From Scrolling to Building: How AI Fuels Both Consumption and Creation
It’s no secret that AI algorithms are carefully curating our Instagram/TikTok/Youtube feeds to maximize our engagement with the platform. The perfect short clip followed by the perfect short clip that keeps us perpetually locked into our smart phone. How has it already been 30 minutes? Can I even remember what I was watching 30 seconds ago?
At this point, most people recognize that doom-scrolling social media is not time well spent; consumption without retention.
My ultimate goal of this article is to shine light on the difference between being a consumer and a creator and how to encourage responsible consumption and limitless creation. While new technologies provide unprecedented potential to build, explore, and create, they also amplify the temptation to consume endless streams of content. I believe that recognizing this paradigm and pledging to create more and consume less will ultimately help empower people to unlock untapped potential.
Become a builder
The creator persona manifests itself in different ways for different people. Whether you’re building a business, recording music, writing poetry, or developing an app — the most important thing you can do is simply get started (I know a cliché, but stay with me).
Never before has the creator been more empowered by technology.
When creating Voyager, I was in constant communication with ChatGPT — How do I incorporate a business in Delaware? How do I open a bank account for my company? Create a business plan? Operating agreement for LLC? Contract structure? …you get it. Questions and answers that would have required days of email communication to lawyers are now effortlessly available.
To prepare for calls with potential clients, I will go for a walk with ChatGPT in my AirPods. I will tell the AI about the context and my goals for the meeting. “Now, I want you to pretend to be the client, and I will introduce Voyager, walk through our offerings, and try to close a deal”. These conversations aren’t just great practice. They also give me valuable opportunities to ask for feedback and advice on my sales process.
In a world where AI is performing more and more entry-level jobs, it’s also empowering the entrepreneur to create their own path.
Build a Personal Brand
I can’t tell you how many times I have come across this advice in my business and entrepreneurship circles. It’s not enough to create; you also need the courage to share what you have built with others.
I strongly believe that in this post-industrial / AI-driven world, personal brands will become increasingly important to career success. To be clear, I am not recommending we all go out and try to become the next MrBeast or TikTok influencer; I simply want to encourage people to find their niche or passion or area of expertise and find the right platform to share with others your experiences, learnings, and creations in this space.
(Anyone reading this may pick up on the fact that this is, in part, what I am trying to do with this article).
You Don’t Need a Business or Brand to Create
There are lots of other ways to become a creator without starting a business. I like to tell the story of my dad’s journey with ChatGPT. I first introduced my dad to the tool about 6 months ago, and like many he started with simple prompts about the weather, then fishing, then planning road trips in the RV. About a month ago my dad calls me:
I’ve been using ChatGPT and I think it could be really useful to help people with dementia. What if we create a document that summarizes a person’s life — who they are, where they have lived, names of family, career, etc.
We feed this document into ChatGPT, and when a person has these moments of frustrating forgetfulness, he or she can simply prompt the tool for quick answers.
And that is exactly what my dad did for a friend. And he continues to iterate on this idea:
Using the computer is difficult for dementia patients, what if we instead used Voice-to-Text? Can we have the tool send proactive messages to remind him of events?
I love this story because it perfectly exemplifies the power of combining the creator mindset and AI technologies to do good — to help others. It captures the journey all of us should embrace when discovering these powerful new technologies; How does this technology work? How can I use it in my life? How can I use it to create something that will help others?
Please Consume Responsibly
On the flip side of creation is consumption. I want to say it straight away that consumption of digital media is not inherently bad. Scrolling Instagram or watching Netflix after a long day to decompress or have a laugh isn’t necessarily evil, but it is important to recognize when these behaviors become impulsive or addictive. One simple trick I do is “hiding” (or at times completely “deleting)” my social media apps from my phone, which creates a bit more friction to launching the apps and gives me back time otherwise mindlessly spent.
It’s also important to note that not all media consumption is created equally. Listening to explorative and educational podcasts like Radiolab or The Rest is History, will provide almost infinitely more return-on-time than watching endless curated sports highlights or learning the lore of Italian Brainrot.
But even a steady diet of Veritasium (a Youtube channel that covers physics and math topics in entertaining ways) or Diary of a CEO can actually hinder a person’s ability to create.
There’s a line in one of my favorite songs by Mt. Joy called Julia:
Addicted to TED talks
Waiting for lift off
But I don’t know it if it’s doing much
People (myself included) often use these educational programs to procrastinate on building. We strive to build something perfect, and we get so lost in the preparation and research phase that we never actually build or share anything.
My final point on being a responsible consumer is to read books. Reading is slowly becoming a lost art, but I firmly stand by that the best stories and the best advice can be found in books. Books are long-form reflections on thoroughly flushed ideas where authors painstakingly curate and create experiences. I think I learned more from reading Phil Knight’s reflections on founding Nike in Shoe Dog, then I have from countless hours listening to podcasts and streaming youtube videos on the topic of entrepreneurialism.
What Does This Mean for Educators?
My call to action for teachers and schools is twofold:
Embrace the creator mentality. Explore and tinker with AI tools and see if you can build something meaningful. Combine your passion for teaching with an expertise in a hobby like cooking or music or climbing or poetry, and create something new. Find a platform that enables you to share your successes and even failures.
Encourage the next generation to be creators and to consume responsibly. Too often, I hear stories of educational systems stifling creativity and promoting conformity. Design projects that not only inspire students to create and build, but also encourage them to share with others. Lastly, begin introducing students to the power of personal brands beyond the stereotypical Youtube or TikTok influencer. Let them explore ways AI can assist in the process.
Wrap Up
When I shared with my wife the idea of writing an article about using ChatGPT to create, we got into a philosophical debate on whether GenAI can actually ever create something new. And how could it? The system is specifically built to be derivative — looking at patterns in data and creating probabilistic predictions.
But I think this misses the point. It’s about the human who is using the tool. It’s about the cleverly written prompts that can help spark learning or inspiration. It’s how we mold raw ideas into wondrous creations that we are excited to share with the world.
