Chat is rarely a suitable interface for most tasks. Here, Maggie Appleton explores and prototypes some alternatives.
Simply put: AI thrives when our need for originality is low and our demand for mediocrity is high.
AI will fill the world with grindingly average texts, passable but derivative illustration and video, and unoriginal but functional new product designs.
What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes—our ability to discern quality (or originality) at all.
We’ve seen this arc before, and music is the richest analogy.
Like Bruce Sterling always says:
Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody.
AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more
Compression made the information age possible by stripping things down to fit the pipes. Expansion made the AI age possible by blowing data back up again. Both operations leave marks; we’ve learned to spot compression artifacts, but we’ve only just begun to reckon with expansion artifacts. Until we do, there’s a lot of risk to manage.
In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.
In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.
Same energy.
How to improve Google’s search results and the World Wide Web in one fell swoop.
Compression, transformation, expansion.
In the loop.
Knock, knock! Who’s there? Control freak (now you say “control freak who?”)
Brian Eno on prototyping and fidelity.