Gen AI No Substitute for the Messy Miracle of Human Collaboration

I have to endure some eye-rolls from my nine-year-old daughter, but it’s worth it. Since receiving a record player for a recent birthday, there's one album I reach for more than any other: Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk.

What can I say? The music turns my dials.

For an album made more than 40 years ago, it still feels contemporary. Every song is like an expertly crafted short story with nothing wasted, every lyric and note purposeful and evocative, and each instrument and vocalist distinct. It makes me happy and contemplative at the same time.

As much as I enjoy the album, however, I’ve never given much thought to the pain and joy of producing it—what it took for five creative souls with their own ambitions, talents, insecurities and demons to enter a common artistic endeavor. I never considered the small and big moments of personal sacrifice required to make it all work.

This week, I saw Stereophonic, the Broadway play at least partly based on Fleetwood Mac and its creation of Rumors. The fictional but poignant portrait of creative collaboration among wounded but talented people made me reflect on the messy miracle of it all.

Peter (who sounds a lot like Lindsay Buckingham) is a propulsive perfectionist with clear ideas about the sound he wants. No one in the band would dispute he’s the driving force of its music or that his instincts are sharp. But they take offense to his insistence that they always bend to his vision and his blunt communication style.

After Diana, Peter’s lover, has just shared a new song with the band that leaves everyone soaked in silence, Peter takes a beat and then tells her to cut the number of verses. ?

“It’s good but … your ego is getting in the way and you need to decide if you’re gonna be a mediocre songwriter or push it to the next level,” he says.

Ouch.

Now, most of us are not pop stars with Billboard chart-topping songs in our resumes. But most of us have been part of a creative pursuit amongst talented people where we have to find our role, defend our contributions and value in efforts of self-preservation, and bend to make something great. It’s not always a joy ride.

As a young reporter, I was edited by veteran journalists, most headstrong with some Peter-like habits. I look back fondly on all that I learned, but the experience was, frankly, at times, soul-crushing. I would often be seated within a few feet of my editors and could hear their sighs and the clanking of their keyboards as they edited my copy. The long notes they sent at the top of my pieces often justified my worst fears that I was a cause without hope. It would feel demoralizing to see my work dissected and critiqued so thoroughly.

Of course, the more I learned, the more I gained confidence in my abilities and ideas. But as a young, inexperienced writer, I needed that rigorous feedback to grow.

“It’s a torture to need people,” says one of the characters in Stereophonic.

True.

Gen AI—an assistant, not a collaborator

The days of spending a year in a studio making an album are long gone. And so are my days of being in a newsroom amongst other writers and editors. ?

Most of my writing today is done alone.

But I often hear about the idea of viewing gen AI as a collaborator. But that’s not how I see it. Using generative AI is like having a tireless assistant eager to help but not an equal. I’ve looked to it for advice on how to improve sentences, explain complex ideas, generate metaphors, and look for holes in my arguments.

But it’s not a collaborator. I never relinquish control. There is one person in charge, and that’s me. And I don’t have to worry about hurting its feelings.

Real collaboration is messy. It requires balancing trusting your instincts with a willingness to be open to new ideas. It’s painful and sometimes frustrating, but it’s also where the magic most reliably happens—where something greater than the sum of its parts is created.

In the last scene of Stereophonic, the engineer on the album is alone, playing with the faders in an almost dreamlike state. It's a haunting scene, and I'll never listen to Tusk in the same way.