When should you use ChatGPT in your writing? And how much should you use it?

There are plenty of writing tasks where ChatGPT can save you precious time. But there are also plenty of writing tasks where it can cost you time. It’ll take longer to rewrite and edit ChatGPT’s outputs than just writing the piece yourself.

What are the writing tasks that ChatGPT excels at? What are the tasks it’s weak at? And how much can you use it for each?

The Three Tiers of Writing

What is your writing task? Place that task in one of these three tiers: low-level, mid-level, and high-level. I’ll explain each.

LOW-LEVEL 

This is writing that just needs to do its job. It doesn’t need to withstand much scrutiny from the reader because it will get skimmed. Whether it’s “good” or “bad” is determined by whether or not it did its job. You’re not composing beautiful prose here. Some examples: most social media posts, FAQs, terms of service for your site, or summaries of existing text.

MID-LEVEL

This is quality content that should engage your audience more, but it’s not the best you can do. This is valuable content, but it’s not headline material. It’s your content for this week, and you’ll need more next week. You’re probably not going to promote this content for months. Some examples: an article or blog post, a social media thread, or a landing page.

HIGH-LEVEL

This is the best writing you can do. These are big ideas and big swings. This content requires excellent writing and storytelling. It might demand research, analysis, or creativity. You’ll continue to promote or sell this content for months or years. This is your prestige stuff, the centerpiece of your written work. Some examples: a book, video, presentation, product copy, or important articles.

Get the idea? Choose the tier for your task. Is it low-level, mid-level, or high-level?

How much can you use ChatGPT? 

The tier you just chose is ChatGPT’s grade for that level of writing. In other words, ChatGPT is excellent at A Tier, good at B Tier, and decent at C Tier. You’ll use ChatGPT less the lower the tier you place it in.

With A Tier, you can use plenty of what ChatGPT gives you verbatim. (But as always, be sure to proof those outputs and edit them.)

With B Tier, ChatGPT will primarily give you raw material that you’ll rewrite. It’ll also give you some usable text.

With C Tier, ChatGPT becomes a support player, a bit like a combination of Google and a human copy editor. ChatGPT can give you information and edit your writing, but most of the work gets done by you. This is ChatGPT at its least revolutionary.

Beware of C Tier

C Tier is where ChatGPT can waste your time. You can end up typing endless prompts as you search for decent outputs or entirely rewriting and rethinking what ChatGPT gives you.  

To determine if your task belongs in C Tier, ask yourself the following three questions. If the answer is “yes” to any of them, it is.

• Is this a long piece of writing? (Even over a few hundred words is long.)

• Is this a complex piece of writing? (Does it have a narrative? Does it have a personal perspective? Is it intended to evoke emotion?)

• Is this a very important piece of writing? (Is it very important to you, your audience, or your business?)

Again, ask yourself: is this long, complex or very important?

An important note: ChatGPT is still very useful for supporting C Tier writing.

You need lots of low- and mid-level writing to market and publicize your premiere content. It’ll need social media posts, articles, product pages, summaries, etc. ChatGPT can help you do a lot of that work quickly.

Some of you might be wondering why you should use ChatGPT less and less as the writing task becomes more and more important. It’s simple: ChatGPT writes mediocre text that tends to be bland. In small doses, this works just fine. The text will be repetitive, rambling, and dull in larger doses. If you use ChatGPT where it’s not suited, you’ll just post text nobody will read.

The quality of ChatGPT’s writing might change, but that’s where we are now.

The Take-Away

ChatGPT can do most of the work for low-level writing, a good amount for mid-level, and valuable support work for high-level. You’ll use ChatGPT less frequently the higher you rank your project in these tiers. But for most of you, C Tier writing is a minority of your day, so there are a lot of tasks where ChatGPT can save you some time and spare you some tedium.

As always, be sure to verify any fact ChatGPT gives you. You’re responsible for what you publish, not ChatGPT.

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This lean and efficient guide will show how to get real writing done with ChatGPT. I do actual work, and I show you how I did it. There’s no hype and no BS. Read more about it here.

Copying: Where It All Begins

In school, we’re all told not to copy. It’s plagiarism, it’s wrong, it’s a no-go.

And I agree! When you’re young, you need to have things simplified. But there comes a time when you need to revisit copying and understand its creative power.

Let me show you how copying is an essential part of creativity. I’ll do this in the simplest way possible.

This is not a trick question: what is this?

Did you say, “Duh, it’s a circle?”

Ding ding, correct!

Now let me tweak it just a bit.

What is it now?

Yep, it’s the Moon. Still just a circle, but with a black backdrop and some stars -- which, by the way, are also circles.

This is a super basic example of creating by copying.  I copied something, tweaked it, and transformed a grey circle into a moon. It’s not high art, but it is creativity in action. 

That’s how you create using copying.

We’ll often interpret what we see differently than others. You might look at that original grey circle and see another possibility. Change two colors and presto, the Sun.

Some might see a ring. Take that sun image, switch that circle to a gold outline, and you’ve got a gold ring.

Some of you might see a flat disc, like a plate.

And some might not see an object at all but a round hole, like a ship’s porthole.

How you perceive is creative. We all spot various possibilities in what we see.

And these things we see then become tools in our creative toolkit. We can use these to solve creative challenges.

Circles, for instance, are the building blocks for all figure drawings, including animals.

How to draw a cat, Illustration by colomio

The comic book legend Jack Kirby used swirls of black circles as backgrounds in his panels, adding extra punch to his art.

Jack Kirby’s famous “Kirby Krackle” dot effect

Inspired by Kirby, the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse used circles throughout to create a portal to the multiverse.

Kirby-inspired dots in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

To be clear, copying by itself isn’t creative. But it’s a vital part of creativity. We take existing things and remix them into new things. We use existing ideas to solve our creative puzzles.

In our next exciting installment, I’ll use pop culture to delve deeper into copying and start to unravel this important issue: when is it wrong to copy?

In the meantime, check out “Everything is a Remix Part 1” and see how all musicians rely on copying.

Subscribe to the Everything is a Remix newsletter and get FINISH IT NOW, our free guide to finishing that languishing project.

New guide to writing with ChatGPT

Folks, I am thrilled to announce that I have a new guide to writing with ChatGPT. This lean and efficient guide will show how to get real writing done with ChatGPT. I do real work and I show you how I did it. There’s no hype about doing everything instantly or making a million dollars and I tell you in no uncertain terms what ChatGPT is good and bad at. I’ve designed this guide so you can finish it in one sitting. Then you can get to work on your own stuff!

Get it now for just $50!

We now support Apple Pay and Afterpay. if you’d like to pay in installments.

How to stop starting

Your brain wants you to go for it. But maybe… don’t.

Ready for launch? Hold up.

I have a problem with starting. I don’t mean that I can’t get started. I mean starting too quickly and starting too much. This can produce small problems like buying software or gadgets I barely use. Or it can produce big problems like unfinished projects or worst of all, projects that are way more crazy-making than they should have been. 

And you’ve got the same problem. Why do I know this? Because what I’m talking about is a human bias called the action bias. The purpose of the brain isn’t just to think thoughts. Its purpose is to make things happen. Your brain wants you to do it: set that goal, buy that course, start that project. But it’s not so good at helping you achieve that goal, learn that material, or finish that project. 

The action bias tricks you into thinking you’re getting something done. But all you’ve really done is begin… and that’s the easy part. Impulsive choices like these will waste your time and resources. If you fall prey to the action bias frequently enough, and you’ll find yourself demoralized and doubting you can achieve much of anything.

I got burnt by the action bias in an unusually epic way. In 2012, I was finishing the original Everything is a Remix series, which was a big success. I was hot and I wanted to capitalize. I wanted to launch something and I wanted to do it fast. I launched a KickStarter for a new series, This is Not a Conspiracy Theory. I had almost no clue what it was or what I was going to deliver or how long it would take or how much it would all cost . (How many successful KickStarters have ultimately cost the creator money? I’m guessing plenty.)

This is Not a Conspiracy Theory worked out. I made the thing I wanted to make, I got to the place I wanted to go. But it took eight years and the process was far more painful than it needed to be. The premature launch took a slow project and made it even slower because I wasted time wracking my brains trying to solve problems that couldn’t be solved. If I’d slowed down and thought things through a bit more, I could have saved myself substantial time and a lot of misery.

It often requires more energy and more discipline to not act. To wait, think things through and then act is actually harder. It’s way easier to just let it rip and make something—anything—happen. 

By slowing down, making sure we want to make the move we’re making and figuring out how to do it the best way we know how, we’re setting the stage for a more efficient and less painful project.

However, this problem is a shadow of what it once was for me. The big thing that has helped has been awareness. My snap decisions bounced back badly enough times that I got wise. I didn’t know anything about the action bias, I just learned through mistakes.

I learned to be slow down on big decisions first. But small decisions matter too, they add up. Something I’ve been doing in recent years is creating these little holds for these impulses. Want to buy something? I put it in a hold list and revisit again when my mood is more moderate. Then I revisit it again when I think. Still want it? Okay, it’s safe to purchase. Most things I want to buy do not make it through this gauntlet.

The practice of mindfulness helps with this, as well as countless other personal issues. 

But the action bias is one of those things that you never banish. It’ll always come with inventive new ways to trick you. But I’ve got decent defense now.

NEW VIDEO: Will the Law Stop AI?

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a brand new video! This is a commission I made for Bloomberg Law. It’s written, directed and narrated by me. It explores the legality of generative AI and features a debate between copyright lawyers Mark Lemley and Ian B. Crosby. You can read more about it over at Bloomberg Law.

Why I removed Kanye West from Everything is a Remix

One of the thumbnail versions from Everything is a Remix Part 1

Kanye West is as canceled as canceled gets. He might still be a giant celebrity, maybe he can even make lots of money somehow, but he is utterly exiled and it’s hard to imagine how he returns. I don’t foresee his mind becoming more ordered in the future. 

On his way down, West left a string of humiliations in his wake, both for himself and anyone he touched. His final stop on the bus ride to oblivion was an interview with Alex Jones on Infowars. It was a dumb, depressing spectacle in which Jones was actually forced to distance himself from West’s anti-semitism. (Jones typically just ignores anti-semitism and moves on, but he couldn’t pull that off with a guest this high profile.)

In my little world, Kanye West has the odd distinction of crossing over between my two major projects, Everything is a Remix and This is Not a Conspiracy Theory. West’s music was in the original Remix and he was featured in the final segment of the new Everything is a Remix Part 1. West wasn’t in This is Not a Conspiracy Theory, but he would have been if I’d made it later. Jones was in it and I also did a whole mini-series about Jones and his most outspoken champion, Joe Rogan.

Generally speaking, folks, you wanna be featured in Everything is a Remix, not This is Not a Conspiracy Theory.

A number of people have noticed that Kanye isn’t in the final edit of the new Everything is a Remix. But this is not quite what it appears. I didn't remove West because of his long series of anti-semitic remarks, which were stupid, wrong, and sad. My reasons were much more mundane. I removed West for format reasons. Let me explain.

The original version of Everything is a Remix had post-credit segments, which were inspired by Steve Jobs’ “one last thing” bits where he’d announce the biggest product after the presentation seemed over. I did one about Tarantino which was very popular, but my favorite is the one about multiple discovery. Actually, that’s one of my favorite scenes of mine, period.

In the Remix reboot in 2021, I wanted to honor the series’ original format and continue doing these post-credit sequences. Kanye West was the first post-credit segment in the new Everything is Remix. But after seeing how that played, I felt like it didn’t fit on contemporary YouTube. It was hard to make that segment but most people didn’t see it. I decided to not do one in Part 2 and see what happened.

Aaaaand… crickets. Nobody cared. So I nixed them after that. (This video about Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was initially going to be the post-credits segment for the new Part 2). 

When the new Everything is a Remix was completed, the Kanye segment was the odd man out: it was the only post-credits segment in the series. It wasn’t consistent with the rest of the videos, so I cut it from the final all-in-one version, which is the version most people see. 

But Kanye should be in Everything is a Remix and if the series ever gets a maintenance upgrade in the years to come, I’ll put him back in. West is a master remixer, arguably the GOAT. His music endures, with or without him.

Kanye West should be seen as someone with an ailment. Exile is probably the only place suited for a media juggernaut with fairly serious mental illness. But I don’t see any purpose in the rest of us depriving ourselves of the joy of hearing his music, or worse yet, editing him out of musical history. West’s music was beautiful when he made it, and in many ways, so was he. That segment in Everything is a Remix Part 1 honors what he did and who he was. I’m proud of it. Go watch it again.

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My Tech Make-over

Whenever I finish a chapter of life—things like moving or completing a large project—I always feel compelled to clean house in a variety of ways. I tidy up my workstation and do chores that have been kicking around for months. I organize my computer, archive old stuff, and clean up my desktop. Although even at the worst of times, gotta say my desktop is pretty dang tidy.

Just admit you envy me for my tidy desktop

But the most impact comes from the improvements I make to my software workflow. Occasionally these changes don’t stick, occasionally they end up being horizontal moves, but mostly, they’re meaningful upgrades to how I work.

Here’s my tech changes from recent years.

• For writing I switched from the writing application Scrivener to the note taking application Obsidian. This was an excellent move but Scrivener is great and might work well for you.

• For video editing I switched from Adobe Premiere to Davinci Resolve. Resolve is an entirely superior application, great move, many other video editors are now following suit. This also saved plenty of money. Everything after This is Not a Conspiracy Theory has been made in Resolve.

• For photo editing and graphics work I switched from Photoshop to Affinity Photo. This move also saved money and it works well enough for me because I don’t use Photoshop that much anymore. But Photoshop is still the best and if I did more graphics work I would switch back.

I've also made new additions, like the Mac-only application Drafts. This is where I do transient bits of writing, like important messages or posts, handy references, notes from meetings—actually I’m writing this newsletter in Drafts! (Obsidian is more like a personal library, a “second brain.” Drafts is more like a notepad.)

And I love Text Sniper (also Mac-only) for capturing bits of onscreen text. Can’t say enough good things about this application and I use it almost everyday.

Here’s the changes I’ve made in recent months. Some of these are still on-going.

• For browsing, switched from Brave to the Arc Browser, which is still a beta. It’s better, do it. You can probably find an invite in this Twitter thread. I made this video with Nick Milo about Arc.

• Although I’ve run a Mac for a long time, I didn’t actually use much Apple software or services. I didn't even have an iPhone. But now I’ve now joined the Apple Cult. I realize this choice isn’t very exciting or original, but in my new dad life using Apple everywhere makes life easier. Everything works well, connects well and the user interface is consistent. I now use Apple Music, Podcasts and Notes regularly. I’m even trying out Apple News for news. I now have an Apple Watch. I love being reachable all the time by my family, and I often use it for podcasts, alarms and UV readings here in sunny San Diego. My wife got me AirPods Pro for Christmas and I love them so so much. We use Photos all the time for family photos and it’s one of our absolute favorite things. These all get synced up to an ever-ballooning iCloud account. (I tried to use Siri with my watch for a while and gave up.)

The verdict is not yet in on these current switches.

• Trying Spark email client for business email. I’ve used Gmail forever, but I’ve moved my business addresses to iCloud. This is just an area where I’m looking to freshen things up and have a feeling of renewal.

• I’m moving away from Notion, Apple Reminders and Asana and trying ClickUp for task and project management. The free plans have everything most of us will ever need.

• I’m likely switching to the very exciting, kinda geeky launcher Raycast, which would replace three apps: Alfred, TextExpander, and Default Folder.

• A lot of business and productivity books are padded and shouldn’t be 300 pages long, and I often find podcasts fluffy and meandering. I’m currently using Blinkist for 20 minute summaries. I still read the most important books, but for the next tier down, this is seeming like a great way to pick up some good bits.

And these old-timers hang in there year after year.

• 1Password for passwords.

• iStat Menus gives me system and network stats I sometimes need.

• Slack for messaging.

• Breaktime for focusing. I set it to 52 minutes, then take a break. I’m sporadic at this.

• Chronosync for backups.

• DropBox is still the best for online file storage. I like WeTransfer for sending large files.

• We need Excel for the business so we use Microsoft 365 or whatever it’s called this week.

All told, almost my entire suite of applications has been replaced over the past few years, including stalwarts like Scrivener and the Adobe suite. These changes have been overwhelmingly beneficial.

The Ideas That Made Me

Lots of you are listening to my collection of book summaries. You can read or listen to these for free on Blinkist.

Paul Vahur wrote me and said he thought the collection was missing an important book, David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I couldn’t agree more. Getting Things Done is an essential book and if you haven’t read it you should.

This got me thinking, “What are the essential ideas of my life?” What ideas have become little background applications that chug along in my brain year after year?

Below is what I came up with. This is not a list of the most important ideas or the best ideas, these are the ideas that resonated with me the most deeply and changed how I think and live. With every video I’ve ever made, I tried to do the same thing in some small way. And in a different way, this remains what I aspire to do.

These are mostly listed in the order I encountered them. The links below lead to Amazon, and most of these can be found as summaries in my Blinkist collection.

Fun Fact #1: I was 34 when I started to get into nonfiction books and ideas. Before then, I was mostly into movies, music, fiction and blogs. A few years after getting into nonfiction Everything is a Remix was brewing and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Getting Things Done, David Allen
I discovered this book in 2006
I think Getting Things Done is the first powerful work system I ever came across. I don’t think I had any formal methods at all before this. In particular, Allen’s framing of capture was a big deal for me. I actually need to re-read this book because I’m sure it’s full of stuff that I do everyday and have forgotten I got them from Allen. (I likely found this through Merlin Mann, who was an outspoken acolyte at the time.)

Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Discovered in 2006
Flow gave a name to something I blissfully experienced but never knew what it was or had any idea how to recreate the magic. “Flow” is a psychological state of heightened experience where you are performing at the outer boundaries of your abilities, where the activity is not too easy and not too hard. The entire book isn’t required to get the idea. The summary, which is in my Blinkist collection, will be plenty for most of you.

Fun Fact #2: If you can pronounce “Csikszentmihalyi” you are officially a card-carrying member of the intelligentsia. 

The Waste Book or Commonplace Book, Various
Discovered in 2010
The “waste book” (Newton’s term) or “commonplace book” (Ben Franklin’s term) is simply your notes. It’s simply snippets of things you’ve encountered or thought: ideas, bits of writing, memorable phrases—anything that created a little spark in your mind and potentially can be used later. Tiago Forte popularized this idea most recently by calling it a “second brain.” This is actually something I was practicing for a few years before I had any idea it was a thing people did. I explain the wastebook process I used back then here. This is still a great way to work; you can do awesome shit with just that. (I think I might have discovered this idea through Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From but I’m not totally sure. That book was a big influence on Everything is a Remix.)

Mindfulness, Various
Discovered in 2010
This is something I found in a variety of ways and through no particular practitioner. Mindfulness is basically just being aware of the present moment and your emotional state. Meditation is a key component. It’s simple and endlessly difficult. I am actually bad at practicing mindfulness. I mostly don’t do it. But I always return to it. And being bad at mindfulness is far, far, far better than not knowing mindfulness exists.

Fun Fact #3: I haven’t meditated in… years! I’m gonna break that streak this week.

Nonviolent Communication, Marshall B. Rosenberg
Discovered in 2012
Nonviolent communication is a type of communication focused on expressing feelings and communicating needs. In our personal interactions, we all have a tendency to make generalized, exaggerated declarations and then defend those statements. For instance, “You’re being inconsiderate because you never put your dishes in the dishwasher.” If this is instead expressed as something like, “I feel hurt when you don’t put your dishes in the dishwasher because I have a need to have my time respected. When you don’t put the dishes away, I have to do it for you.” It might sound kinda goofy but this shit works. This is trickier to grasp than mindfulness because it’s surprisingly hard to identify emotions and needs. And like mindfulness, it’s endlessly challenging to do and keep doing. An unusual quality of this book is that I remember finding the writing kinda hippy-dippy and corny. Whatever. Deal with it, it’s worth it.

Thinking in Systems, Donella H. Meadows
Discovered in 2012
This is a titanic book for me. It’s the most accessible introduction to systems thinking and systemic thought. It’s what really gave some detail and features to the vague, amorphous concept of the system.Thinking in Systems is what spawned my series This is Not a Conspiracy Theory. If there’s a single idea that still needs storytelling development, though, it’s systems. If you’re a storyteller and want a challenge, this is a worthy one. Thinking in Systems is great but I think somebody out there can do better and bring these ideas to more people.

Hunt Gather Parent, Michaeleen Doucleff
Discovered in 2020
I’ve not read a lot of parenting books and I make no claims to be well-read, but this one resonated with both me and Nora deeply. It basically synthesizes traditional knowledge about parenting, mostly through Mayan cultures. To me, the modern Western style, typified by “helicopter parenting,” seemed excessively managerial. I think children need as much freedom and autonomy as is age-appropriate. A lot of parenting I saw seemed to both underestimate what children can do (no chores or responsibilities) and overestimate what children can do (exhaustive negotiations about things they aren’t yet mature enough to make decisions about). This book helped to clarify and systematize my values and to validate the best parts of my own upbringing.

Fun Fact #4: One thing I’m certain of about parenting is there’s a million ways to do it. Anything can work, including helicopter parenting.

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Various
Discovered in 2019
This is related to the “waste book” concept. Personal Knowledge Management is essentially a systemization of this concept into a varying set of methods and tools. There’s no consensus way to do it. Zettelkasten, or Smart Notes, is the formative system. Tiago Forte uses PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive). PKM is a social creation that belongs to nobody in particular. Forte has great storytelling on this topic, but my favorite methodology is Nick Milo’s. Nick doesn’t yet have a single, definitive work, but I would start with his Obsidian for Beginners series.

Fact #5: I’ve said the word “system” 11 times in this email! I mean 12! Systems are my thing. Make that 13.

From Strength to Strength, by Arthur Brooks
Discovered in 2022
This is the most recent book to change my life. It’s about the transition that takes place somewhere in midlife, where we lose some mental speed and agility and have to change direction in order to suit our strengths. My email about resentment and disappointment resonated with a lot of you. I’m still sending out replies to that one. (If you missed that email, search your email for “Everything is a Remix now sustainably fueled by disappointment and resentment.”) If that message connected with you, you should read this book.

Fun fact #6: Strength (along with length) is a word I have never ever gotten used to spelling. I still type it wrong constantly.

Fun fact #7: I asked ChatGPT what words end with “gth” and it helpfully suggested width, growth, fifth, eighth, twelfth, breath, depth and yes, highsmith. Thanks superintelligence!

Everything is a Remix, This is Not a Conspiracy Theory, et al, by Me
Started creating Everything is a Remix in 2009
Started creating This is Not a Conspiracy Theory in 2012
Fuck false modesty: by miles and miles and miles, the biggest influences on my life are my own stuff. Visit this newly renovated page to ogle them all. As I’ve collected them and tidied them up lately, I’ve watched some again and I’m immensely proud of the entire lot. A couple underrated ones are the Rogan Vs. Jones series, which I happened to press play on then got sucked into watching the entire 90 minutes, and The End: In Praise of Credits, which has a new level of meaning cuz, y’know, I’ve ended making videos. Every single one of these is something I wished existed and now it exists. The influence that they’ve had on my life is immeasurable, vastly beyond anything I merely read. Nothing will change you more than the thing you create yourself.

Use this link to save 50% on This is Not a Conspiracy Theory. (Offer expires June 16th!)

Things I’m into at the moment

• Blinkist
  Audio book summaries are one of my main media sources right now. You can listen to the books in my shared space for free. 

• LIT Video Books
  These are mini-doc versions of popular nonfiction. Really great deal right now.

• Tana
  I’m experimenting with merging notes and project management and it’s looking very promising. For PKM nerds, Tana is kinda like a combination of Roam and Notion. It’s still early and in beta so you need to get on the waitlist. (Sorry I have no invites!)

• Fathom
  Using this for Zoom call transcriptions and AI summaries. Works amazingly well, with only the occasional gaffe.

• Drinking fuckin’ salt for some reason

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Why artists shouldn’t fear AI

“The AI hype inferno is raging out of control right now, and these narratives are just as often utopian as they are dystopian. I’m going to heave a few much-needed buckets of water on this wildfire.”

Read my latest article, “Why Artists Shouldn’t Fear AI.” This is a expansion and elaboration of Part 4 of Everything is a Remix, Artificial Creativity.

Everything is a Remix Complete Transcript, 2023 Version

This is a transcript for the complete, 2023 version of Everything is a Remix, Parts 1 through 4. The video can be seen here

Part 1

Remix.

To copy, transform and combine existing materials to produce something new.

Remixing is everywhere you look.

Tik Tok is remixing. You do your version of dance moves.

You lip sync to someone else's audio.

You duet -- literally.

Memes are remixing. You take a photo, you repurpose it, then someone else tries it, then there's a flood of everyone trying out combinations, including remixing other memes.

When you take something old and use it in something new, that’s remixing. It might just seem like just copying, but it's actually something much more. Remixing can empower you be more creative.

Remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments, to create software without coding, to create bigger and more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas.

You don’t need expensive tools to remix, you don’t need a distributor, you don’t even need skills or… good judgment. Everybody can remix and everybody does.

From our songs and games and movies and memes, to how we train computers to create, to the way we sense of reality, to the evolution of life itself, everything is definitely a remix.

To explain, let’s start in the Bronx in 1972.

Title: Part 1: The Song Remains the Same

In the early seventies in New York City, a new technique for creating music starts to form. At parties DJs are looping the dancers’ favorite parts of songs.

An early pioneer is DJ Kool Herc, who extends instrumental breaks by switching back and forth between two copies of the same record. And he has partners, MCs, who sometimes speak rhythmically over these beats, just like many black entertainers had been doing for a long time.

Boom, rap music is born, and starts to grow. And in the last few decades of the twentieth century, it will transform popular music and the popular imagination.

Sylvia Robinson spots this new trend and assembles a team to record an actual rap song. She creates a group called The Sugarhill Gang, they copy the rhythm from Chic’s “Good Times”, and score rap’s first hit, “Rapper’s Delight.”

Grandmaster Flash takes Kool Herc’s simple idea, refines it and turns it into a new art. He records the first music created with just turntables.

This technique of taking old bits of music and using it in new music becomes known as sampling. At first rap samples are mostly r&b, soul, and funk–lots of James Brown.

But soon artists are sampling different sorts of music, like rock. Run DMC and producer Rick Rubin sample The Knack’s “My Sharona” in “It’s Tricky.”

A Tribe Called Quest uses the bass line from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” in “Can I Kick It?”

The sampling gets more and more eclectic and more and more complex.

Public Enemy uses nonmusical sounds: speeches, sound effects, noise.

De La Soul brings together sixties rock, seventies soul, and eighties pop into a single song.

And the Beastie Boys and producers The Dust Brothers unite hundreds of samples in their album Paul’s Boutique.

Sampling spreads outside hip hop, into some of the biggest pop hits.

Sly and the Family Stone gets sampled in Janet Jackson's “Rhythm Nation.”

A riff by Tom Tom Club is used in Mariah Carey's "Fantasy."

The group Len samples a forgotten disco hit by Andrea True Connection in “Steal My Sunshine.”

And Britney Spears' "Toxic" uses a highly modified sample from an eighties Bollywood musical.

But one of the most famous and least recognizable samples in pop is in Daft Punk's "One More Time," which slices up a song by Eddie Johns. Firstly, three parts are isolated. Then the song gets slowed down. The second part then loops three times, then the first part plays once, this little sequence then loops two more times, then the third part loops seven-and-half-times, then the first part plays --. This whole sequence loops throughout the song. Eddie Johns' song becomes a Daft Punk song by just chopping it up, stretching it, and rearranging the parts.

Sampling reached its pinnacle with The Avalanches’ album “Since I Left You,” which merges perhaps thousands of samples into a swirl of sound unlike anything else. The album is layered together from distorted bits of obscure songs, sketch comedy, and movie dialogue. The title track loops and speeds-up a variety of forgotten songs from the sixties and seventies, then slices up, pitch shifts, and rearranges a vocal into an entirely new melody.

And finally, sampling leaves behind the twentieth-century, and the world of CDs and vinyl and physical media, and takes to an explosively growing new medium, the internet. Gregg Gillis' project Girl Talk challenges the entire concept of musical ownership with a series of flagrantly illegal mashup albums that can be downloaded for free. Each song is composed entirely of dozens of uncleared samples by popular artists.

Hip hop began at block parties in the Bronx and grew to dominate popular music, and along with it, so did sampling and so did remixing. Remixing is now a core element of music. Even when artists aren't remixing, they're often curating and manipulating sound in a similar kind of way.

But remixing didn't begin with hip hop. Earlier musicians were remixing too. They couldn’t sample, but they could still copy.

Just like rap is a remix, so is rock.

To explain, let’s travel to England in 1968.

After the break-up of the band The Yardbirds, their virtuoso guitarist Jimmy Page starts a new group. He recruits John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, and John Bonham to form Led Zeppelin. They play a new kind of incredibly loud electric blues and within just a few years, they’re the biggest band on the planet.

And yet, Led Zeppelin are dogged by controversy. Many critics and peers label them as… ripoffs. The case goes like this.

“Dazed and Confused” features different lyrics but is clearly an uncredited cover of the same titled song by Jake Holmes. Holmes files suit over forty years later in 2010, a settlement is reached and Holmes’ name is finally added to the credits.

The iconic guitar riff of “Whole Lotta Love” is the creation of Jimmy Page but Robert Plant lifts some of the lyrics from Willie Dixon’s “You Need Love”.

“The Lemon Song” is also mostly a Zeppelin original but includes more copied lyrics, this time from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor.”

And the most famous example is Zeppelin’s biggest hit, “Stairway to Heaven,” the opening of which resembles Spirit’s “Taurus.”

A battle is waged in court for years and Zeppelin finally prevails in 2020 when the song is found to not infringe copyright. Opinion among musicians is divided. Many argue that the chord progression is too common to be owned. While others argue that the similarities go well beyond the chord progression.

Zeppelin toured with Spirit in 1968, three years before “Stairway” was released. In his sworn testimony, Jimmy Page claims he never heard "Taurus" before writing "Stairway".

Led Zeppelin made mistakes, but they were also just doing what artists do. Copying from others, transforming these ideas, and combining them with other ideas.

Hip hop artists would do the same thing a decade later. And they too would sometimes get in trouble for failing to credit other artists.

Hip hop artists would sample actual recordings. While rock artists would recreate melodies, chords, arrangements and more.

Chic’s “Good Times,” one of the major early hip hop samples, was itself synthesized from various sources throughout culture, like the funk and jazz of the seventies and the glamorous, sophisticated aesthetic of Roxy Music. "Good Times" famous bass line was inspired by the one from Kool and the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging.”

Nile Rodger's of Chic: This is a song I wish I had written. So what do I do? I go, damn, well if I wrote Hollywood Swing, it would go like this. And then I write "Good times."

“Good Times,” like every other song, remixes the musical ideas of others.

It was once rare for musicians to admit that they copy, but it's become common.

Like Dave Grohl has spoken openly about copying beats from disco bands when he was the drummer in Nirvana.

Dave Grohl: I pulled so much stuff from The Gap band and Cameo and Tony Thompson on every one of those songs. That's all disco! That's all it is.

And when a controversy emerged over Olivia Rodrigo's song "Brutal" perhaps copying an Elvis Costello riff, Costello said this was fine and he did it too. "It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy."

Musician and DJ Questlove has said that "...the DNA of every song lies in another song. All creative ideas are derivative of another."

But past musicians have certainly known this as well. The folk singer Odetta refused to condemn Bob Dylan for copying from her, and instead said this copying is a form of tradition.

Interviewer: Cause he stole --

Odetta: No, no, no, no. We call it folk music. We call it what do we call it? We don't call it stealing.

Interviewer: Appropriation?

Odetta: Well, we could, but we don't. It is... passing on the folk tradition. That influence, which is like just like a key that opened up something that was of his own stuff. So I can't even take credit for that. I can't take credit for how he heard something.

All musicians are connected, and these connections cross continents and oceans and decades and centuries. They transcend the barriers that divide people, and even unite the living and the dead, whose creativity lives on through us.

When we create, we often seem alone, but we are in fact together.

And yet, copying is complicated. One of the most boring things about popular culture is all the relentless copying. There's very clearly many many many bad ways to copy.

And that’s where we’re headed in Part Two.

Part 2

Memes are famous for being funny or clever or goofy or even amazing, like these things that look like objects but are actually cake.

Memes are fun but what you might not understand about memes is that they are... profound.

Let me school you for a moment. Don't worry – there will be more memes.

Richard Dawkins, seen here in this exclusive footage, coined the term meme in 1976 in the book The Selfish Gene.

"Meme" means "imitated thing." Memes are just ideas that get copied.

And the copies, they mutate, then these meme mutants compete with each other in a global battle royale. And the winner is whichever meme gets copied the most.

So. Memes want your attention. Memes want to spread. Above all, memes want to get copied.

Class dismissed. Here, have memes.

Memes are now the dominant method of broadcast among young people. They're often just photos and text but memes can be anything.

Whatever happens on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or the internet in general is a meme.

Dumping a bucket of ice water over your head is a meme. Skateboarding and drinking juice while listening to Fleetwood Mac is a meme. Swinging your arms from the back of your body to the front of your body repeatedly is a meme. Even buying a stock is a potentially hazardous meme.

The slang words we type are memes.

"Sus" came from people playing the game Among Us.

"Stan" came from just Twitter in general, and was inspired by an Eminem song.

And terms like "Karen" and "woke" and "flex" and "fire" and "slaps" and "yeet" and "lit," all came from black culture. Slang is kinda like the NBA – it's a lotta black people.

It's not just slang words that are memes, every word we speak is a meme that triumphed in the great meme battle royale. The English language, and every language, is a mega-remix of mouth sounds from around the world.

You're paying attention so well. Here, have another meme.

Think of memes like this. Everything you do and then share with the world is a meme.

The gestures you make, the clothes you wear, the jokes you tell, the dances you dance, the emojis you type, the tweets you post, the thumbnails you create, the clickbait you write, the phrases you speak, the nonsense you share.

These are all things we copy and share and modify. They're all memes.

It's our natural drive to copy from each another that creates memes and creates culture. We love to copy and we love it when others copy too – just not from us, more on that later.

Why do we love copying? Why do we love copying? Why do we -- okay I'll stop.

To explain, let's go to the movies.

Title: Part 2: More of the Same But Different

Popular films are all about copying. Pretty much all of them are new versions of old stuff. They are sequels, remakes or adaptations, and that includes prequels, reboots and spin-offs, which are just rebrands of the same things.

Of the top ten box office hits of 2021 thus far, nine of them are sequels, remakes, and adaptations. "Jungle Cruise" is sorta original but it's also based on an amusement park ride -- as most great films are.

Congrats to "Free Guy," the lone original movie in the top ten! Here have a Leo meme.

The domination of sequels, remakes and adaptations is not new. From 2012 to 2021, 92 out of 100 of each year's top ten hits are either sequels, remakes or adaptations. And in four of these years, it's every single film in the top ten.

We have an endless appetite for... more of the same but different. We don't just want the same thing over and over, but we definitely like things more familiar than unfamiliar.

Clip from Free Guy: IPs and sequels. That is the thing that people want.

We've got nine "Fast and Furious" movies and counting.

We've got seventeen Batman films.

We've got 36 Godzilla movies.

We've got roughly 300 Dracula films – I couldn't count them all.

And some movies and shows are now adaptations of fan fiction, stories written by fans based on their favorite characters. If you think that kinda sounds like all fictional writing, yeah, it is.

Oh, and the video you're watching right now is my second time doing this series. Or perhaps third, it's debatable.

Even when movies and TV shows aren't sequels or remakes or adaptations, they're still designed to be like other movies. They stick to the rules of genre, a tres bon French word.

Genre films give us familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations.

When you watch a genre movie, you expect certain things. Just like someone playing a new Role Playing Game expects a quest where they level up their stats, someone watching a genre movie expects the story to deliver the standard elements of the genre.

If it's a sports movie, well, the teams gotta suck really bad. They've gotta be truly pathetic, then there's a new coach, but more humiliating losses, then a montage, then a string of wins, then the brink of defeat, then maybe an inspiring speech, then triumph in the end or at least a moral victory.

All genres come with these sorts of rules, these sorts of expectations. The movies don't have to do all these things, but they gotta do most.

The genre that now reigns supreme above all others is the superhero genre. The Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular has grown to become the highest grossing franchise in cinema history, at over 23 billion dollars.

Superhero films are built around... superheroes. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

All superheroes are similar. Like they all have trademark powers. Superman flies and he's crazy strong. Wonder Woman is also super strong but she also has really weird equipment too, like an invisible jet but she wasn't invisible. She was just a soaring seated person.

Sidetracked sorry. So they all have special powers. They protect the public and do good deeds. They have a dramatic origin story. The bad guy is like a superhero but evil. And their costume is kinda like underwear/suit-of-armor/scuba-suit/fetishwear.

And yes, this clip is from a real Batman movie.

But above all, superheroes are all about justice... of the fist. They fight... a super lot. Endlessly. It's they're thing. They could definitely de-escalate more often.

Sorry, sidetracked again.

When we watch a superhero movie, we expect all this stuff and more. Even movies and shows that subvert the traditional genre, still honor these rules.

The character of the superhero is actually the only thing that defines the superhero genre. Superhero films can be a variety of genres--as long as there's a completely mind-numbing amount of fighting. Do they have a daily face-punching quota they need to get? Sorry I keep doing this. But seriously, what is wrong with you people?!?!

Anyway, superhero films can be different genres and "Avengers: Endgame" actually has scenes in multiple genres. There's even a moment that feels like a quirky indie film.

Beyond the character of the superhero, these movies aren't aren't that different from any popular film. They aren't that different from Frozen or Moana or Dune or The Hunger Games or The Lion King or Avatar or Harry Potter or The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings or The Shawshank Redemption or Ground Hog's Day or The Godfather or The Silence of the Lambs or Spirited Away or Star Wars or Alice in Wonderland or Seven Samurai or To Kill a Mockingbird or It's a Wonderful Life or The Wizard of Oz.

All these and loads more are just versions of what Joseph Campbell called The Monomyth or The Hero's Journey, a series of common plot points found in myths. This underlying structure has been used around the world since prehistory.

Superheroes are simply the newest, most sophisticated, most spectacular, most face-punching-est version of this ancient formula, the mother of all genres.

Genres are sets of loose rules that define different types of films. Writers and directors play a game with the viewer where they follow these rules or twist them or outright subvert them.

All movies build on the movies that came before them. In a way, all movies are sequels.

Here is what we want.

We want characters we know, we went stories we know, we want the familiar. Why?

We want familiar things because we use old things to understand new things. Just like you use words you know to understand words you don't know, we use old stories to understand new stories.

Douglas Hofstadter argues that: "(We) make sense of the new and unknown in terms of the old and known..." (Surfaces and Essences, Douglas Hofstadter)

Hoftstadter claims this process of analogy is "the fuel and fire of thinking."

One of the ingenious abilities of humanity is seeing connections between similar but different things. At the very core of the human imagination we are seeking similarity, we are comparing new things to old things in order to understand them. And we understand new stories better when they are made to resemble old stories.

And now, here is the point of all this.

Jurassic Park clip: Hold on to your butts.

The reason memes and sequels and genres are so overwhelmingly popular is because they make new information easier to understand. They play to our desire for familiarity. And just like we understand new things by building on top of old things. we create new ideas by building on top of old ideas.

When we consume, we mostly consume more of the same but different. And when we create, we are mostly creating more of the same but different.

There is only one way to start creating and that is to start copying.

Some of the most innovative, influential and popular films did a lot of copying.

"Star Wars" pioneered a new genre of science fiction by merging together sci fi with adventure serials, westerns, war films, and samurai films.

Quentin Tarantino's early films clearly copied elements from countless other films.

Jordan Peele's "Get Out" followed the template of "The Stepford Wives" and transformed the feminist horror-drama of the original into a nightmare about secretive racism.

And the best superhero film was created in this same way, by remixing ideas from the past to create something that is both new and familiar. That film is-- I am so sorry, that is not the right clip. That film is "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse."

"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" clip: All right, let's do this one last time.

"Into the Spider-Verse" is inspired by a pair of disrespected American art forms that have conquered pop culture: hip hop and comic books.

The movie has a strong spirit of early hip hop and uses a kind of sampling throughout. It copies from live action film, from 2D and 3D animation, and especially, from comics.

First and foremost, Into the Spider-Verse is a movie version of a comic book.

All the graphic elements of comic books are here:** the panels, speech balloons, captions, these squiggle things, words for sound effects. This trope is so old they made fun of it in the Batman TV show from 1966.

Into the Spider-Verse loves the printed quality of comics. Like it uses Ben Day dots throughout. These small dot patterns are used in printing to create different colors. Roy Lichtensteinn did a version of them at large scale and made them a style.

There's actually a lot of dots in the movie. The portal to the multiverse is inspired by the dot patterns created by Jack Kirby.

The movie also uses misregistration, which is when printed colors didn't quite line up. It's used throughout to create blur. Sometimes it kinda looks like a 3D movie without the glasses.

Into the Spider-Verse is strongly influenced by classic hand drawn 2D animation and anime.

The film uses lines to create definition, which is typical in 2D but rarely done in 3D films.

Even more unusual, a lot of the animation is done "on the twos", that means the characters move on every second frame, which is how classic animation was done, and it gives the movement a sharp, snappy feel.

Lastly, the movie pulls lots of techniques from live action film.

There's a lot of roaming camera movement. Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men is the biggest influence on this style in modern film.

There are timelapse shots. Requiem for a Dream was innovative here.

There's even zooms, which is when the camera doesn't move and the image just gets magnified. This was a popular technique in the seventies, especially in kung fu movies.

You can't really point to anything in this movie that is original.

"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" clip: How many more spider people are there?

And yet the sum total is original. What makes Into the Spider-Verse unique, fresh and innovative is its combination of influences.

And the film isn't the isolated creation of a single genius. It's the product of many, many, many artists and writers, who draw from the deep lineage of Spider-Man stories and copy countless ideas from comics, movies, music and art.

Copying is the wellspring of all creativity. This is where it all begins. As we copy and copy and copy, our own voice and our own style emerges.

Fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has said: "Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.”

First we copy, then we create. Stephen King began writing by copying the text from comic books into his notebooks. "At some point I began to write my own stories. Imitation preceded creation..." (Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft)

18-year old Olivia Rodrigo has been harshly criticized for copying from other artists. But this is what every artist must do. And sometimes young creators will go too far. Would we prefer that they not go far enough.

But copying alone is clearly not the answer we seek. There is obviously a lot more going in great creative works than just copying. How does the magic happen? How do innovative ideas emerge from the seemingly derivative act of copying?

We find out in Part 3.

Part 3

The act of creation is surrounded by a fog of myths.

Myths that creativity comes via inspiration, that new ideas are the products of geniuses, that they come from nowhere, and appear as quickly as electricity can heat a filament.

But creativity isn’t magic. It happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials.

When we create we use just three simple tools. The first of these forms the soil from which all creation grows. We copy.

We think of copying as being uncreative. But copying is at the core of creativity and the core of learning. We can’t introduce anything new until we’re fluent in the language of our domain, and we do that by copying.

Many of technology's biggest successes began as copies.

Minecraft began as a copy of another game. Its creator initially referred to what he was working on as an "Infiniminer clone".

The operating system Linux began as a free clone of the UNIX operating system. Linux is now the backbone of basically the entire internet.

And the clear strategy of Apple is to create better versions of established products and features.

Before Apple Music there was Spotify. *or maybe even Napster*

Before AirPods there were many other bluetooth earbuds.

Before Apple Watch there were many other smart watches.

And lots of iPhone features first appeared in Android.

Although it was Apple that actually invented the smartphone to begin with.

This strategy extends all the way back to the creation of the Mac in the early eighties, which copied many of the best ideas from the Xerox Alto.

Nobody starts out original. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding. And after that... the sky's the limit.

Title: Part 3: The Elements of Creativity

After we’ve grounded ourselves in the fundamentals through copying, it’s then possible to create something new using the second creative tool: transform, taking ideas and creating variations. This is time-consuming tinkering but it can eventually produce a breakthrough.

Many of the biggest successes in tech began as something very different and didn't find success until they were transformed.

Discord began as a feature for a game. The game wasn't that successful so they dropped it and only kept its chat feature.

Pinterest started as a digital replacement for paper catalogues. Again, didn't really work but people really liked one of its features – collecting and sharing clippings. So this became the site's core function.

And Tik Tok began as a lip-syncing app for short music videos. But over time, it pivoted to what more people wanted: short form video.

TikTok clip: You're done.

These are all huge successes, but they aren't major innovations so much as variations on existing ideas. **But the massive breakthroughs that change the world, rely on the third and final creative tool: combine. Taking the elements you've copied or transformed and bringing them together.**

Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press was invented around 1440, but almost all its components had been around for centuries.

Henry Ford and The Ford Motor Company didn’t invent the assembly line, interchangeable parts or even the automobile itself. But they combined all these elements in 1908 to produce the first mass market car, the Model T.

And the Internet slowly grew over several decades as networks and protocols merged. It finally hit critical mass in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web by combining several well-established ideas.

These three tools are the basic elements of creativity: copy, transform, and combine. And nowhere is all of this more obvious than in the realm of games.

Video games don't really try to conceal their copying. They copy from everywhere.

Video games copy ideas from tabletop games.

Alexey Pajitnov began Tetris as a version of a game from his childhood called pentomino. To make it simpler, he made the shapes out of four squares, instead of five, which greatly reduced the number of pieces.

Video games copy from game shows.

Wordle is very similar to the game show, Lingo. In both you try to find a five letter word within six tries, and the game tells you when a letter is correct or somewhere else in the word.

But mostly what video games copy from is video games. The history of video games is a chain of new games taking ideas from old games, transforming them, and iterating on them.

Or sometimes it's a single designer iterating on his own ideas, like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, who created, a series of hugely influential platform games.

But some of the most innovative games combine from multiple sources.

“Deus Ex” combined three game genres. All of these were done better by other games, but when combined the result was unique and innovative and became one of the most acclaimed titles in gaming history.

Other games copy from sources from outside gaming. "Cuphead" is a run and gun shooter, but it combines 30s style animation with a jazz score, giving it a look and feel that's never been done in games.

Some games even allow the players themselves to modify the game. Mods are customized versions of games which can be shared with other players. Plenty of classic games began as mods.

“The Stanley Parable” clip: Employee number 4 to 7. The job was simple. He sat at his desk in room 4 to 7 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard.

"The Stanley Parable" is a surreal adventure game that subverts players' expectations of gameplay. It began as a free modification of "Half-Life 2."

DOTA 2, otherwise known as Defense of the Ancients, a hugely popular esports game, is a sequel to a game that began as a custom map for Warcraft III.

And sometimes mods even turn into entire genres.

One of the biggest phenomenons in gaming has been "Fortnite", a free-to-play, battle royale game. But the origin of Fortnite isn't really Fortnite. It didn't even start with game developers, it started with modders in a seemingly unrelated realm.

The military simulator ARMA 2 let players make mods and one of these was "DayZ", a survival game with zombies. It's hard to convey how obsessed we were with zombies at this time.

"DayZ" then became a standalone game and people made mods for it.

Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene, a web designer, not a game developer and barely a programmer.

Brendan Green: My code is terrible. Like people tell me to fix the game, if I try to fix the game, the servers would explode.

He saw these mods and wanted to make his own. So he created "DayZ Battle Royal", which was inspired by the book and movie "Battle Royale", where it's all against all until there's one winner.

If this sounds familiar to you, it's also the plot of "The Hunger Games."

Eventually Greene's mods turned into another new game, "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds," or PUBG, which also goes on to become hugely popular.

It's only at this point that Fortnite finally enters the scene. But initially it's something very different. It’s a game where players make a fort during the day to survive night attacks by -- you guessed it -- zombies.

But once Fortnite's developers Epic Games got a load of PUBG they created a new version that copied PUBG's best ideas. But Epic then turned it into something quicker, more casual, more cheerful, something that looked great in livestreams, and was less buggy.

Gamer streaming clip: I got a bug then because there's a floating SLR on my screen here and it's shooting right now.

And Epic added plenty of other creative takes on other ideas. It incorporated complex building. They made the game free to play on pretty much any platform and generated income from in-game purchases. The game eventually grew into a rich virtual environment that many consider an early example of the metaverse, an open VR world that may be the future of the internet or may be... nothing.

Meta clip, Mark Zuckerberg speaking: Whoah, we're floating in space. Who made this place? It's awesome!

Fortnite sometimes takes copying too far. Players' signature moves, known as emotes, were sometimes duplicated without permission from popular videos, movies, and television shows.

But overall, it can't be denied that Fortnite is a unique, creative and historic title within the history of gaming.

And this phenomenon was created not just by a major video developer but by modders, by pop culture, and by players.

Fortnite's roots even predate PUBG and the Battle Royale genre, and extend back to games like Minecraft, Unreal and countless others, to b-movies like Death Race 2000, and even to pro wrestling, where dozens of guys would vie to throw each other out of the ring until one remains.

Technology has always fueled creativity. But now technology is becoming more than a tool that we use. Technology is becoming our collaborator, our competitor and yes, our replacement. In our final episode, we'll see how AIs create... by remixing us.

Part 4

In 2015 artificial intelligences started making images based on nothing but text input. This was basically like reverse engineering photo captions. The results were very low quality, but that it worked at all was stunning.

By 2021 AI image generation was doing things like this.

It's better art but still mediocre at best. What was historic was that the AI combined ideas together in a variety of ways. The AI seemed to exhibit... *creativity.*

2022 was one of the most whip-lash transitions of the modern technology era. There were now several image generators and they were making images like these. No human hand drew a stroke here. All these were created with nothing but text prompts.

Creating a sophisticated illustration was suddenly as easy as typing a word or two.

Enter JOY and you get this.

Enter CAT and you get this.

Enter BRAINY EYEBALLS and you get this.

Then you can combine words together for infinite variation.

AI-created art is no longer cute and clumsy. It still has weaknesses, like human anatomy, especially hands, and it mostly lacks the expressiveness and the storytelling of real artists, but AIs are *creating* *art*. And they are doing it with beauty, with stunning versatility, and even with subtlety.

AI has had similar breakthroughs in text generation and coding, but it's AI art that sparked the fiercest debate and generated anger and fear in the art community.

Fran Blanche: I can't imagine that there's any writer or artist on the planet right now that isn't really thinking about this and wondering where they're going to be in five years.

This anxiety was triggered by a profound development in human history. Machines have breached a sacred realm we thought was solely the domain of people.

The first battleground of The Age of AI is art.

Will AI replace human artists? Is AI image generation ethical? Will the future of creativity be ruled by AIs?

In this final episode of Everything is a Remix, we venture into the newly emerging field of Artificial Creativity.

Title: Part 4: Artificial Creativity

Let's begin by addressing the most common emotional reaction to artificial intelligence: fear.

Storytellers have long warned us about the seduction and the danger of technology. The Greek titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was brutally punished by Zeus.

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was subtitled The Modern Prometheus, Dr. Frankenstein is obsessed with uncovering the secret to life.

Frankenstein creates a man, but is horrified by his creation, who then seeks violent revenge.

Stories like these are a warning about meddling with the sacred and unknowable. They're a warning about arrogance.

"Frankenstein" clip: It's alive, it's alive! In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God.

In recent decades, the subject of these tales has taken on a particular form: the computer.

HAL 9000, a prescient imagining of a computer assistant, was one of the first popular fictional computers.

"2001" Clip: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

HAL ultimately decides to sacrifice its crew for the sake of its mission.

"The Terminator" films feature a powerful defense network AI called SkyNet.

"The Terminator" Clip: They say it got smart. A new order of intelligence sighted after eight microsecond extermination.

Our dream of technological progress has reached a nightmare conclusion.

"Avengers: Age of Ultron" Clip: Everyone creates the thing they dread.

We are now imagining the day when we are supplanted by our creations.

"Ex Machina" Clip: One day the AIs will look back on us that same way we look at fossil skeletons in the plains of Africa. An upright ape, living in dust, with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.

The topic of human extinction by AI is no longer limited to science fiction. It's popularly discussed by intellectuals.

Yuval Noah Harari: We are probably one of the last generations of Homo Sapiens. In a century or two at most, I guess, that humans like you and me will disappear and Earth will be dominated by very different kind of beings or entities.

Many of the leaders of the field of artificial intelligence claim the time when our creations will match us is rapidly approaching. Some think human level intelligence, known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, will be reached within a couple decades.

Demis Hassabis: I think that it's coming relatively soon in the next, I wouldn't be surprised by the next decade or two.

After AGI comes an "intelligence explosion," with AI rapidly improving itself and spawning superintelligence. Humanity will then be the parents of... gods.

The belief that AI will soon surpass us and take our place is widely held among many brilliant people. So, why not believe them?

Because similarly brilliant people have been making similar predictions for as long as there has been artificial intelligence and they have all been... wrong.

Many people in AI fall into the same old trap that true believers always fall into. They think the great whatever is almost here, I swear it's just about to happen.

Let's take a brief tour of AI's many failed prophecies.

Many of the pioneers of artificial intelligence predicted that machines would attain human-level intelligence by about the 1980s.

More recent predictions have been just as wrong.

Shane Legg, cofounder of Google DeepMind, said in in 2008: "Human level AI will be passed in the mid-2020s.""

It's 2023 right now and I think we can safely say... no.

In 2015 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said their goal by 2025 was to "get better than human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition.”

This one is looking like no, no, no and no.

An engineer even claimed a Google chatbot was sentient in 2022.

Blake Lemoine: In order to be capable of convincingly arguing that you are sentient requires sentience.

I have no idea why this is supposed to make sense.

One of the most prolific and optimistic forecasters is Ray Kurzweill. He's spent decades predicting the arrival of "the singularity," which entails AGI among other things. And his date for arrival of AGI is rapidly approaching.

Ray Kurzweill: I've set the date 2029. A machine, an AI, will be able to match human intelligence and go beyond it.

I'd like to get in on the prediction fun too, so I'll say AGI in 2029 is exponentially wrong.

Of course, there are plenty of people in AI who believe AGI is nowhere in sight.

Erik J. Larson, author the "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, "argues that current AI technologies are not going to lead to AGI.

Eric J Larson: Any foreseeable extension of the capabilities that we currently have do not result in general intelligence. Just point blank. They just don't.

Oren Etzioni, an esteemed figure in the field of AI, flatly states that we have no idea when AGI is coming.

Oren Etzioni: My answer to when is, take your estimate, double it, triple it, quadruple it — that's when.

Matter of fact, expert projections on the arrival of AGI range from now... to never. Translation: they don't know.

And here's an unpopular opinion we might want to ponder: maybe human level artificial intelligence is impossible, maybe human level artificial intelligence. Maybe the universe can do things we can't.

We don't know when – or even if – AIs will match human intelligence. It's unlikely they'll murder us anytime soon.

But there is something they want to murder now: your job. And they don't need anywhere near human-level intelligence to do it.

This is why illustrators are so upset. They are the first to suffer what's called "creative destruction". Old jobs are eliminated by new technologies and ideas, resulting in lost livelihoods and real pain.

"Upgrade" Clip: When you look at that widget, you see the future. I look at that thing, I see ten guys on an unemployment line.

However, this also leads to increased productivity and fresh growth.

Automation is now expanding beyond the domain of muscles and entering the domain of the mind. It has crossed over into arts and expression.

But actually, this isn't quite new either. Specialists have been getting replaced for decades... without AI. Let's go back to hip hop.

With the birth of rap music, suddenly you didn't need to play an instrument, didn't need to know anything about music, didn't even need to sing. If you had a turntable, a drum machine and a mic, you could make the most exciting music around.

And this trend has only accelerated. Anybody with a laptop and a bit of music software has tools that would have seemed like science fiction to early DJs like Grandmaster Flash.

And this is more than just music. Anyone can now easily build a website or build an app or launch a shop or shoot gorgeous photos or shoot gorgeous videos.

Art has been getting cheaper, faster and easier since the printing press, which creatively destroyed an entire class of monks who painstakingly hand-copied books with quill and parchment.

If machines can make images as well as we can, then why shouldn't they? What's the issue?

The issue is *how* the machines learned to create images. Let's put image generation on trial and determine if it's guilty or not guilty of crimes against creativity.

Here's the evidence.

The simple version of what the AIs did is this: it studied countless images, without permission, then it emulated them and created its own versions.

So yes, this is just like you. The entirety of this series demonstrates that this is how we all create.

But... it's more complicated than this. Let's zoom in.

Image generation has three steps. I'll explain each, and all of these need to be ethical.

Step 1. Tons and tons of images were scraped from the internet. These images are called a training set.

It looks like a mountain of junk. If you found a folder of this stuff on your hard drive, you would immediately throw it out.

Step 1 is just obtaining a zillion images from the internet. Step 1 is ethical. Search engines do the same thing. And you can go download as many images as you want right now.

Step 2, the AI processes the images and creates a model. This is their version of studying the images and learning from them. Y'know what, this ain't simple. I'll come back to this.

Step 3 is open and shut: the AI processes requests from users, which are written prompts, and creates images. If someone just wrote a program that can draw, that would be fine. Step 3 is indisputably ethical.

It all comes down to Step 2. This is the tricky bit. What the AIs did with copyrighted images is called diffusion. Noise was added to the images over many steps until they're just noise. Then it runs this process in reverse, with the goal of creating a new image with the same meaning. The cat should be a cat, not an identical cat, but a cat.

I have no idea why this works either. But somehow it does.

If diffusion is copying then AI image generation is copyright infringement. Is diffusion copying?

On the one hand, it's kinda like copying because it reproduces the watermarks from stock photos. On the other hand, it's pretty bad at it... so it sorta made something new?

The clear conclusion... is that is unclear. That's why this topic is so controversial. It is truly ambiguous. This is like the dress controversy all over again, except furious.

My guess is that this ambiguity will result in diffusion being considered fair use. It will be hard to definitively prove that it's copying because... this stuff is complicated.

This is going to multiple courts, we'll learn a lot, and we will get an answer.

Let's just assume for now that diffusion is kinda-like copying but not totally copying. And let's take a swing at the most important question of all. Is it ethically right – or at least acceptable – that artists' images were used without consent?

Megan Rose Ruiz: It seems like it's a pretty general consensus in our community that we do not want our work to be used to train A.I. models.

I am sympathetic to how artists are feeling, but it does seem acceptable to me.

For starters, most of the training images are pretty generic and in this context, they seem public domain. Sure, this might be your photo of a pretty girl or a dog or a quesadilla but it's very similar to thousands of others. Nobody owns the idea of these images and that's really what's getting emulated.

The biggest controversy is over a small minority of the images. These are artwork by professional artists and serious amateurs.

Let's get this clear up front. No artist owns their art entirely. If you don't believe me, here's the artist Scott Christian Sava saying the same thing.

Scott Christian Sava: My art is a mosaic, an amalgamation of the art and artists that inspired me on my journey to become the artist I am today.

The collective achievements of art belong to everyone. They are as free as the air.

Too many artists are getting overly possessive about what they believe is theirs. This artist went viral claiming their art was used to train an AI model.

Deb JJ Lee: AI art is theft. It is an awful, awful way to just, like, steal from artists. It's evil. And if you use AI art, you are dead to me.

They based this on images like these, but the only similarities are the color palette and the basic composition. They're otherwise very different, like for instance, this is trash and this is good.

Yes, there is some piracy going on in AI image generation. There's some piracy going on everywhere. I'm doing piracy right now and you're watching me.

There are plenty of caveats. Training AIs on individuals artists' work does seem wrong. Everyone should be able to opt out of all training sets. And maybe AIs should simply not train on images from active art communities.

Also, some company should make an image generator trained on public domain and licensed images, which would avoid this hornets' nest entirely. Somebody please do this.

But for me, I don't see deep injustice here. In sum, AI image generation seems not guilty.

How disruptive AI art will actually be is not yet clear, but it will definitely have some sort of role. Artists are going to have to adapt.

And the rest of us should take note. If you think what's happening to a bunch of illustrators doesn't concern you, think again. The fear and anxiety the art community feels is going to spread. Many of us will have to adapt. Any mind work that can get automated will get automated.

Blue collar workers have been living this for decades. Now it's white collar workers turn.

Of all humanity's technological advances, artificial intelligence is the most morally ambiguous from inception. It has the potential to create either a utopia or a dystopia. Which reality will we get?

Just like everybody else, I do not know what's coming. But it seems likely that these visions of our imminent demise will someday seem campy and naïve – because our imaginings of the future always become campy and naïve.

AIs will not be dominating creativity because AIs do not innovate. They synthesize what we already know. AI is derivative by design and it is inventive by chance.

Computers can now create but *they are not creative.* To be creative you need to have some awareness, some understanding of what you're doing. AIs know nothing whatsoever about the images and words they generate.

Most crucially, AIs have no comprehension of the essence of art: living. AIs don't know what it's like to be a child. To grow-up. To fall in love. To fall in lust. To be angry. To fight. To forgive. To be a parent. To age. To lose your parents. To get sick. To face death.

This is what human expression is about. Art and creativity are bound to living, to feeling.

Art is the voice of a person. And whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing, it's not because of what the AI did. It's because of what a person did.

Art is by humans, for humans.

In some videos about AI, the big reveal is that *this video* was actually made by AI. But this video and this series is the opposite: nothing has been AI. Except where I cited AI art, this is entirely human made.

The words are all my mine, but they're merged from the thoughts of countless people. Everything you've seen and heard is from real filmmakers and musicians and game developers and other artists.

All these thoughts and all this media were remixed by me into something new. And yes, I did it it all without permission.

“Everything is a Remix” is a testament to the brilliance and beauty of human creativity. In particular, it's a testament to collective creativity. Human genius is not individual. It is shared.

You, my dear viewer, are a human – the best technology there is, with no successor in sight. The future is ours. And it will be won or lost by us brilliant, stupid, horrible, beautiful humans.

But there is only one complete certainty about what's coming: AI will not stop. And we need the help that artificial intelligence can potentially bring to the complex problems of the 21st century.

We are saying goodbye to the old world and entering a new one. But we are not obligated to accept this new world as is. Our duty is to make it the best it can be, to make this revolution better than the last one.

We are launching into the unimaginable. As we always are. We are always hurtling into some inconceivable future. There is no other way to move forward. So... here we go.

Everything is a Remix: The Complete, Updated 2023 Edition

Ladies and gents, after two years of hard work, the new-and-improved Everything is a Remix is complete! All four parts have been combined into a single, hour-long video. This is now the definitive Everything is a Remix experience. I made some minor edits but the episodes are basically the same as when they were first published.

And that's a wrap for my career as an internet filmmaker, folks! I'm shifting to a new phase of my life and career. I'll update you all on what's next in a bit.

Thank you all so so much for your time and attention over these many, many years. I’m still here, just in a different and still emerging form.

The best way to keep up with me for this next phase is via my newsletter.

If you'd like to make a donation you can do so here.

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Music Playlist: Spotify, Apple Music

My swan song, Artificial Creativity

I am enormously proud to present Everything is a Remix Part 4: Artificial Creativity. I’m very happy with how this video turned out and I hope you all enjoy it.

As some of you know, this is my last video. I’ll update you all shortly on what this means. Let me just say for now, I will still be pursuing interesting topics, I’ll just be doing it in a different way. Again, update coming in a bit.