Finding a creative flow making things

Overcoming doubt, building chat AI’s to support myself, tutorials, and zines

Here’s a recap of things I’ve made recently and musings on them. I’m excited to share what I’ve been up to, and interested in starting conversations, hearing ideas, and finding opportunities related to what I’m working on. If you know folks who would be into this, I’d love it if you share this with them!

TLDR for this post;

• Learning new things and building is hard. Weekly informal check-ins brought the structure and motivation I needed.

• I’ve been making conversational AI’s to support wellness and internalizing healthier ways of thinking. After learning a new exercise, I use the chat AI to help put it to practice.

• I share a couple tutorials on tuning pre-trained AI models, and on building your own GPT-3 AI chat.

How might I get support on a project, right when I need it?

Overcoming doubts and getting back into making

I spent the last few months getting back into programming. To get an idea for how long it’d been when I last programmed, js was all var instead of const and let. I was inspired back in November at Hacking Models, a hackathon in the generative AI space where I put together a talk to help inspire ideas. Seeing the hacks was inspiring, and afterwards I wanted to build up the skills to quickly prototype again. The next several months I’ll be building out ideas, and then picking one and running with it.

It’s easy to forget that learning is tough. Questions of doubt come to mind. Should I be learning this? Am I wasting my time? So many distractions too. At the least bit of discomfort, I’m so willing to be distracted. And then what do I make? Going from tutorials to actually making a unique thing was a leap. Here’s what I found worked. I picked something small to make. It doesn’t have to be mind-blowing amazing. It doesn’t have to reflect my creativity. Once I make that small thing, other ideas come up of things to make. When I make those, that opens up other possibilities too. I love the flow in the making → ideas → making feedback loop. The most important part is to get that first small thing out the door. When I can’t figure out what to do next, I trust that making something small will open up new ideas.

For me the key to overcoming the challenge of learning, distractions, and shipping, was an accountability buddy. We have weekly informal weekly 1-1’s, and it’s been remarkable seeing how much discipline, structure, and motivation it’s inspired. Recurse center has weekly show and tells, and now I understand how these kinds of rituals can be so effective to build momentum.

Reflecting on what I’m making, and what I’m curious of — jumping off of tools for thought, I’ve been thinking of tools for wonder. How might I make things that are intuitive, and welcoming, that inspire creativity, new ideas, and expressiveness? How might these tools expand how we think?

From my zine on uncertainty. Here’s one way to overcome it.

Things I made

Build something small, and leverage something big.

I tuned an AI model for classifying images to recognize if doors are open or closed given an image. Yes, it’s totally random, but I wanted to just start with something and get moving. While updating the model with data cleaning, I found myself questioning what it means for a door to be open or closed. Like what if it’s open just a crack? The highlight of this project was seeing they way powerful pre-trained AI models could be leveraged for specific applications through fine-tuning, and it doesn’t require a ton of computing or data. Read more and see my apps in "Build powerful applications with limited resources using the magic of transfer learning.”

Programming bots to help myself.

Over the past few weeks I kept feeling a friction getting started with projects and keeping then going. Like getting started with the next fastai lesson. Or writing a blog post. Or jumping into colab to test out ideas. I made Creative Coach AI to help me with this. It’s built using GPT-3. If you’re curious how it’s made, I wrote up a tutorial on making custom GPT-3 chat apps, “Get started building with Generative AI: Step by step guide making a GPT-3 AI chat.”

I haven’t shared Creative Coach AI publicly since the costs of the OpenAI API can add up. Instead, I’ve shared the app with a few friends to get feedback, and in general thinking of how to approach pricing for these projects. Usually I think of new projects that would be innovative, useful, creative, or expressive and just share it broadly. Now I’m interested in introducing this aspect of products to sell, and then in turn support myself.

I like the idea of creating custom bots to assist me in wellness and growth practices. Often there’s some pattern of thinking I’d be interested in changing with cognitive reframing. For instance, I noticed myself feeling doubt and anxiety around trying new things. Things that I knew I’d enjoy. An effective way to work through this is to take a moment and imagine the best case scenario, and that gets me excited. Internalizing a new thought pattern involves putting this insight to practice over and over, and this is where the conversational AI can help. I observe the process in reframing, and create the AI to replicate that as best as I can. The conversational AI helps support the practice and behavior change. Often what it shares is intuitive, but a small reminder in the context when it’s needed is powerful.

Other ideas I’m thinking about are a journal buddy, and interactive meditation support. In a way, I’m kind of programming bots to program myself.

A conversation with the creative coach AI

Zines are everything

I thew an event in DC where we got together to draw and make zines and at the end we presented our new zines to each other. It was really sweet and I’m going to do it once a month. Read the zine I made on navigating uncertainty. Finding and supporting creative community is one of the most important things for me to feel a sense of place.

What’s next

• For generative AI things, I’m building more conversational AI bots around wellness. Recently, I started playing with image generation, specifically look into stable diffusion with drawing inputs. What kinds of interfaces could be interesting? Here’s some early explorations, and you can follow along over the next month on twitter.

• Since I’ve been researching and writing more, I’m rethinking how I do these things more effectively, specifically updating the tools I use for bookmarking and taking notes.

• Inquiry: How might I get more comfortable thinking about $$ and building that muscle for business? How might I include this in my creative process? I had to get in this space when I started selling my book. It was pretty uncomfortable! So along those lines, thinking of making creative things I could sell.

Thanks for reading! You can follow what I’m up to by subscribing here. If you know anyone that would find it interesting, I’d really appreciate it if you forward it to them! And if you’d like to jam more on any of this, I’d love to chat here or on twitter.