Before I had my King Canute moment a fortnight ago, I was trying to write this post, and didn’t manage it, so I was determined to get it finished in time for this week. It’s turned into one of my longest reads. Let’s hope it was worth the wait…
Warning: the first half of this post talks about finance, and you’ll probably think I’ve fallen into one of my terminal digressions. But I do track back round to creativity in the end. You just have to trust me. If you don’t trust me, though, and decide to stop reading, nourish yourself with this short video of Dr. Joren Whitley, the giraffe chiropractor, at work on a long-necked client instead.
But if you’re still here…
I occasionally deliver a training session on the subject of financial management, aimed at people working in the culture sector who are unconfident or inexperienced around money matters (although I invariably find those people are doing much better at it than they give themselves credit for.)
I’m in the process of redeveloping my session, in an attempt to turn a day-long in-person thing into a four-hour online thing. As part of that redevelopment, I’ve been speaking to J, a colleague who delivers his own, more advanced financial training, based on his extensive accounting and senior management experience.
There’s a spectre at the feast nowadays when it comes to the sessions we both deliver — namely, AI, which constantly flaunts its ability to “Get More Done”, selling itself with increasing arrogance and aggression on the promise of its supreme power to solve every problem for people who are time-poor, who are overloaded at work, who want to maximise their productivity.
Actually — scratch that last bit.
AI posits itself as a perfect solution for:
— people who have been conditioned to think of themselves as time-poor, and who often seem to enjoy the victim or martyr status that comes with that way of thinking;
— people who are allowing themselves to be overloaded at work because of their inability or refusal to say no to other people and their priorities;
— people who are so focused on ticking quantities of tasks off their to-do lists that they end up sacrificing the very quality of any task they carry out.
But anyway, I digress.
One of the many things J and I both agree on is the value of having multiple touch points within the financial management process — by which we mean, ensuring there are lots of times when you handle financial information yourself, rather than letting other people, or worse, letting AI, do all the handling for you.
While it can be extremely helpful, for example, to work with a bookkeeper or accountant at various points during the financial year, that doesn’t mean you should leave everything entirely to them. It’s important for you to lay your own hands on the data, too, so that you cultivate your own knowledge and discernment, so you understand your financial position on a micro-level (such as where money comes in from and what money gets spent on) and on the macro-level (including how near or far you are from becoming insolvent*).
Finance software packages have been around for ages, and they are designed to carry out complex tasks, such as producing all sorts of detailed reports with a few clicks, which is extremely helpful, especially to someone like me who is not in the business of running a business, but is in the business of staying in business.
Even more alluring to the unconfident and the inexperienced, the new AI features of these packages can now attend to lots of rudimentary tasks as well, like turning photos of receipts into records of income or expenditure, and then automatically matching them up with the corresponding transactions on an imported bank statement.
The culture of “Get More Done”, and the paranoia about time poverty and productivity, argue loudly that we should just let the AI features take care of this kind of thing for us. But I’m all for recognising the value of us doing this kind of thing for ourselves, some of the time, at least.
Someone like me, running a small business, can definitely find time for this, quite often. (You’d be amazed at what you can do, and do thoroughly, in just one single hour per month.) Someone running a larger business obviously can’t sit inputting every transaction, but they can still ensure they’re checking reconciliation reports every month. Touch points come in all different shapes and sizes. It’s all a question of proportion.
It’s also a question of actually giving a shit, and I am beginning to realise that an increasing number of people just don’t give enough of a shit about their work, or, for that matter, anything beyond their own needs and feelings.
But anyway, I digress (again).
YOU’VE MADE IT TO THE CREATIVITY BIT!
Thanks for staying. Or maybe you skipped straight here, because you think of yourself as too time-poor to read the whole post…
I’m hoping the parallel between hands-on financial management and all kinds of creative practice is self-evident, but I’ll spell it out anyway. First, however, a public service announcement.
AI may have the capacity to produce text, sound, still and moving images, but I do not and will never dignify the output of algorithms and diffusion models by describing them as writing, as music, as pictures, as films, and I will certainly never call them art. Those things are the province of human minds being filtered with choice, with feeling, with discernment, through the activation of a pen, a keyboard, an instrument, a paintbrush, a camera. The obscure operations of a water-and-power-hungry data centre have no claim on these words or these concepts.
But anyway, I digress (yet again).
I could, so I understand, quickly and easily instruct a Large Language Model to conjure up a sizeable block of text in response to some carefully framed prompts. I gather that a good many people are doing that already, and are calling themselves writers. But writers they are not.
My writing goes through repeated stages which necessitate my hands-on involvement. The handwritten first draft of each new novel is a good case in point. And then, once I’ve typed everything up from my notebooks, the manuscript gets printed out so I can go through it with my red and green pens for the first proper edit, getting to grips with what I’ve got. (Red ink for typos, cuts and quick corrections; green ink for questions, and for ideas for bits of new text.) Every successive draft can only emerge after getting my hands inky while grappling with the one that came before — the work of the hands and the work of the brain completely intertwined.
I’m not just talking about the practical method by which product gets generated, here; there’s much, much more to it than that. The frequency and extent of my touch points with my writing are intrinsically linked to both the refinement of the work and, more importantly, to me refining myself, to me strengthening my writerly muscles.
Process, as much as, or more than product as the valued outcome. But I’m noticing more and more that devotees of AI, or AI apologists, as I prefer to think of them, are much more focused on product than process.
The unexpected up-side of this is that I now really appreciate encountering people who are not that way inclined at all.
A new(ish) friend, L, is a visual artist who draws and paints. We met back during my life modelling era (which is now on indefinite pause, but I hope to get back into it one day.) L recently took some photos of me as the basis for a new portrait of me (!) which may form part of his set of entries for an exhibition opportunity (!!) later this year. Before the photo-taking, we looked at some of his past work, including some magnificent large landscapes, one of which is an award-winner (!!!).
L’s pictures are the product of unimaginable hours of painstaking effort, great stretches of time filled with his iteration of that complex interplay between hands and brain. They are things of exquisite beauty and delicacy. I don’t doubt that AI could be cajoled into producing representations (or simulations) of the same geographical features that L depicts. But it is impossible, I think, for AI to achieve even a fraction of what L has accomplished.
The nature of that accomplishment is hard to define but is nonetheless entirely tangible. I don’t just mean the portfolio of fine artworks which have resulted from the time he has spent creating them. More than that, I mean the cumulative effect that these years of effort have had upon L — upon the person L has become through these decades of hands-on activity, through these many thousands of touch point moments.
I suppose, crudely put, nebulously put, those touch points add up to L’s construction of his unique self through the media of pencil and paint. My writing, by the same token, is my construction of my unique self through the media of words and sentences.
If you’re a creative person, as I imagine is the case for most of my readers, then the things you create are, likewise, constructions of your unique self through the materials of your chosen medium. A piano. A lump of clay. A group of plants. A sequence of dance moves. An entire building.
Every time you use those materials, I am willing to bet you add to the construction of your unique self in the most dynamic, fulfilling, transformational ways during those periods where you (and not someone else, and certainly not AI) are laying your own glorious grubby little maker’s hands on them — during the touch points which punctuate your process.
May those touch points continue to be many and often in your work. Happy making, cherished Reader.
* Just FYI, I’d define insolvency as getting to the stage where you couldn’t pay a business debt of £750 to someone you owe money to. I’m pretty sure the Insolvency Act (1986) would back me up on that.
