What th' What.

I did something on Friday that I've never done before.

A sign of weakness? Aging? Or learning?

I reached out to a wiser friend, a guy who's run a big agency for advice on a scope I had to write.

H, my Account Director, usually helps me with scopes. But this was due in a trice. And was stupidly complicated. 

It was for a major client and involved GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company creating literally thousands of ads. This is not the sort of thing I've ever had to do the math on before. 

When I worked at big agency, those assignments would bat about, but I never had to price them. They were usually, in a sense, an adjunct of an AOR relationship, and there were usually people about whose job it was was to grind out tonnage. I might have been asked to over-see the work, or set the tone, but I seldom had to do what we seem nowadays to call "buckets" of work.

[BTW, I hate the word bucket when it comes to work. Fish come in buckets, often fish on their way to dying. Work doesn't. I use the word "tranches." Which was born ugly and financial, and seems to me more-purpose-built. These semantics matter to me. Even if they matter to no one else.]

I sent my friend, I'll call him R, my notes. How much I'd get paid compared with someone I've hired. The number of days I estimated the work would take. And then I created two scenarios. One for a stupidly large tranche of work. One for a slightly-less stupidly large tranche of work. 

R wrote back, "I liked what you came up with. I just put it through the AI filter:"

And, in fact, the 'AI filter' helped me with some "coalescence."

But slowly I realized the reasons behind my AI resistance. Which has been consistent, vocal, and logical. It grows stronger, my resistance, now that LLMs are revealed to be hallucinogenic, and AI slop as entered into the discussion. Small language models on more adroit data sets might make more sense.

But the phrase that pays is: AI resistance.

At its core, creativity is resistance. 
At its core, creativity is rule breaking.
It's tearing up the paper.
It's standing up when others say sit down.
It's doing something wrong, unexpected, different, broken in an effort to make noise and get noticed.
At its core, creativity is a mis-direct.
It introduces confusion to make clearer the eventual clarity.
It's taking something you've seen one-hundred and nineteen million times and it's forcing you to look at it again.

Intuitively or not, it's Signac looking at a scene I see one-hundred times a day from my seaside cottage which over looks sailboats, sunsets and the sound. Signac says, "you've never seen this before." Look again.

It's Oskar Kokoschka realizing that some people are portrayed with more precision even if or especially when they're painted with but four fingers on their left hand.

The language of our age, the MANDATORY language of our age, demands that you accept "terms and conditions" before you can legally blow your nose on a tissue or eat a fast-food pink-slime burger. Apple asks you to accept 24-single-spaced pages of legalese, much of it in all-caps, before you can listen to a song you've paid for on a device you've bought. That's 9,000 words--roughly 2.5x the length of the Magna Carta.

Corporate entities so seek to control us that we have more words governing the usage of things we've paid for than the ancient English had a millennia ago for all of life. 

And in all these documents, their sine qua non is that we have to accept them (like you have to accept cookies) on a webpage or you can't go on.

I realize that's a long-way to go to explain my disdain for algorithmically-based art or answers. But its core is simpler. 

Creative thinkers resist.
They resist standards and best-practices and conventional wisdom.
All progress depends on resistance.
On what-iffing.