Where the Magic Lives

On human creativity in the Intelligence Age

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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This week, news of a literary hoax. One that allows us a glimpse of the future for human intelligence in the age of thinking machines.

Back in December, a Hong-Kong born philosopher called Jianwei Xun published Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality. It’s about the manipulation of reality in digital environments. And it made waves in Italy, where it was published in translation.

But the world learned last month that Xun does not exist. He is the invention of the book’s real author: the Italian essayist Andrea Colamedici, who had styled himself the book’s ‘translator’.

Colamedici revealed that Xun is really an AI. More specifically, says Colamedici, he used AI to create the fictional Xun, and to create and refine the core concepts and arguments in the book. Hypnocracy, in short, was co-authored with machine intelligence.

See what Colamedici has done? It’s a book about the manipulation of truth that itself turns out to be a manipulation of the truth. Are you not entertained?

But why am I bringing this news to you here in NWSH? The answer: because the lesson Colamedici wants to teach us via this experiment is, I’m convinced, the most important lesson of all right now when it comes to AI.

It’s not news to any of us that AI has become capable across a wide range of intellectual and creative domains: writing, image-making, strategy, and more. What’s less well appreciated is the way so many people are drawing exactly the wrong conclusions from this. They think — or more often, fear — that all this means irrelevance for human creativity, and the end for human intellectual endeavour.

It doesn’t have to be that way. And I don’t think it will be that way.

The people who advance that vision are imagining a future in which we fall into a toxic relationship with machine intelligence. A different path is open to us.

Colamedici, who teaches at the European Institute of Design, started fermenting the ideas that became Hypnocracy when he noticed this kind of thinking among his students. ‘I realized that they were using ChatGPT in the worst possible way: to copy from it. I observed that they were losing an understanding of life by relying on AI…’

So he devised a programme intended to reengineer their relationship with LLMs. At the heart of that programme is an idea I’ve written about before. That is, that we must see AI not as a machine to do our thinking for us, but as a collaborator that pushes our own thinking further.

This is how Colamedici used AI when he came to write Hypnocracy. The book was not, as some outlets have reported, ‘written by ChatGPT’. Rather, he used a range of LLMs as sparring partners:

‘Yes, I used artificial intelligence, but not in a conventional way. I developed a method that I teach at the European Institute of Design, based on creating opposition. It’s a way of thinking and using machine learning in an antagonistic way. I didn’t ask the machine to write for me, but instead it generated ideas and then I used GPT and Claude to critique them, to give me perspectives on what I had written.

‘Everything written in the book is mine. Artificial intelligence is a tool that we must learn to use, because if we misuse it—and “misuse” includes treating it as a sort of oracle, asking it to “tell me the answer to the world’s questions; explain to me why I exist”—then we lose our ability to think. We become stupid.’

Exactly this.

If we choose to use LLMs as answer machines, our creative and intellectual faculties will wither. We’ll have found a new way to minimise ourselves.

What’s more, a future artist or writer who uses an LLM in this way will generate outputs that are, by definition, mediocre. Anyone will be able to generate outputs of the same standard, simply by pressing a button inside ChatGPT.

Soon enough, those truths will become commonplace. I’m sure there will be lazy writers who simply ‘use ChatGPT’, but there won’t be a market for their work. Their books will fade away into the sea of sameness.

The creative future lies elsewhere.

It lies with writers, artists, philosophers and others who realise that something amazing is happening now, but that it isn’t an excuse to switch off our own creative and critical faculties. Quite the reverse, in fact: this is the best time ever to be a creative person. These enlightened souls will understand that magic will happen when smart and talented people use AI to push their thinking to places they would not have otherwise visited.

That means using AI as a sparring partner. A collaborator. A sounding board, cheerleader, and critic.

That’s where the magic will be found.

Literature is a case in point. I’m convinced that soon most books will be written in the way Colamedici says he wrote his.

That is to say, most will be written using AI as a thought partner. Of course, anyone will be able to ‘write’ an average book by simply pressing the button on an LLM. But no one wants to read average books. There will still be plenty of room for — and plenty of market value in — human creativity.

I already write most of my longform essays for Global Macro Investor and The Exponentialist in this way. I go to ChatGPT or Claude to discuss, extend, and refine my ideas. I work with my AI collaborator to devise an outline. And then I write. I’m sure many others are doing the same; and the books some of them are writing now will soon make their way into the world.

So let us take heart. My conviction is that via the collision of human and machine intelligence, some amazing art is coming.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

This was #16 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH.