What is Excellence in the Age of Generative AI?

It’s the fifth anniversary of my father, Nick’s, death.? Facebook popped up the memory first thing this?morning. Their algorithm can’t tell the difference between good memories and bad. That said, the reminder doesn’t sting as much as it has in the past. I’ve found it has become a prompt for reflection on my relationship with my father, the lessons I learned from him, and memories of the things we have done together over the years. We crafted fine furniture, built houses and additions, and much more. We always worked well together because I learned to appreciate something my father held dear early on. ?

Excellence.?

I remember the day I took that lesson to heart well. I was eight or nine and had just mowed the lawn. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and I was happy to have done the job myself. I called my father over to show him. He took a look, nodded, and calmly said, “Do you think you did a good job?”?

“Yes!” declared I.?

“Hmmm.” Nick said, and nodded again. “What about that bit over there?”??

There was a bit of taller grass where I hadn’t overlapped the rows. My heart sunk a bit, and I confessed, “I guess not.”?

“What are you going to do about it?” said he.?

“Fix it.” I restarted the mower, and smoothed out that patch. I also noticed an area where I hadn’t run up to the edge of my grandmother’s currant bushes, and took care of that. When I was done and looked up from mowing he was still there, and smiling. “Now that’s a good job!”??

It was a little thing, but his?expectations for excellence were always high, and his praise for it higher. That sort of thing has an impact, and to this day I cannot help but expect the best from myself and others. But we live in a time where technology has leapt forward, and can now readily surpass what we once might have considered excellent. ?

“I find it disheartening.” one of my co-workers in the design department recently said. “We imagined a future where AI would take all the menial tasks and leave us with more time for poetry and art. But it turned out that all AI is good at is poetry and art.”?

I feel differently. ?

It’s not disheartening. It’s a challenge. A call to become more excellent. ?

Marc Coyle, the CIO of Belleville, recently opined, “All AI has done is raise the bar on mediocrity.” If ChatGPT and MidJourney are the new mediocre we now have a target to set our sights on. We owe it to our own sense of personal worth and the value we bring to the people we work with to strive to be better. Sometimes that’s hard. MidJourney can crack out a production-ready image in no time at all that I couldn’t hope to achieve without thousands of hours of practice*. Sometimes it’s easy. I tried LinkedIn’s new AI profile writing assistant to see what it could do with mine. Multiple attempts produced nothing half as coherent, concise, or compelling as what I’ve managed on my own. ?

The bar will keep moving. It’s the nature of things.?

There’s every reason to expect that AI will continue to raise the bar on mediocrity. We should embrace that. I see the key here is to learn to leverage AI to help us springboard to greater acts of excellence. Learn to use the tools to help us do what we love doing better, and never let a machine take that away from us. After all, bots are just tools, and as Marshall McLuhan said, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” And so, the cycle goes, from when we first chipped a piece of flint to create an edge unto today.?

The new standard for excellence.

I can imagine showing my father something created by AI, and him saying, “Do you think YOU did a good job?” ?

The answer would be, “No!” of course. But if I took what AI could do and used it to help me build something better than I’ve ever done before I’d be happy to say, “Yes!”?

What do you think??

* imagine prompt We become what we behold. We shape artificial intelligence, and thereafter artificial intelligence shapes us --ar 16:9?