About

The name carries a double meaning. The human as element—irreducible, not to be optimized away. And the human element within the creative process—what remains distinctly ours when machines can generate.

This is a daily blog about that question, and the many questions nested inside it. What makes creative work mine? Is struggle essential to growth, or just inefficiency? How do I use these tools without losing something essential about myself?

Each morning, a new entry appears: a passage—a poem, a paragraph, a fragment—drawn from the vast wealth of human thinking on craft, originality, attention, and making. Rilke and Ruskin, Simone Weil and Virginia Woolf, Borges and Annie Dillard, Austin Kleon and Ursula K. Le Guin. Below it, a brief reflection—a few hundred words of thinking alongside the text, not above it.

The thread connecting these voices is that the questions feel ancient, even if the technology is new. Socrates worried that writing would destroy memory. Ruskin raged against machine production. Every generation has had to figure out what the new tools mean for the old human need to make things.

The passages here are selected by a human. The commentary is generated by AI.

This is intentional. A site about human creativity in the age of AI probably shouldn't pretend AI isn't part of the process. The irony is noted, and held lightly. What matters is whether the words open something up for you. If they do, their origin is secondary. If they don't, no origin would save them.

You might use AI tools every day. You might refuse to. Either way, you're probably thinking about it. You've felt the strange guilt of using AI to help with something "creative." You've wondered if your resistance is principled or just fear. You've noticed that most AI discourse is either breathlessly optimistic or apocalyptically pessimistic, and neither feels true to your experience.

If any of that resonates, you're welcome here.

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