We saw a snake on a hike last weekend. The same thing always happens when I see a snake. I don’t know why, it’s kind of weird, but I get a song stuck in my head. So on Monday morning, as I was scratching the itch, I put it on in the background.
Now, the song is playing and I’m thinking about my friend Ben Hunt’s note from last week (Contact: AI and the Semantic Dimension) - and, that was all about snakes too. But not the same type of snakes. He’s doing his version of the metaphorical thing, writing about snakes and AI. As he put it, "The Snake is the Deceiver. The Snake is the Trickster."
And this tips my brain over down another flight of proverbial stares, straight to the bottom of a third rabbithole, which is always how you know Monday is going well.
Because now I’m thinking about the sample at the beginning of “Snakes” the song. The kung fu flick. I’ve got Five Deadly Venoms on my mind and - I know there’s a connection but the snake in metaphor and the snake in the style is - at least a Tuesday problem.
So I stewed on it.
The movie is a trip, if you’ve never seen it. It’s classic Shaw Brothers’ stuff. An old kung fu dude is telling his young student how the venom styles he developed could be used for evil. He needs the student to track down each fighter and find out who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy, and help unwind the operation, by any means necessary.
Our student goes out into the world and starts tracking down the fighters in hiding, armed with the knowledge of how each fights. Toad and Lizard are ok. Complicated, but OK. Centipede, Scorpion, and (ready for it?) Snake are up to no good. Kung fu training and fight sequences ensue, the teacher dies but not without imparting what the weakness of each technique is, and in the end, the student who is not a master of any one style has to cobble together a new approach, join forces with Toad and Lizard, and beat up all the bad guys.
The takeaways I will put the highlighter on is that the very curious, style-less student overcomes the various venoms by
A. loving to learn,
B. actually putting the work in to develop a style of his own, and then
C. teaming up with others to strategically kick some butt.
Beating the bad guys requires your detective hat.
And, in a way, isn’t that almost exactly what the role of Ben’s snake was accomplishing? Detective work is good. It’s how we figure stuff out. It’s how we know not only that the snake is fighting with a singular style, but how that very fact teaches us how to defeat it. That’s why the snakes are an inevitable foil in so many myths and stories.
Wu Tang, the group, was always a representative metaphor for this awareness, too.
It’s why the movie sample is in the song. It’s why it’s a posse cut and not just a one-man show. If we zoom out, here you have a supergroup of friends, cousins, and rappers, making not just collective albums, but also individual albums, which all had individual record deal contracts (RZA is and was a genius for this), and they’d use this to survive in thrive inside of a system built for sake of the system and not the art.
They were playing detective games with how to beat the system. They were playing cultural games with how to make their art, and be better than the bad guys.
And all RZA and Wu cared about was the art. Yes, money because C.R.E.A.M., but the ART, and staying true to what made that group of friends happiest.
Not the industry, not the charts, not exclusively the bank accounts.
Which is where AI’s role in all of this comes into focus. For me, at least. And my severely ADHD short-circuiting, pattern matching brain.
The snake on the trail, the song in my head, and the note from Ben are the playbook for AI.
AI pattern matches globally for you. You barely have to try, because all you have to do is prompt. And, what’s a prompt spit back at you? Something that’s, at best, average.
Perfectly average. Beautifully average. And I say perfect and beautiful because, and this hurts to write down, but if you feed a bunch of stuff into AI and it comes back to you, and then you think, “Hey this is better than what I thought of” it isn’t true. If it feels true, you are feeling the tug of yourself up to a new mean-adjusted AI average.
It’s not actually better. It’s not actually perfect. It’s not actually beautiful. It’s AI’s interpretation of your taste, maybe even meant for your taste, but it’s average.
Above average - or even just outside of average, aka unique, special, and differentiated - is whatever pops up in your head that can’t be replicated anywhere else in any way, at that moment in time.
The snake in Ben’s piece wins through accepted generalization. It wins not by simply tricking you, but by exploiting your low(er) self-esteem into making you think an average solution is good enough. That it is somehow doing a basic task better than you can do on your own.
The Snake character in 5 Deadly Venoms is playing the same role. It’s one style used to rip people off. It’s not benefitting the whole, it’s just benefitting the user of the style, and despite looking strong, intimidating, and scary - it’s fundamentally weak.
We have to fight the flattening. We have to find our own internal styles. We can borrow from others. We can learn a little Toad and some Lizard, but we have to embrace the in-understandable chaos of how our brain puts things that amuse us together and run with that. With friends. Always with friends.
AI is great, but it’s average compared to you. You are special. Be your own detective and love the things you love.
Oh, and - embrace being a little old and a little dirty. It’s so much more fun.
