Solopreneurship in the age of AI will redefine how creators work and allocate resources

"ChatGPT is the colleague I never had. The psychological benefits outweigh the intellectual ones. I know my field. I don't need "answers." I need constant and immediate feedback and suggestions."

I've been thinking about that a lot recently: how the notion of a "dedicated project team" is redefining in real-time. To address the quote above: I definitely suck at my field*, but now I've got the power tools to make me much better at it - and without any need to spend my resources on colleagues who will fill my gaps in knowledge.

For the first time in my sort-of professional life, it became possible to substitute 99% of a production team with a set of AI tools at your disposal. I spent years depending on other people or a certain kind of work and would have never believed anyone who would have told me that someday working alone can be entirely possible and easygoing. That's a game-changer for creators and artists: you can have your prototype or an MVP ready in hours.

Consider this. Art has always been an area where it's been ever challenging to persuade potential team members to join, or you're always short on resources because of the economic uncertainty of the results. Anyone who has ever tried to produce, let's say, an art installation or a choreographic performance will recognize the pain of answering the question, "how can we convince *put-here-an-amazing-creative-professional* to join us with our few cents that have left?" Experiencing ChatGPT broke me: the workflow and resource allocation for solo creators or for small teams is about to change drastically.

Of course, I'm not talking about replacing the army of highly proficient full-time professionals in multilayered market-ready products with ChatGPT. Yet.

It's visible on a small scale, though. We plan to launch Bilita (finally) in the next few weeks. The speedrun production of the last month has been accelerated by AI tools to create a content plan and execute it, fix our website, prepare visuals for various socials, write thousands of story texts, etc. All this I did by myself. I've finally been able to work faster and better, which has allowed me to get ahead on a dusty stack of side projects as well. 

I'm fully aware of how early we still are. Still, it blows my mind every time I imagine how AI will soon be used in other creative fields, not just primarily in text-based domains.

So okay, AI is a cost-effective solution that drives down costs and enables small teams to take on more considerable challenges. Even with the current iteration of ChatGPT, we have one of the most powerful tools available for streamlining workflows. But I keep asking myself, "will it make us even more alone"? As AI accelerates, we will see its potential to replace every team member, where AI takes on the grunt work while allowing you to focus on higher-level things. So will you even need anyone else at all?

In the recent post "For Polarization," Marc Andreessen builds on this quote by Christopher Hitchens:

"…only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity. Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich."

The foundational aspect of any art form is to always be wrong. Picasso once said that his art Is "a sum of destructions". To create something sublime and eternal, there's got to be a dialog of ideas in contradiction to each other. Every artist needs a person or a passionate group to guide them through the valley of uncertainty. Art - music, cinema, software, etc. - cannot exist without everlasting contradictions within and subsequent search for the steady ground to build your ideas on.

The possibilities for LLMs are endless, and with their limitless potential, the upcoming GPT-4 will revolutionise how we create and work. Of course, we will drown in content by then, and the quality curation will be challenging. But the works that produce artistic clarity through the contradiction of ideas will stand out as the most valuable and profound creations. And while ChatGPT accelerates for clarity and speed, humans will always stay fragile and unsure, searching for someone who can actually contradict you.

* I still consider myself somewhere on a spectre between art and technology – an amateur on both sides.

Solopreneurship in the age of AI will redefine how creators work and allocate resources

"ChatGPT is the colleague I never had. The psychological benefits outweigh the intellectual ones. I know my field. I don't need "answers." I need constant and immediate feedback and suggestions."

I've been thinking about that a lot recently: how the notion of a "dedicated project team" is redefining in real-time. To address the quote above: I definitely suck at my field*, but now I've got the power tools to make me much better at it - and without any need to spend my resources on colleagues who will fill my gaps in knowledge.

For the first time in my sort-of professional life, it became possible to substitute 99% of a production team with a set of AI tools at your disposal. I spent years depending on other people or a certain kind of work and would have never believed anyone who would have told me that someday working alone can be entirely possible and easygoing. That's a game-changer for creators and artists: you can have your prototype or an MVP ready in hours.

Consider this. Art has always been an area where it's been ever challenging to persuade potential team members to join, or you're always short on resources because of the economic uncertainty of the results. Anyone who has ever tried to produce, let's say, an art installation or a choreographic performance will recognize the pain of answering the question, "how can we convince *put-here-an-amazing-creative-professional* to join us with our few cents that have left?" Experiencing ChatGPT broke me: the workflow and resource allocation for solo creators or for small teams is about to change drastically.

Of course, I'm not talking about replacing the army of highly proficient full-time professionals in multilayered market-ready products with ChatGPT. Yet.

It's visible on a small scale, though. We plan to launch Bilita (finally) in the next few weeks. The speedrun production of the last month has been accelerated by AI tools to create a content plan and execute it, fix our website, prepare visuals for various socials, write thousands of story texts, etc. All this I did by myself. I've finally been able to work faster and better, which has allowed me to get ahead on a dusty stack of side projects as well. 

I'm fully aware of how early we still are. Still, it blows my mind every time I imagine how AI will soon be used in other creative fields, not just primarily in text-based domains.

So okay, AI is a cost-effective solution that drives down costs and enables small teams to take on more considerable challenges. Even with the current iteration of ChatGPT, we have one of the most powerful tools available for streamlining workflows. But I keep asking myself, "will it make us even more alone"? As AI accelerates, we will see its potential to replace every team member, where AI takes on the grunt work while allowing you to focus on higher-level things. So will you even need anyone else at all?

In the recent post "For Polarization," Marc Andreessen builds on this quote by Christopher Hitchens:

"…only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity. Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich."

The foundational aspect of any art form is to always be wrong. Picasso once said that his art Is "a sum of destructions". To create something sublime and eternal, there's got to be a dialog of ideas in contradiction to each other. Every artist needs a person or a passionate group to guide them through the valley of uncertainty. Art - music, cinema, software, etc. - cannot exist without everlasting contradictions within and subsequent search for the steady ground to build your ideas on.

The possibilities for LLMs are endless, and with their limitless potential, the upcoming GPT-4 will revolutionise how we create and work. Of course, we will drown in content by then, and the quality curation will be challenging. But the works that produce artistic clarity through the contradiction of ideas will stand out as the most valuable and profound creations. And while ChatGPT accelerates for clarity and speed, humans will always stay fragile and unsure, searching for someone who can actually contradict you.

* I still consider myself somewhere on a spectre between art and technology – an amateur on both sides.