Critical Questions

Ask me anything. Go ahead. Don’t hold back. Because even if I don’t have the answer, AI does. Or does it?

Now, that’s an excellent question (should we ask… Claude?).

But the fact is that simply asking AI a question isn’t enough. Search can probably do a better job. Where AI really comes into its own is when you pose the “right” question… or rather, “prompt it.”

In old-school computing, the prompt is a cursor, a symbol that keeps flashing, awaiting input.  But in the AI-era, the prompt is all about posing a leading question… one that guides AI to respond as you’d like it to. 

But the bigger question is: do you know precisely what you want? Because if you can’t state what you want clearly, AI isn’t able to unravel the morass of your mental gymnastics and come up with that “vague idea” you had in mind.

Sometimes, you think you know what you want. But when you put it out there to AI, you realize that AI hasn’t interpreted your prompt to produce what you had envisioned. Which means that you have to go back to the drawing board and re-imagine it. Why? Because AI can do many things, but it can’t read and interpret your thoughts (unless you’ve implanted a chip in your brain in which case, it can). 

But what it can do and does do rather successfully is understand patterns of thinking or responsiveness. That’s why, when you train AI, you program it by teaching a process or a chain of commands a.k.a. machine learning via a larger dataset a.k.a. LLM (large language model) in which the pattern keeps getting repeated. The larger the dataset, the better AI learns, and based on this “learning” AI can mimic the pattern and start generating a “cookie-cutter” response seamlessly.

But let me make one thing abundantly clear: AI itself has no actual imagination. No, I’m not being creatively elitest. AI genuinely has no actual imagination. It’s simply a hyper-skimmer of data, which then comes back with an approximation of what its feeding on. 

Without knocking Google’s Imagen AI tool, AI is incapable of having an “original” thought. AI is an exquisite curator that can generate (hence it’s called GenAI) something based on what’s ALREADY out there, but it can’t really innovate entirely off its own steam. 

Which brings me to the existential question: Is there any original thought out there? Isn’t everything inspired by something that came before it? 

At some level or another, are we all simply ripping off what already exists? Now, that’s an uncomfortable question. 

So, just in case you think you can take a page out of someone else’s book and pass it off as your own, you’re wrong. Blockchain is the ultimate AI-writer’s block! 

That’s the beauty of blockchain. It documents, verifies and traces all the way back to the source. In fact, what both blockchain and AI really do is push the creator-mindset to do what it does best: create a new paradigm. It pushes us to kindle a new spark, and wash up a new wave of creation on our barren 9-to-5 shore.

And no, it doesn’t only push the creator, what these two Machiavellian machinations do, is also push the distributor to think outside the idiot-box. From publishing to OTT, distribution companies are always trying to slot and stereotype your creativity so that it becomes easy and efficient to sell. Translate that to mean it requires less money and less work to get it out there. Chicklit? Historical Fiction? Rom-com? and the ultimate irony is that the formula works. There’s bound to be a buyer for it because that’s the narrative that you’ve been fed all along. 

Get it? Machine learning and human learning are not all that different, the key differentiator is that humans have imagination and machines don’t, as yet. Wait, so what does it mean when we say that AI is hallucinating? It’s making up stuff! Isn’t that imagination…?

Hmmm… yes, in a sense, it’s just riffing on a theme. But there’s a huge difference between simply guessing facts and making up figures and actually creating something completely anew.

That’s where blockchain really challenges the status quo. Because with blockchain, you can bypass the distributor altogether. A blockchain platform allows you to share your work, develop a niche audience or following, and even generate seamless micro-payments, in a pay-per-click or pay-per-view model. It also takes away the monopoly of media streamers, and instead, democratizes the entire distribution network with its own distributed ledger.

In the media & entertainment landscape, where structural hierarchy is a leaning Tower of Pisa, it simply flattens it. Suddenly, the creator is in complete control of his or her work, and how it’s shared and presented to the world. The creator retains the sole rights of the work, and because it’s time-stamped on the blockchain, it can immediately be traced back to its original source.

So, next time you face writer’s block, don’t try and sneak someone else’s story onto your page with AI. Rekindle your imagination instead. Because the blockchain will trace the work back to its source, and then you’ll be left to answer the uncomfortable question.