The creative process always starts with an idea.

Last year, during a sunny April morning dog walk around the park, I scribbled one of those ideas in my pocket notebook.

I was just starting to grapple with what it meant to be a creator of things in the Age of AI. I was frustrated to hear more people start to argue that there's no difference between art made by a human and art made by a machine as long as it's good, whatever that means.

When we typically talk about creativity we valorize the finished product–the painting, the movie, the essay, or the song. But in a world where AI is capable of generating finished works indistinguishable from human endeavors, people are beginning to question what it means to be creative.

But what rarely gets mentioned is the process itself.

I've spent thousands of hours playing music throughout my life but I'm not famous, I don't have a hit song on the radio, and nobody is pining to collaborate with me.

And let's face it, AI can probably write a better song than I can at this point.

But the process of learning, playing, and making music has had an immense impact on my life. It's taught me the value of practice, that the pain of struggling to learn is always followed by the pleasures of overcoming that challenge, and that making things is often better when you do it with other people.

More than that, it's just plain fun.

I love playing music for the sheer joy of it. I relish developing technical skills, and finding new ways to express what's inside of me through the same notes on the fretboard that all musicians are constrained to.

The finished song is the goal that focuses my attention, but in the end, it is, and always has been, an artifact that remains proving that the creative process happened. If someone else likes it, that's great, but I would've made it anyways.

What I wrote that day in my pocket notebook was an early expression of my personal gripe with how AI enthusiasts were talking about the creative process, captured so I wouldn't forget it:

"The point of painting is not the painting. It's who you become in the process."

If I had used AI to make music for me I never would've learned those values of discipline, mastery, and dedication to craft. I would never have developed the confidence that is earned through the accumulation of hard to acquire skills.

Frankly, I would never have become me because who I am is a direct result of the thousands of hours I've poured into the process.

And I'm not the only one who thinks the process is the real point of creativity. Last year, Brain Sanderson's viral keynote speech made a similar claim.

"Art is the means by which we become what we want to be...The purpose of writing all those books in my earlier years wasn’t to produce something I could sell, it was to turn me into someone who could create great art....Because in the end of it all, you are the art."

The reason I believe notebooks are so important in the Age of AI is because they allow us to be constantly engaged in the creative process rather than focused on making the product as efficiently as possible.

Notebooks are by their nature restricted to process. They can never be the finished product that is viewed, or read, or sold to an audience.

Unlike AI, or an app that promises to take care of the hard parts for you, paper forces you to think for yourself. "Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say," Schopenhauer argues, "writes anything worth writing."

Notebooks are always works in progress, ideas in the making. They are the place where we discover what it is we have to say. It's in making these ideas through observation, contemplation, and exploration that we get to experience the distinctly human joys of creativity.

And if your worried the finished product won't be as good without artificial assistance then Schopenhauer has one more idea for you to contemplate:

"Only he who takes what he writes directly out of his own head is worth reading."

Prompt:

Why do you engage in creative activities and hobbies? How have those pursuits changed you in the process?