Austin Kleon, an author and artist, writes about creativity, steady daily work, and borrowing ideas, based on his book Steal Like an Artist.
Commenters cite his posts on quantity leading to quality and creative restlessness, and his old Vonnegut story graph post.
+e^x for Kenny Werner's book.
Kenny Werner's philosophy if you can summarize it in one sentence - is if you are a trumpet player - you must master breath control, fingering so by the time you are in performance - you are truly playing without thinking of the mechanics.
There are many analogies to really focused coding, Kenny Werner's philosophy, and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of flow [1]. You must master the syntax, the grammar, the idiosyncrasies, the rules and unwritten and written customs, and the is-isms of the language before you can "effortlessly" write code in a given platform/language. This is one of the reasons beginners to programming may stumble on the hike - they are so focused on the writing of the lines of code that they are often pushed by themselves or their otherwise well-intentioned teacher to produce code. The building blocks of code are not the lines of code - it is the concepts and the system and framework and mental model behind it (the whiteboard so to speak).
"This year, forget about the year as a whole. Forget about months and forget about weeks. Focus on days."
http://austinkleon.com/2013/12/29/something-small-every-day/
An excerpt from Kenny Werner's book that I just pulled out of my giant stack of books Jenga style (p.85).
> Practice
Perhaps music feels great as long as you're fifteen feet away from the instrument, but as you move closer, a different energy takes over and your connection dwindles...
How can we retain the bliss of…
As a graphic designer/artist: this question strikes me as funny because the frequent "how do I start programming" threads are always so matter-of-fact. 3-4 biblical texts get recommended, a handful of vetted resources bandied about, and then a minimal amount of hemming and hawing over which language to use.
As daunting and foreign as those threads seem to me, programming has a lot of known knowns - I can see where "how do I design" would be more daunting because it's such an unqualified expanse consisting almost completely of grey area. Stand before it, naked, putting yourself in the shoes of the designer, and imagine the horror of the client's most unspeakable words: "I can't explain it to you, but I'll know it when I see it."
All that aside, I think the advice that I've received from this community re: learning to program/hack is still sound as it applies to graphic design:
1) Have a project and work toward it. If you don't have one, make one. Be specific in your end goal.
This focus enables you to do the most important thing:
2) Steal like an artist. (via http://www.austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-9-other-things-nobody-told-me/)
All the other advice in this thread is pretty legit. You probably don't even know what looks good, so don't start on your own. Do your research. Look at competitors in the space (or the closest you can find to it). Use open source/CC art. Follow the crumbs back to the artist's portfolios and see the other work…
To support your point that we we make choices among alternative, see this document I put together circa 2010 with about 50 alternatives -- some good, some obviously bad -- we can use to address the socio-economic changes needed to maintain healthy human communities in the face of increased automation: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our…
Parable of the Pots - Quantity leads to quality
https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origin-of-a-parable/
[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
> From that point, an LLM, which remembers everything verbatim and mixing them together is arguably making plagiarism from many sources to create their own works, while being unable to cite them accurately. A very useful property, indeed.
I think this is a weak point in your argument. I support the rest of your reasoning, but this point can be attacked. For plagiarism to exist, the original work has to be easily detectable by a human. We've seen this sometimes be the case (see NYT lawsuit), but often times, the line is blurry (see Ed Sheeran lawsuit [0]). There's a reasonable argument to make that the combination of existing ideas by an AI creates something novel. It's what arguably what artists do, too. There's even a famous book called "Steal like an artist" [1]. As such, some output by AI can be plagiarism, but the very way modern AI works may not automatically mean everything is plagiarism.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcCKlsTgjeM
[1]: https://austinkleon.com/steal/
For someone who's "too stupid" to understand these techs, they certainly can explain them and their drawbacks and alternatives well.
This reminds me of a bit of advice from Austin Kleon that I've used frequently -- "Make bad art, too"[^1]:
> “Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it’s good or bad is beside the point. Just make something.
This is a perspective I have to come back to, as an engineer building enterprise-scale things, when I'm working on small-scale projects. I don't need to use the same tools I use at work, I can pick "bad"[^2] architecture, I just need to build _something_.
[^1] https://austinkleon.com/2020/04/15/make-bad-art-too/
[^2] "Bad" in that I know precisely how and when and what would bite me in the ass when I try to scale it.