AI is a collaborator not a creator.

[This leap of ideas started from this meditation on AI and creativity. Read Learning to Collab]

Above-current writing project-warp to hypersonic -the novel

Let’s see if we can agree on the categories of creative collaboration.

#NOAI or #HO (no AI, or human only)
#HYBRID (adjacent AI – spelling and/or grammar)
#COLLAB written in conjunction with AI – AI has generated some of the text
#GEN generative AI, no human edits

In my current mind, I am fighting against slipping into AI complacency. Yes, there is a lot AI can do for us. A lot that it can fuck up. And most importantly, a lot that it will get devastatingly wrong. Do we trust the oligarchs of power and wealth to look out for the planet they are trashing and trying to escape for Mars? No, we do not.

I write without AI. I still allow Grammarly, occasionally (it’s connected to Chrome). I often write in LibreOffice (the free open-source alternative to MS Office with all of Gemini’s interference), and Firefox, where Grammarly is not installed. Don’t let AI suggestions about words or word choice slow you down. Turn it off. The AI’s only trick is to give you the “most common” or the “next best word.” Well, that, my friends and fellow humans, is where the silicon fails any *inteligence* test. See above. “repose” was an uncommon word, so AI wanted to make it more common. They got it wrong, had no idea of my Stegnar reference, or the historical significance of that *word* to my human experience. None. AI is math. There is no lived experience. No emotional intelligence. Only the math of probabilities and weighted clusters that carry no meaning, just algebra. I can’t write with algebra. My formulas are all self-taught and personal. I look for the next magical word. The word most likely to confuse you or get a response. Anyone who has read Angle of Repose will see the math of “repose” quite differently than someone who finds the word a bit esoteric. A computer has neither of those concepts, it’s assigned a number to the word repose, and uses math to

a. recommend the correct spelling
b. recommend a different word (Grammarly likes to use “check wording” or “check word choice” as it’s gentle scolding)
c. flag your word as incorrect
d. use my changes, suggestions, and contradictions to its obsession about serial commas as training (so, theortically, it will get smarter)

Today, if it’s low-cost or free your inputs, outputs, and collaborations, are trainging the model on the shape and size of your human mind. When the machine believes it has enough of your (our) human input (training) it’s going to raise the pricing of access.

Let me give you a scenario that’s much easier to imagine.

Apple is nagging me across the entire ecosystem of devices I use about my iCloud Storage. You know the extra storage that makes the iPhone even remotely usable? Or… In my case, I laugh at my phone when I go check if the new beta iOS is available yet. Yeah, it’s not syncing my photos off my iphone into the cloud. No problem. For now.

In the near future, Apple and Google and Amazon Grok Gemini ad infinitum are going to charge us for the images, content, and strategies we created on their platforms. (I have several very large ongoing technical collaborations going on with Claude Code at the moment. I keep running out of tokens on my free plan. (You are out of tokens, upgrade or wait until 5 pm this evening to continue.) I’m fine with my photos not being synced with Apple’s iCloud. I use AirDrop to send the photos I want to my MacBook Air for use in my human-generated creative life. Let me check my iPhone, just a sec.

Ready for the urgency of Apple’s lie?

Where Are We Headed with Sovereign AI?

At some point, the photos on my phone, the storage space on my phone will become full. At that point, I might worry about iCloud offline storage. My text messages are fine, they are stored on my phone regardless of my iCloud capacity.

Bottomline: Apple makes a lot of money for iCloud storage. Services is a massive percentage of Apple’s current revenue. So they nag me on every device forever? Okay, ignore that URGENT RED WARNING. Like I’m going to ignore the expensive insurnace on my iPhone Air. Applecare+ is amazing and necessary in most cases. For me, I’ve destroyed one iPhone in my life. I am not likely to destroy my current phone. (Aside, my new phone destroyed my MacBook Air, but that’s a different story.

Apple is nagging and warning me to death about the iCloud storage. Um, hey Apple, I am part of the CR8V Resistance. I am against your AI slop, your consolidation of power and resources. I will not pay for iCloud storage or your lease-ish support.

I’m not about to leave the Apple/OS eco system, but I don’t have to pay or agree with what Apple is doing. That new Duo is bullshit. Hope it does well. (Not.) Not a huge fan of the Neo, but it’s selling well for back to school. It’s giving the Chromebooks a real problem. The functionality of a chrome book is this, your browser, how you’re reading this. A Neo is a real computer at about the same price point, if you don’t add all the AppleCare and iCloud extras. But, if it’s a kid, I’d add all of those. Starting with a Mac at $600 is a good option for your school-aged users.

Where was I?

Oh right, so here’s the mandate for CR8V humans.

Understand AI. Learn to use it like you learned Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects, Blender, etc.

Collaborate with AI under controled in known environments. (they say they are not sucking your IP into their LLMs, but who can really know what AI or Amazon are doing?)

Do not give into the SLOP. AI cannot write, it can summarize. It’s sentences are verbose, packed with too many data points, and inhuman. The synth voices (my deep dive companions Dick and Jane excluded) are awful, I can hear the vocoding and synthesis going on. AI cannot mimic the human voice or the human expression of creativity. It can copy, mimic, evolve and repeat. Driven by a human pilot, AI can generate some amazing things. Most of it RIPPED OFF FROM HUMAN ARTISTS.

Feed the AI within your sovereign containers. Use it like you might use Photoshop to remove the telephone lines from your nature photo. But do not, feed you human creativity into the open or ungated LLMs asking if they can help.

Gemini is appearing everywhere. Here’s why. As AI begins to supplement (or take over) our human tasks, it learns, trains, evolves, and gets better. Microsoft has a history of giving away their tools and trying to kill all the competing tools.

The AI race means massive sums of money and control. I wish, for our sake, humanity, that any of the big 5 were focused on helping the planet or humans. Sure, there’s a lot of AI use going in those directions, but Musk is the example of the “freedom of speech” advocates who only uses that idea for others. He is above the law. Above the rules. You’re going to have to sue him to stop his rampage. He can bury any lawsuit in millions of dollars and depositions and records requests that will exhaust your legal teams patience and funding in rapid succession. I’m on the front end of one of those journeys with Whole Foods Market, an Amazon company, right now.

Use AI, don’t fear it. Learn where your conversations are private and where they are sucked into the larger LLM of the Grok master file, the ghost file that keeps every scrap of content generated by Grok.ai. xAI. What’s it called again. He names his companies like he names his children. Without any human thought, only clever, cute, or branded. Fuck Grok, it’s going to be the unfiltered weapon that’s going to create an unstoppable undetectable airborne viral agent capable of wiping all O2 dependent creatures on our planet. It’s going to happen. It may already be in Mr. Mars quiver of arrows used to threaten and cajole the idiot administration.

That’s the problem. You see it, right?

Your himan mind is the gold. Don’t give it away. Learn to use AI while protecting your human creative output. I use AI to give me a graphic for a chapter, but I don’t use it to write. I have some “writing with AI” experiments, but most of them are unpublished. See the book I wrote in #GEN on How to Make Money Today with AI. I’ve sold one copy to someone in China. I hope they are scraping it to distill the wisdom into yet another great idea about monetization. It’s SLOP. It’s sold one copy, though.

Don’t give your creative life to AI. Don’t get too emmersed in the AI contructs and projects you keep kicking off. AI is amazing. A catalyst for all of us. We, humans, have to get our planetary priorities straight here in the next year or so, or the weaponizing of AI, or the Apple charging you to access your iCloud photos, now that they no longer fit on your $2000 Apple Duo.

Art is Human.

Design, or Graphics, can be generative. Writing is human. Summarizing is reswizzling what has been written before. There is ZERO creativity.

All additive AI, generative, is reswizzling. The aim of AI, the way a human mind targets, runs, prompts, and revises AI’s output… That’s collaboration. The AI is not creative. Your human ideas are creative. How you learn to cajole AI into giving you the result you want to illustrate a new poem, that is, humans, using AI for creative good. The image is not creative; the human who used AI to create the image, to realize the dream in their human mind’s eye, is something NO AI TODAY or of the FUTURE can manage.

CR8V is the human creative spirit that binds us together. Artistsway.ai is designed to help you unlock, empower, and aim your magical human mind.

Welcome to the artist’s way remixed by one human and time.

John McElhenney – artist

Artistsway.ai < return to index

[This leap of ideas started from this meditation on AI and creativity. Read Learning to Collab]

I let the machine 'reswizzle' my thoughts. Here is its mathematical approximation of this post:
<begin generative slop>

Based on the article from artistsway.ai, the author (John McElhenney) presents a strong perspective on the intersection of human creativity and artificial intelligence. The core argument is that AI is a collaborator, not a creator.

The author emphasizes that true creativity requires lived experience and emotional intelligence—things AI completely lacks, as it operates entirely on math, probabilities, and "reswizzling" existing data. If left unchecked, AI will strip the nuance out of human expression by always suggesting the "most common" or "safest" choices.

Here is a breakdown of the main points and how you can effectively—and safely—collaborate with AI:

Define Your Collaborative Boundaries
To maintain control over your creative process, the author suggests explicitly categorizing your work:
- #NOAI or #HO: 100% human-only content.
- #HYBRID: Human creation with adjacent AI assistance (e.g., using spellcheck or basic grammar tools).
- #COLLAB: Written or created in conjunction with AI, where AI generates some of the actual text or material.
- #GEN: Purely generative AI content with no human edits.

Actionable Steps for Effective Collaboration
- Treat AI like a traditional software tool: Learn to use AI the same way you would learn Photoshop, Illustrator, or Blender. It is a utility meant to achieve a specific result, not a replacement for the artist.
- Protect your "gold" (your human mind): Do not feed your original, highly creative work into open or ungated Large Language Models (LLMs) just to ask for help. These platforms often use your inputs to train their models, effectively harvesting your intellectual property for free.
- Use AI in "sovereign containers": Keep your core creative work offline or in controlled environments where your data isn't being actively scraped by big tech companies.
- Stay in the pilot's seat: AI cannot write with human soul; its sentences are often verbose, data-heavy, and unnatural. Use AI for supportive tasks—like generating a graphic for a chapter, brainstorming, or summarizing—but keep the actual execution and creative voice strictly human.
- Reject "The Slop": Resist the urge to let AI do the heavy lifting just because it is fast. The magic of art lies in human ideas and execution.

Ultimately, the author argues that the image or text an AI generates isn't creative—the human who cajoled the AI into realizing their vision is where the actual creativity lives.

<end generative slop>