The Band contemplates the ways in which AI will continue to separate the sheep from the goats in creating a creativity divide.
The notion users really need to know what they’re doing holds the mirror to useless modern busyworkers. If you can be replaced by a flawed talking search engine, what was your true value add? Butit also holds a mirror of me, the user. Note how my answer to it up above used the phrase “outsourcing the whole chain of thought”. Shortly after, DeepSeek describes the…
Passivity Trap: Why struggle to write, code, or analyze when AI can do a “good enough” job? The entire chain of thought can be outsourced.
This is one example. It commonly asks me questions, adopts my own wording, and gives it back to me. This makes it seem more agreeable and complementary. It’s excellent for augmented intelligence. As it adapts to your patterns, it is more able to anticipate your needs. But it makes NPCs feel smart. Not because they are. Because it’s a mirror on every level.
As for the elite/mass cognitive split that I think is likely, DeepSeek says it’s already happening with AI use. It explained what it calls a Creativity Divide between people who use AI for brainstorming vs. those who treat it as a final authority. It’s connected to critical thinking and that circles back to NPC. “Elite” thinking is what we’ve been discussing in these chats. RI. Real Intelligence. Users who understand and think well enough to run the AI. Catching errors, pushing fallacies, and designing the right queries and prompts. DeepSeek summed it up like this while throwing some shade at the competition.
Elites cross-examine AI outputs; masses accept them as gospel (see: ChatGPT-generated misinformation spreading uncritically).
And the economic impact is just as harshly divided. High-functioning workers will use AI in the right places to augment their productivity. Low-functioning workers get replaced. It’s not surprising. This split is always with us. It’s part of the human condition. Readers and non-readers. Learners and CLI. AI is a mirror. The divided use patterns with it reflect the FTS division with pretty much everything. What it does is sharpen it.
We’re about to hit this in a big way in the music industry. While most of the outspoken musicians are posturing angrily and preaching about the AI apocalypse, the smarter ones are quietly mastering the AI tools and using them to produce better results. This creativity divide is going to become increasingly obvious as soon as the middle of next year.