Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing

AI, Creative Work, And The Art Of Prompting

When the prophet producers, Nick Ashford & Valerie Simpson wrote Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in 1968, artificial intelligence was the stuff of science fiction casually referenced on shows like Star Trek and Lost in Space. 

Like many, I’ve been studying AI tools like MidJourney and ChatGPT for the past few months now, trying to get a handle on their implications for creative industries like mine. While I’m left with some anxiety and a realization that we’re never putting several compounding genies back inside their bottles, that harmony also lingers: “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.”

The uncomfortable fact is, these AI tools (and more importantly, what they’ll soon morph into) can accomplish an astonishing amount—more than I imagined possible. Here’s a use case I recently played with. Let’s say you’re a journalist, podcaster, or documentary filmmaker. Not only are you able to ask ChatGPT to come up with a list of questions based on best journalism practices for a subject you’re looking to interview, once the interview is complete, you can then feed it your transcript and command it to edit the conversation based on a statistically proven storytelling formula.

I’ve seen this done…and done, I’m hesitant to admit, extraordinarily well. 

Watching AI close the loop on what used to take seasoned craftspeople hours to accomplish has led me to ask the same question many of us have been asking: “What’s left for us humans to do?”

The answer, I believe, is in a single-syllable word, one we’ve been casually throwing around as of late in the midst of all this chatter when it comes to AI. In fact, once you’re done reading this, I promise you’ll never not notice it again. 

The word is “prompt.” And it’s a remarkable, beautiful word. 

To prompt means to inspire, to urge, to give rise to a feeling, thought, or action. 

Artificial intelligence may be able to perform many helpful tasks, but only humans can truly become prompters. 

Prompters are conductors, facilitators, impresarios—those brave enough to prompt others to be brave, vulnerable enough to prompt others to be vulnerable, human enough to prompt others to re-engage their humanity. 

Ted Lasso, bell hooks, project managers, and kindergarten teachers are all prompters. 

Think back to the interview scenario I mentioned. AI may have been able to open and close the loop, but it takes a human somewhere in the middle to decide whether or not they’re going to invite another person to the table. It then takes another human to be willing to participate honestly and candidly once seated. When the conversation meanders down an unexpected path, it will take both humans practicing the social intelligence necessary to pivot in real time, daring to go off-script, agreeing to break the template. 

I mention in my book, The Forgotten Art of Being Ordinary, that creative output will soon look a lot less like social media and a lot more like social work. That’s good news because it means there will always be a deficit of prompters. Why? Because in a world where more and more can be done for us, the will to suffer will become increasingly scarce. 

Suffering is the secret ingredient to what truly moves us, urges us, gives rise to a feeling with in us.

There’s something about knowing it took a violinist years of enduring finger cramps to master the primal sound coming from a wooden box, understanding why a writer wrestled night after night over the right words before deciding to share them with us, or discovering that Van Gogh painted the fields as an act of rebellion against an increasingly automated society that would not accept him. 

We appreciate suffering because it’s the prompt that tethers us, reminding us we’re not alone. It’s something we all do and something that forges what we revere in one another.

Yes, AI will deliver on its promise to do whatever we prompt it to with society-altering ease. No, it can’t replace the ageless art of calling each other into close proximity even when doing so starts with a sting.

Ain’t nothing like the real thing.  

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