Through Time

Imagination: making things beside a model, keeping your taste

What is known about creativity, how taste grows, and how to use a generator of text, images or music as a sketch, not as a stand-in.

A course for anyone who makes things: writing, drawing, composing, filming, even just for themselves. You will sort out what is established about creativity, start to notice how a machine pulls toward the average, and be able to take your own things through to the end. Copyright is covered in the course on law, and the question here is another one: whose is this really, and do you like it.

So far there is only this table of contents. Lessons appear one at a time, and we promise no dates. Feed of new lessons (Atom)

18 lessons, 4 parts

Part 1 What is known about creativity

A lot is said with confidence about creativity; some of it has been tested and some of it has not.

  1. What creativity tests measure

    Tasks like “think of uses for a brick” count ideas: what that says about you, and what it means when a model takes the test.

    coming soon

  2. Brainstorming in a group

    Groups come up with fewer ideas than the same number of people working apart, and the main reason is simple: everyone waits their turn to speak.

    coming soon

  3. The myth of the creative hemisphere

    Where the split into “left-brained” and “right-brained” people came from, and why neither teaching nor your view of yourself should be built on it.

    coming soon

  4. Put it down and come back

    Does a break help you solve a problem: what is really there, what stories of sudden insight have added, and how to test it on your own work.

    coming soon

  5. More attempts

    Does quantity produce quality: what in the idea can be supported, and what rests on pretty stories.

    coming soon

Part 2 Taste

Taste cannot be downloaded, and we hold it to be the main skill beside a generator, because now you choose more often than you make.

  1. What taste is

    Is there any arguing about taste: a judgment, a habit or a badge of your circle, and which of these is useful to someone who makes things.

    coming soon

  2. Other people’s likes and your taste

    A well-known experiment with unknown songs: when other people’s downloads are visible, success gets more unequal and harder to predict.

    coming soon

  3. The gap between taste and skill

    Ira Glass’s point: a beginner’s taste outruns their skill and volume of work closes the gap, and a generator removes it only on the surface.

    coming soon

  4. How taste grows

    Looking at a lot outside the feed, comparing, explaining why one thing beats another: no large studies stand behind this, and we say so plainly.

    coming soon

Part 3 The model as a sketch

A generator is useful where you go on to throw away nearly everything it made.

  1. Ideas from a model, and stories that look alike

    With ideas from a model stories get rated higher, above all from less creative writers, and they come to resemble one another.

    coming soon

  2. Text as a sketch

    How to ask a model for options and objections, not a finished piece, and how to work so that little of the first version survives.

    coming soon

  3. The first image sticks

    Once you have seen a finished example it is hard to think of anything else: why to sketch your own first, and how to use outputs as a reference board.

    coming soon

  4. Music as a rough draft

    What a music generator offers someone who plays and someone who does not, and why a finished song is not the same as your song.

    coming soon

Part 4 Your own work

Whose work it is and whether it got finished: two questions a machine will not settle for you.

  1. Whose work is this

    Workshops and ghostwriters have always existed: what makes a thing yours when someone helped, and whom to tell.

    coming soon

  2. Keeping your voice

    A model’s suggestions quietly pull your writing toward someone else’s averaged style: how to notice that and take it back.

    coming soon

  3. Fifty words

    Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet to use only 50 words: how to set yourself a limit when a generator can do anything.

    coming soon

  4. Getting it finished

    Starting anything with a generator now costs next to nothing, so finishing counts for more: how to decide it is enough, and show it to people.

    coming soon

  5. A look ahead: when everything looks alike

    A flood of similar content and demand for work with an obvious author: what may happen in the next few years, and all of it is hypothesis so far.

    coming soon