for you. I make these things that make me happy, and therefore they make you happy. You know, here's the process. Imagine hanging with a pal of yours and thinking about thinking about work, and you're throwing ideas back and forth, and you're getting a little silly and a little jokey, and eventually one of you, like uh, you know, really not taking it seriously, and you says in kind of a sinister fashion, it goes like this, it goes, yeah, you know, it would be really funny. Whatever you say, whatever is done next, do that thing. And it may, it might mean you end up drawing on a supermodel or buying baby chicks from Kansas, you know, for a short film. But you will take that wrongest answer and you'll make it the right one. Because unlike AI, for us, there ain't no rules. So I like to make myself laugh or or get that feeling of a deep breath when you see something beautiful, you know, that sense of awe, like, oh shit, that's awesome. And it might just be a scribble. But if I can get a bit of that in the process, that energy carries through to the reader. That is something AI can't replace. Again, the uniquely human need we all have to connect. Because no matter how good it is, you know, whether it's music or watching a movie or reading a book, anything, anything generated by AI is going to be uh uh artificial. You know, and for us, even if it's bad or a screw-up or a blooper, we pre we prefer to witness and appreciate and enjoy the creations and performances of human beings. When they're imperfect just as much when they appear to be perfect. We all want that real connection and honest uh and authentic warmth of something made by a human being. And that's something a computer can never do. And why, why would I want to let go of that fun? Why would you want to? It seems silly to say and sillier to apologize for, but creativity is hard work. And learning to trust ourselves is a practice and a craft that we should not let go of. And sharing your history and your past and all of your experiences in your work, that cannot be replaced, and it should not be replaced. Because that is honesty and that is authenticity. And we as humans have the possibility to come up with something to delight and inspire and educate, and that is the most profound of human experiences. That is what makes your creativity possible. And when they write about AI and creativity, think about this. When you're reading an article or hearing about AI and creativity, think about this. The creativity they're talking about is a generic sense. It is not your creativity, and it is certainly not mine. I love you guys. I trust you guys. I think you're awesome. I love hearing from you. You guys are amazing. Um, it's called the right questions, so we do need questions from you. And without you, we are not here. I love you. I'll talk to you later. Bye bye.