Lately I’ve been thinking about creativity, the self, and sentience. Part of that comes from some great late-night talks with friends. Part of it comes from my work with LLMs. The overlap is getting harder to ignore.

What’s striking is how often people respond like language models. Predictably. Patterned. Sometimes even parroting phrases that have no basis in fact. It’s clearest in podcast intros, like when someone introduces a podcast guest or topic and says things that just sound right but aren’t grounded in anything real.

It has me asking: are our brains just the substrate that culture runs on?

I don’t say that in a cynical way. I find it kind of funny. Most of us, myself included, lean on language templates to save mental effort. In the age of social media we’re trained by what we consume. Like LLMs, we remix what we’ve been exposed to. The problem is, we stop short of truth.

And that’s the key. Creativity isn’t about novelty. It’s about effort. The willingness to seek truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable or inconvenient. Especially when emotional truth and empirical truth collide.

What helps me transcend this is play. Humor. Letting myself get it wrong. Not taking myself too seriously. And staying alert to how culture and platforms are trying to shape what I say and how I think.

Working with LLMs hasn’t made me fear AI. It’s made me more aware of how much we already act like it. The difference is, we still get to choose if we want to put in the effort.

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