Short Cuts.

When I was a young man and had hung up my baseball spikes for good, I replaced them with runners' shoes. It's easy to get fat and I was good at it. To allay the inevitability of adipose and to assuage my  competitive mien, I turned to long-distance running with my usual fury.

For about ten years, from my early 20s to my early 30s, I raced on weekends. Anything from five-miles to a full-marathon, and I rarely clipped a number to my tattered singlet without hoping to set a personal best and finish in the top ten-percent.

I'd never finish higher than that. Those that can and do usually have bird-like frames--their bones are more like straws than mine which are like tree trunks, or Greek columns or some order of elephantine. But finishing 99th out of a thousand entrants was for me a reasonable aspiration.

A.E. Housman wrote, in part:

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

I might have writ:

The time you slogged the ten k race

Your belly slapped you in your face;

Your thighs they chafed and bled from friction,

You a runner? That's science fiction.

Nevertheless, I worked hard to knock down what for me was fast--six-minute miles or so over the course of a 10K. I joined a less-than-egalitarian track club, I befriended someone who ran track at Princeton and he coached me, and I trained and caffeined and dieted to the point of visible, if not rippling, abdominal muscles.

Racing in Central Park involves handling some pretty serious hills and some pretty sharp turns. The race course was usually marked out with cones and the understanding was that you stay within the cones, lest you cut the course.

I must say, I never really understood course cutting. It wasn't the difference between getting a medal or not, or winning or losing, or winning some prize money. It was, at my strata, the difference between finishing 99th or 101st. If cheating got you your best time, can you in your head really count it when you know you cut-corners to get there? 

Does a personal best mean anything when you did your worst to get it?

Somehow it seems today that cutting corners and getting places purportedly faster is the key motivating force for just about every business and every agency.

It's clear at this near-popping-point of the AI bubble that AI can write even faster than I. It's also clear that the things that make creativity special, interesting, remarkable and original cannot--almost tautologically--be derived by AI.

The turns of a phrase that makes a bit of writing magnificent and memorable cannot be engineered algorithmically. They can only be derived humanly.

"Nobody handles Handel like you handle Handel."                                                                --Preston Sturges

“Once in camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.” ― Ernest Hemingway 

“Any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me." --Eve Babitz

“There is no God and we are his prophets."   --Cormac McCarthy 

“A faithful atheist who died at eighty-five, resolved that he was headed neither for heaven nor hell, and who, when his sneezes elicited a reflexive “God bless you,” replied, “No thank you.” --Sam Roberts

The quotations above were written without AI and couldn't be written by AI. Ever.

AI is Orwellian. 

Meanwhile there are thousands, maybe millions, maybe billions of people and clients proclaiming AI the equal if not the better than humans--and allowing AI to do their writing for them.

The point, to me is clear.

Things that are worth doing take time.

A road race. Some copy. A 71-page deck. Ideas.

You can cheat and have them go faster.

But this is simple.

It's not as good.

AI can't do what people can do.

Only time and work and doing it again can.

Only running every inch of the course.

Or thinking through every exigency.

Most race results though look ok.

Ok enough, I guess, if you squint.

It seems to me it's like my sketch above. 

It's cutting corners.

It's cheating.

It's robbing humanity of humanity to get someplace nominally faster. 

Just like smiling photos throughout linked in proclaiming someone chief creative officer of the year and her agency agency of the year while they've lost 75-85-percent of their revenue, clients, people and market value is cheating.

There's a right way to become agency of the year. It's serving clients. It's doing smart, real, effective work. It's treating people well. 

Or, you can pay for play it.

Most of what you see today is ginned up untruths. 

(And truth is what we're after.)

This is sleight of hand.

And a slight on humanity.

In a word, it's cheating.

--

Somehow, I think what Katy Jurado says to Lloyd Bridges is all that needs to be said.