The Awesome Power of Learning New Sh**

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Learning a new piece of software can take you to strange mental places. It breaks you down… It makes experienced professionals feel like beginners who don’t know anything and it can make beginners feel like they won’t ever learn enough to get started. But if you stick with the learning, there’s always a point in the process where you have a “breakthrough” and you start to understand how to actually make things with this new tool.?

But Rob - why bother learning new creative tools? The AIs are gonna destroy the creative industry!!

Uhhhh… no… OK, well maybe… or maybe not! The point is Snarky Voice in My Head that nobody actually knows what kind of change is coming. Change is definitely coming, but anyone who tells you they know the future is trying to sell you something… something like AI.

Regardless of how AI develops as a tool, I’m going to keep learning about it, but I’m not going to use it in its current form. I wrote about this in a post last year . I don’t want to “collaborate with a machine”… I want to collaborate with other humans.?

Oh crap, here we go on another anti-AI rant!

Uhhhh… no… OK, well maybe… or maybe not! Everyone is so excited about how generative AI is going to allow us to “do more faster” but when was the last time anyone ever said “I wish there was more media to look at.” It’s been about a generation at least.?

The only things we need “more” of are meaning and purpose and you can’t get those from chatting with an AI or from looking at the pretty pictures it generates.?

OK smarty pants, how CAN you get more meaning and purpose?

Learning new shit is a pretty good start. One of the things I dislike the most about generative AI is that I don’t learn anything using it… OK… maybe I learn how to tell it how to generate things better… but is that really the culmination of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of human civilization? Hey MidJourney… show me a photo of the Pope in a designer puffy jacket.?

Humans have flourished by working together, telling each other stories, learning and then applying that learning in creative and unexpected ways. Other animals learn and use tools, but Human animals learn AND create NEW things with what they’ve learned.

But Rob… People ARE learning to do interesting things with AI!!

True, Snarky… but other than bizarre LSD inspired moving images that are cool once and then you don’t need to see again, I haven’t seen anything yet that couldn’t have been created by working with other people towards a creative goal.

Generative AI doesn’t bring people closer together. It doesn’t encourage collaboration between people. It does the opposite. Why work with an illustrator when you can use MidJourney to crank out something in the same style that person would have done? Why work with a writer when ChatGPT can generate pages of text instantly??

I think what is most distressing about generative AI like ChatGPT and MidJourney is that they discourage LEARNING… Why learn to write? Why learn to draw? Why learn to code? Why learn how molecules form compounds? Why learn ANYTHING???

Meaning and purpose.

Learning new things, sharing what you’ve learned with other people and then working with people to create new and interesting things will help you to find that meaning and purpose. Marketing tells us that we can get it from a shiny new car or a cool pair of shoes or a full luxurious head of hair.?

I don’t have any of those things, but I mostly feel meaningful and I mostly have purpose. I’m collaborating with people on creative projects and I’m learning every day. And that brings us full circle back to ZBrush.

ZBrush is weird. It started out weird with an interface that was designed on purpose not to be like anything else on the market. If I had started learning 3D in ZBrush I probably would have thought it was amazing, but I started in traditional 3D apps with ‘standard’ interfaces and every time I’ve tried to get my head around it, I crash into the interface wall and give up… Not this time…?

For the first time in a long time, I have the mental space to learn and for the last week, I’ve watched a ridiculous number of hours of tutorials trying to find a connection, a spark that would give me that breakthrough moment I mentioned above.

I found it in an unlikely video … When I saw the thumbnail, I said… “uhhh WTF is that? Robot underpants?” The object in the tutorial is weird LOL just like ZBrush but it had all the kinds of features and surface details I needed to learn how to make, so I took a chance and clicked on it.?

So many instructors forget what it was like to be a beginner. They use jargon that loses the learner… They use a custom interface that doesn’t look like the default that loses the learner… They try to impress the viewer with their technical skill and that loses the learner. Not this guy…?

Quiet and unassuming, he used the default interface, reminding me where to find stuff in the menus when he used a keyboard shortcut… He remembered he was talking to people who don’t know ZBrush. Yes… He makes something kinda weird but I learned soooooo much from the techniques that I feel like I’m ready to start the project that I’ve been trying to learn ZBrush for, and that feels… Empowering.?

I’m learning how to sculpt complex shapes in 3D. True, a child with internet access could ask MidJourney to show them something just as beautiful, actually more beautiful than anything I could make. But…

I derive meaning and purpose from learning and creating things and I’m not going to let a little thing like AI stop me.?

If you’ve ever wondered about what robots might wear under their regular pants… Here’s a timelapse…?

If you’ve ever wondered about what robots might wear under their regular pants… Here’s a timelapse…?

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