An AI-Generated Existential Crisis

When generative AI started getting baseline competent at producing various works of visuals, sounds, and code, I think it’s quite normal for creatives to feel… pointless. Why even bother when you have a machine that can produce works that may eventually be better than what you can do now? Why put effort into learning or getting better at something when a machine can just do it for you?

Of course, this is something I’ve wrangled with for a while when these generative tools started taking off. Many of us struggle with comparison to others who are better than us, but at least they are relatable as people. Granted, AI is certainly very flawed, but it’s the kind of thing that makes one think hard about the future of human creation, specifically.

Of course, I found the problem for myself wasn’t specifically AI, but how I view my own creative/technical work in relation to others and the wider community, and how that impacts my ability to make things and intrinsically enjoy creating things. Perhaps in this blog post you might find something that resonates with you and your situation.

To create or not to create… Why do all this anyway?

If you can forgive the nihilism in the above chapter title, perhaps you can humor this question:

Do you desire to do something for the sake of doing it, or to express competence?

I think the older I get, the more I realize that the desire to express competence in something is a perpetual losing battle that only hurts long term growth. Of course, this could just be a “skill issue”, but please humor this: with the visibility of the internet, and its widespread adoption, the likelihood of any of us being “the very best” or even relatively good by comparison is exceedingly small. One could get into the weeds as to what qualifies as good and that it’s not necessarily a flat spectrum, but that’s outside the scope of this article. All that being said, in trying to be the best, we’ll only release things that are perfect. Unfortunately, perfect doesn’t exist.

If we follow this to it’s logical conclusion, we’ll never release anything, and our ability to give to the community will be diminished. Whether it is inspiration, knowledge, or even mistakes others can learn from, the calculus of not releasing our works could very well be negative in the grand scheme. See, so many works of art we cherish, or technical marvels of code and design had to get their inspiration from somewhere. After all, we don’t just abandon children after birth and expect them to build their own civilization entirely from scratch. Even a literal genius like Isaac Newton had to build upon what came before to help invent Calculus and Classical Physics as we know them today (fun fact: Calculus used to refer to all math, and the Calculus we know today was originally called Infinitesimal Calculus).

So if we’re not doing things to show competence, then why are we doing them?

To Learn, or To Help Others Learn

The best way I’ve ever learned anything is by tackling a project that’s just a little out of my reach, with the tools and resources to make it happen. I mean this. The most learning I can achieve is when I’m made to apply skills I know in new ways. Whether it is creating a C library to process floats bit-by-bit, a shell script that redirects video links to mpv, or a silly song using the megalovania leitmotif and breakbeats I found on the internet these sort of toy projects have been invaluable in increasing my low skill in these fields. Of course, these projects aren’t going to make me famous, but they’re invaluable to cement things in-practice that most people only ever learn in-theory. Having these small projects also makes it easier to come back and refresh yourself if need be (like I often need to cause I have too many hobbies send help).

P.S. I find it kind of annoying when people claim “reinventing the wheel” is pointless. There’s no better way to learn how the wheel works!

If you want to help others learn, why not try creating your own projects then explain them to an audience on a blog or YouTube? Teaching others to help yourself learn is often called the Feynman Technique, and many have put it to good use as a way to increase their own learning as well as others. Of course, the Feynman Technique only covers teaching, but making mini-projects to demonstrate a concept is like that little bit of extra credit, like the interactive quaternion visualizations that 3Blue1Brown and Ben Eater made, or the video Nic Barker made on how his UI library works. If you want a less technical examples, many creators like pikat (great artist btw) release plenty of content on projects they’ve tackled and the challenges they faced along the way.

For the Smell of The Game (it smells good)

The most subjective but important part of this whole article, making things is fun, and it’s only human to want to share the things we’ve made with others (most of the time). For all the talk of “evil human nature” we rarely focus on the good like a lot of the community building and sharing of things we find cool. This could be anything from a funny meme, a TikTok that tickled your fancy (person who spams my dms with TikToks, you know who you are :3 (no hate)), a deep and thought provoking essay or video essay, or even something we made ourselves. The problem is that people are afraid of what others may think, but if you enjoy doing something just because it’s fun to do, you really shouldn’t care about what others may think.

You shouldn’t let the words of others change how you feel if you’re doing something for your own sake.

Keep in mind, people who are usually satisfied with something won’t comment on their satisfaction online (reviews on shopping websites were a very common example before people were incentivized to leave positive reviews). The threshold of positive association to get someone to comment on something just generally tends to be much higher, and it’s easy to let a few negative comments sway how you think about the whole audience.

Of course, this doesn’t include the perfectionism argument to avoid sharing your creations, because that’s a very large topic that would need an entire article to unpack, and it’s certainly something I’d like to look at soon™.

Sharing your work is important, because who knows what will become popular, you may just be the one to cater to a niche no one would have ever known about, or become the inspiration for someone else to create great works as well, and sharing your work even when it may not be ideal is a great way to show how humble and down-to-earth you are (but this is only between you and me, don’t let anyone else know about this you hear!). For example, this article is is not ideal, as it’s a test run, to figure out how hugo and CMS works. It definitely won’t be perfect, but it will be great for LEARNING (callback!?! in my article?!?) how to use Hugo at a basic level before getting into the more serious content.

Conclusion

In a world where comparison is constantly being a thief of our limited supplies of joy, and where AI may further complicate these feelings, many may wonder “Why even create in the first place”. You may decide a certain hobby isn’t for you after reading this, but the joy of creation shouldn’t be gatekept by a desire for competence in a world where that desire will never be fulfilled, and the opportunities for learning and self-improvement from the act of creating and sharing are innumerable and invaluable.

Edits:

<24/07/25 15:21:01> Made some wording of the third paragraph of the second section less wordy.