Creative decisions often feel like they hinge entirely on subjective opinions. That’s especially true in creative industries, where those of us labeled right-brain thinkers are often encouraged to lean into instinct and emotion rather than logic or objectivity. (Get 5 of us in a room together trying to make a decision and it quickly becomes exhausting.) Over time I’ve looked for ways to balance subjectivity with a clearer, more structured process. That curiosity, alongside the recent explosion of GenAI, has become a minor obsession of mine over the last couple of years. I’ve been exploring and experimenting with ‘old school’ machine learning, GenAI, and their adjacent technologies not just as tools to use, but as systems to study. What I’ve learned is that understanding how machines process data, identify patterns, and make decisions doesn’t just improve your ability to work with technology, it changes how you approach your own creative decision making. Studying the underpinnings of AI such as regression & classification, algorithmic structures, statistics, and data science has sharpened my perspective, helping me find clarity in my creative choices on set without losing the emotional depth that makes the work resonate. This shift has been especially relevant during my stint as an adjunct professor. Teaching students who are just beginning their creative journeys and who don’t have years of experience to draw on can’t always rely on instinct alone. I encourage them to ask objective questions about their goals and their audience, and the outcomes they want to achieve in order to inform their creative decisions. Those same questions have reshaped how I think about my own work. For me, this process has underscored something I was taught long ago - creativity flourishes when we define its boundaries. While machine learning might seem like more of a left-brain endeavor, studying it has helped balance logic and intuition in ways that have improved not just my outputs, but also how I think about the creative process itself. It’s allowed me to resolve creative disputes more quickly, which has allowed for more time to focus on the fun part - the execution - where I actually get to use my ‘creative’ skill sets. For those of you (us) who are (perhaps rightly so) angry about the training of LLM’s on personal data and copyrighted works, I’d challenge you to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I’m not proposing you delegate creativity to machines, but instead use the fundamentals of algorithmic thinking to refine your own process. For those of us in creative fields, thinking more objectively doesn’t diminish our work… it amplifies it.
If you can do that, you will take the power of your decision making to a whole other level. In many cases, you will be able to test how that principle would have worked in the past or in various situations that will help you refine it, and in all cases, it will allow you to compound your understanding to a degree that would otherwise be impossible. It will also take emotion out of the equation. Algorithms work just like words in describing what you would like to have done, but they are written in a language that the computer can understand. If you don’t know how to speak this language, you should either learn it or have someone close to you who can translate for you. Your children and their peers must learn to speak this language because it will soon be as important or more important than any other language. #principleoftheday