Sprouts: Nurturing and Filtering Ideas in the Age of Generative AI
Image created by the author using the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation tool.
This article is inspired by a delightful New York Times column by Madison Malone Kircher titled "The Beautiful Chaos of Apple Notes." Picking up on a recent TikTok trend, Kircher asked her readers to share their most "unhinged" Apple notes to themselves . As Kircher points out, "The Notes app occupies an odd perch in the digital landscape. Since its contents aren't usually intended for consumption by anyone else, we are under no pressure to make sense." The TikTok hashtag #notesapp has garnered more than 189 million views. Clearly, there's something cathartic about reading the notes others leave to themselves. Perhaps it makes our own seemingly senseless scrawlings less foreboding as we confront the limitations of our memory and brains in the emerging age of AI…
I began sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of my Apple Notes stream, searching for traces of my own now-unhinged thoughts. However, given my interest in generative AI, I decided to take it a step further and explore what GPT-4 could create from the scraps I discovered, using my reading notes and newsletter articles as its primary data sources. I wondered whether I could use generative AI to rejuvenate these notes and reconnect them to my current network of interests, thoughts, and writing.
The first thing I noticed while browsing through my Apple Notes is that I have an embarrassingly large number of passwords stored in the app. Most of them are for services I subscribed to long before I started using 1Password to manage my passwords, but old habits die hard. Cleaning up my password detritus is now on a task list in Todoist, my task manager. I also found lots of photos of lightbulbs. Is anyone else mystified by the incredible variety of mostly indistinguishable lightbulbs in the Lighting aisle at Home Depot? There are snippets from conversations with friends, colleagues, and business partners in my slush pile too. Interesting, but not relevant to this experiment—although they did remind me that I have (hopefully not “had”) once-close friends I haven't connected with in far too long. And, I found quite a few "sprouts:" brief responses to books and articles I was reading, random thoughts, and a few three-line notes that now read like haiku's left behind by an alien species.
I initiated my experiment with this note from February 2021: "Style is a form of commentary." Although it wasn’t written too long ago, enough time has passed for me to lose its original context.
Using the notes I keep in my Obsidian note-taking app and the Smart Connections GPT plugin developed by Brian Petro, I asked GPT to use my reading notes imported from Readwise and my archive of metaphor articles to respond to the following prompt:
You are a research bot. Review my notes in /folder/"metaphor Article Archive" and my notes in /folder/"Readwise". Explore connections to the phrase "style is a form of commentary". List the six strongest connections you find. Include the connected text, the note title, author of the source note if it is called out in the note, and source path.
Here’s the response:
Based on your notes, here are the five strongest connections to the phrase "style is a form of commentary":
1. Connected text: "Style is the perfection of a point of view."
Note title: On Writing Well
Author: William Zinsser
Source path: Readwise > Books > On Writing Well > Highlights
2. Connected text: "This phenomenon, of slipping into the style of another writer, gives you great freedom and joy, in your manipulation of language. You are ventriloquist and chameleon."
Note title: Essays Two
Author: Lydia Davis
Source path: Readwise > Books > Essays Two > Highlights
3. Connected text: "The way we write can be thought of as the way we build a house: the words we choose are the materials, and the style is the architecture."
Note title: The Elements of Style
Author: William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
Source path: Readwise > Books > The Elements of Style > Highlights
4. Connected text: "what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind?"
Note title: The Sense of Style
Author: Steven Pinker
Source path: Readwise > Books > The Sense of Style > Highlights
5. Connected text: "Ordinary conversation is so rife with figurative phrases because metaphor is about more than just words. We think metaphorically. Metaphorical thinking is the way we make sense of the world, and every individual metaphor is a specific instance of this imaginative process at work."
Note title: I Is an Other
Author: James Geary
Source path: Readwise > Books > I Is an Other > Highlights
6. Connected text: "Each of these attributes is like a different musical instrument. When I write, I’m composing and orchestrating. I'm composing a melody and choosing the attributes that create the sound I’m looking for. I'm deciding which attributes I want to bring up front for a solo and which ones are laying back. The final composition is an expression of how I've applied my unique aesthetic—it's my voice."
Note title: Using Your Aesthetic to Evaluate Your Work
Author: Cliff Guren
Source path: metaphor Article Archive > 35. Is It Good? Developing and Using Your Aesthetic
The initial notes in the list are bright stars—they contain the word “style” and quickly concentrate my thoughts on the concept of style. However, it’s the notes further down the list, specifically the note on metaphor and the note from my article on developing your aesthetic, that draw me back into the universe of thoughts I’ve developed about style, many of which stem from my interest in poetry.
My goal wasn't to produce a publishable article but rather to re-animate phrases and ideas whose original context and meaning had been lost to me. The failure to preserve the context was mine—I didn't capture enough of the substance of these thoughts to give them a shelf life of more than a few days. However, because I could recreate a plausible context using a relevant collection of artifacts—reading notes and writing—GPT was able to re-contextualize the scraps and connect them to related ideas I’ve been reading, thinking, and writing about.
I re-ran my experiment using other note fragments with varied results. GPT consistently provided related notes—however, some of my note fragments were truly one-offs. Ideas so distant from the core of my current reading and writing that they couldn’t be drawn back into close proximity. Although I could have continued tweaking my prompts, my attention turned elsewhere…
The crucial aspect of this experiment lies in my ability to reconnect my disconnected notes to the curated galaxy of my notes, ideas, and thoughts, rather than the information in GPT’s general dataset. This is the future of generative AI: personalized datasets and responses derived from the data and ideas that are chosen by you.
Sprouts and Filters
The creative process is rapidly changing—not for the first time or the last. Most advances in technology are driven by our desire to save labor--physical and mental labor, but also creative labor. We’re constantly working against the clock. For us, time is a zero-sum game: the time we save doing one thing provides us time for something else. Better tools and more productive collaboration are two of the most cost-effective ways we have to "make" time. Because generative AI jump-starts ideation, we can begin our creative work with more nascent ideas—what I like to call “sprouts.” However, the jumpstart isn’t incremental: it’s exponential. For example, the influential architectural firm Zaha Hadid Architects in London has developed a generative AI design tool that can produce over 3,700 office interior design plans per hour. The blank page is a thing of the past.
In my articles, “Choreographing Creative Thinking” and “The Way Forward,” I explore the dance between divergent thinking (idea generation) and convergent thinking (idea selection). The relationship between these two mindsets is often visualized in the following manner:
Divergence (Idea Generation) and Convergence (Idea Selection) Kite Model
As I wrote in “The Way Forward:”
Most renderings of the kite-model imply that these two frames of mind (Divergence and Convergence) are opposite facing, like the two faces of Janus. But in practice, the bulk of the creative process is spent zigzagging back and forth between idea generation and selection, playful imagining and focused work, wild exuberance and quiet contemplation, chaos and order. The movement between the two states is an intricate dance, with the lead constantly switching between the partners as the dance progresses. This is the messy middle of the creative process—the part I call “The Maker’s Workshop.”
The Maker's Threshold: A Generative Space Between Idea Generation and Selection
The Maker’s Workshop is a sandbox, a petri dish, a greenhouse. It’s a generative space focused on the formation of new clusters of ideas, new filaments of interwoven ideas, new combinations that are greater than the sum of their parts. These unforeseen possibilities only become apparent when you are actively engaged with your ideas—comparing, contrasting, and combining them. The Maker’s Workshop is where the doors to the adjacent possible get tested and occasionally open.
Generative AI is a transformative tool that allows you to combine idea generation and selection into a single, iterative, progressive workflow. The impact on the creative process is even more profound when working with a dataset of your own source material. Since you’re working with familiar material, the process quickly exposes more facets of your chosen subject, rapidly expanding the range of creative possibilities available to you. However, like all powerful tools, it has a downside: the blank page quickly fills with ideas, often resulting in an overwhelming number of options.
Most books on creativity focus on how to generate ideas—but in the age of generative AI, the issue isn’t the scarcity of ideas, it’s their abundance. In many ways, this problem resembles the dilemma individuals in modern consumer-oriented cultures face when walking down a grocery store aisle: how to choose?
In his book The Paradox of Choice, psychologist and professor Barry Schwartz writes, “As the number of choices we face increases, freedom of choice eventually becomes a tyranny of choice.” To avoid the tyranny of constantly having to make often meaningless choices, Schwartz recommends narrowing the number of choices you have to make: make as many choices as you can once, then make the decision a rule that you choose to follow. For example, if you decide you’re going to focus on your health and only eat food that’s good for you, you can walk down the long aisle of processed snack foods without stopping. By choosing to constrain your choices, you minimize decision fatigue and make it easier to focus on the choices that actually make the biggest impact.
Constraints also enhance creativity. Artists proactively constrain their choices by developing and articulating an aesthetic. When an artist expresses their aesthetic in their work, we call it their “style.” Your style reflects the choices you’ve made that aren’t significantly impacted by your immediate circumstances. In an age of abundant ideas, use your aesthetic to narrow the number of ideas you’re working with at any one time and apply your style to express your ideas in a unique way.
Style is a form of commentary.