Creativity “Because you’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m not needed anymore.’” “That’s right.” So I continued. “But say you had this tool and you were John Lennon. You could say, ‘I know I want to create a song about imagination, connectivity, mutual love, and so forth.’ You could instruct this software—which, by the way, knows you and your style by now—you could tell it to take a stab at an idea like that. Or three or four stabs. None of the results would be the song, but after hearing them you might say, ‘Well, I love the bits between the ten and twenty second marks,’ and ‘That one rhyme it came up with at 1:15 was not bad.’ Then you take those bits as building blocks and you make something much better.” His face brightening, I added, “And, remember, this is all hap- pening just minutes after you had the initial inspiration.” Immediately, he saw how these new tools could help a virtuoso musician like himself be even better. More ideas, more produc- tivity, more music that he could make and share with the world than he’d ever thought possible. Would there be complications, conflicts, new methods and pro- cesses to figure out? Absolutely. But as he reminded me, those are part of being an artist, too. AI, he saw, would change the way he used and expressed his creativity—and he was ready to go: “I can create so much better now, so much faster, and in different ways. When do I get this thing?” * * * 47