myspace 2.0: ai's creative renaissance

prompts are the new html

🎧: listening to ‘mr. hands, by Herbie Hancock’

i don't want to date myself, but it's okay. i'm a child of myspace. it was an amazing era where kids were literally and unknowingly coding their creative expressions into websites to impress their friends. it reminds me closely of where we are with ai right now. as we all log in to [pick your platform] and are greeted by an empty text box that can become our new magic wand, it can quickly lead to anxiety and decision paralysis for users who lack creativity.

in my experience, for far too long, creatives were an afterthought in technology—until now. as they say, eventually the pendulum swings. we are back! myspace, in comparison to facebook, allowed every user to have a unique social presence, and your profile aligned with how creative you could think or research... see the similarities?

i remember being a young kid wanting to impress my friends on myspace and trying to figure out how to make my top 8 hover when the cursor floated over, or how to make the new jay-z song play as soon as you landed on my profile. we were all coding, yes, but also being mini researchers that turned our findings into a fully fledged product: "vern's myspace page." once facebook came along, we all kind of had the same "silicon valley blue" profile with the same profile picture, the 3-4 relationship statuses, and a few photo albums.

almost every day i see people finding new use cases for ai and posting their prompts, along with results of how the tool can improve. it's almost built-in user testing. on the technical side of the coin - i even have begun to see creativity being a major part of model behavior, and interpretability studies. from the openai demo discussing designing model behavior being prompted to "act like a cat", and the research + product team asking themselves well how much like a cat should the model be? how intuitive is the model? determining that balance is as much of a creative endeavor as it is a technical one, like a music producer tuning knobs. if we get even more technical, the "golden gate claude" example from anthropic also shows us how the model itself is a creative being at its core and determines the variables of how to respond based on "features."

as we all continue to create and imagine a new world with ai, let's continue to get excited and realize that the black box or "what to do" should be a challenge to push our creativity.

but, with great power comes great responsibility. as we're mixing paints to create new ai use cases, we have to make sure this tech is inclusive. we're not just coding profile pages anymore – we're shaping the future of human-ai interaction. let's be push creativity and think about how decisions affect others.

-v.