This post was first published on my newsletter, Delightful

An idea about bacteria

Many years ago in biology class, a teacher introduced us to petri dishes.

We diligently swabbed several classroom items, then ran the swab across the dish substrates. A few hours later, we saw bacteria. A few days later, the bacteria filled the dish.

That’s why bacteria is so powerful, our teacher said: they replicate quickly.

And because they replicate so quickly, he continued, they change quickly.

One generation may be weak, the next generation a bit stronger. Interacting, as they do, with their environment, encountering challenges.

Some persist, some die, the ones who live tend to be stronger relative to their local requirements.

That’s one way, our teacher said, that scientists study heritable change over generations.

Anyway, the best way to have a strong bacteria is to have lots of bacteria.

An idea about content

Many years ago I worked for a client that published content.

Articles, blog posts, social posts, stuff like that.

They diligently crafted each article and post. They edited Google Docs for hours. They’d spend days on rounds of writing, rewriting, dotting I’s and crossing t's, ensuring fidelity to detail, burnishing each piece to a high shine.

Then, they would send that preciously crafted thing out into the world, listening for the weak echoes of any reaction at all.

Of course they were doing everything exactly backwards.

They were optimizing their things before they tested their things, and accordingly optimized a lot of things that would never have made it past testing.

They key, they were surprised to learn, is to generate a lot of things.

Some of those things will die.

Some of those things will live, interacting, as they do, with their environment, encountering challenges.

The ones that live are the ones that are stronger relative to their local requirements.

Anyway, the best way to make good content is to make lots of content.

An idea about AI

One way of creating a lot of ideas, and quickly, is to use AI.

For example, here is an AI idea:

And here is another AI idea:

These are ok ideas!¹

They are not great ideas!

But that doesn’t matter. These ideas come cheap. In point of fact, they were free. You can, quite quickly, make a lot of them.

You can talk about them, and discard them, and improve them. And by and by, you will come up with a better idea.

And the process of getting to a better idea will happen a smidge quicker, because you got all the shit conceptions out on the table, toot suite.

That’s how creativity works, of course.

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.²

An AI has an idea

This is all to say that the point of AI tools, for now, isn’t to spit out brilliant ideas.

The point of AI tools, for now, is to spit out crap ideas so you don’t have to.

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