Me, Seth Godin, and AI
I’m kind of fascinated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) these days. When I was a professor, I tended to be an Early Adopter of technology in the classroom. When my colleagues were resisting Wikipedia and Moodle, and when they were devising elaborate conspiracy theories about students plagiarizing large chunks of their papers or using Cliff Notes instead of reading the play or whatever, I was trying to figure out how to make it all work for me, because I saw technology as a way of skipping the tedium of lower-level learning in order to actually have higher-level thinking and conversations. I wasn’t interested in the threats posed by technology, but the possibilities.
Despite being retired, I find myself wondering how I would have incorporated AI into my classroom. Which means I listen to podcasts about AI, read books and articles about AI, and most important I try to use AI in some of my work. You’ve seen this in some of my previous posts, like this one. Today, I had an idea I wanted to try out.
This morning, I was listening to Ezra Klein interview Ethan Mollick, the author of the recent book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI and publisher of One Useful Thing here on Substack. I won’t go into detail about how I got to what you’re about to read (my mind is a mystery, even to me), except to say, first, that Mollick said that Claude.ai was the most “intellectual” of the AI platforms (e.g., ChatGPT or Google’s version), and then he talked about the ability to have the AI assume the “personality” of a specific person during your “conversation.” I also have used Claude to generate summaries of a couple articles, and each morning I get an AI-generated summary of any articles I have saved to Readwise Reader, which allows me to see whether I want to spend the time reading the whole article. Anyway, it was the idea of AI’s imitating writing styles that set my imagination going.
So. Back in the Olde Days of Blogging, some people found my style of writing to be overly…aggressive. (Believe it or not, I’ve mellowed.) So that got me thinking whether I could copy and paste an old Theatre Ideas post from my 2009 Blogspot site into Claude and ask to have it rewritten in the style of Seth Godin! As some of you may know, I’m a fan of Godin, who has written many excellent books, first on marketing but later and more importantly on creating and creation. The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? is a personal favorite. He has a unique style that is positive, encouraging, and metaphoric. So I wondered what a piece of my writing would sound like if it was translated into Godin-ese. What follows are the results.
Here is the 2009 Theatre Ideas original — a post entitled “It’s Not About You”:
I'm a fan of Daniel H. Pink. I think his book A Whole New Mind was inspiring and fascinating, and created a vocabulary that could be used in discussions from education to business to the arts.
Later, I was invited to listen in on a webcast with Pink about his latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, a book done in Manga comic book style that gives six principles for young people trying to find their way in the post-college world of work. As someone who teaches said young people, my curiosity was piqued, so I grabbed a copy when it came into our university library.
It is Rule Number 3 that I'd like to discuss tonight, because it applies to our previous discussion about how to garner legislative support for increased arts funding. But I also would propose that it is a rule, if embraced by the arts community, that would change the face of the arts in significant ways and raise them in the esteem of their fellow citizens. It might even lead to a New Renaissance. Rule #3 is: It's Not About You.
Our hero, Johnny Bunko, is stuck in a boring job he took because he followed his father's advice to major in something secure in college rather than following what he was most passionate about. One night, wallowing in despair as he works an all-nighter, he cracks open a pair of chopsticks which releases a savvy and sarcastic genie named Diana who says she is here to teach him how not to screw up his life. The first two principles -- "There is no plan" and "Focus on strengths, not weaknesses," have led our hero to make a mess of things by arrogantly focusing so much on his own "special genius" that he is about to screw up a big opportunity. Diana bursts on the scene to set him straight. The dialogue in the comic reads as follows:
Diana: It's not about you.
Johnny: But last week you said...
Diana: Read my lips, numb-nuts! It's not about you. It's about your customer, it's about your client. Use your strengths, yes, but remember... You're here to serve -- not to self-actualize...
Johnny: So I don't matter at all?
Diana: Of course you matter, but the most successful people improve their own lives by improving others' lives. They help their customer solve its problem. They give their client something it didn't know it was missing. That's where they focus their energy, talent, and brainpower.
Johnny: Outward, not inward.
Diana: Exactly...So pull your head out of your...ego.
Artists are not admired in our culture. Oh, sure, if you're a celebrity, you get oohed and aahed over, and even allowed to comment on political issues every once in a while if you'll help a politician draw a crowd, but for the most part the average Joe thinks artists are self-absorbed, arrogant con men who try to pass off incomprehensible nonsense as profound works of art. They don't buy the idea, so common in discussions about the nonsensical question "What is art?," that it's art if the artist says its art. They don't know why they should work at a job while artists spend all their time daydreaming and farting around.
Now, you know that that image isn't true, and I know that that image isn't true, but the reason that they don't know is two-fold: 1) they don't know any artists, because artists huddle together in what amounts to spiritually gated communities populated only by other artists, and 2) because whenever artists are asked why public money ought to be used to support art, artists talk only about themselves -- about their self-expression, their oh-so-personal vision, the purity of their integrity. And then they offer a few kumbaya generalities about how the arts are "good for" everybody everywhere and ask for a check. Once they get the check, they use it to create art that thumbs its nose at those who gave the money in the first place. It's a performance that wears thin really quickly, and after about three decades our elected leaders decided, in the 1990s, to stop taking it anymore. We've been trying to recover ever since.
It's not about you. That doesn't mean "You're here to take orders." Rather, it means you are a conduit, a limen like a doorway between the imaginative realm and the concrete realm. Artists are like shamans or mediums who, through long training and painful experience, have learned to open themselves to the ineffable and are able to part the curtain that separates the unseen from the day-to-day.
Over time, life develops through repeated exposure a film that dulls experience. It is like a scrim slowly falls between us and those things in life that we see on a daily basis. Artists raise that scrim, so that we see it once again in all its vividness. That's what Shklovsky meant when he said that art "helps us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony." That is an amazing gift, a wonderful thing to be able to do. But it is something that is done for others. As an artist, you must experience that stones stoniness yourself, but you must also be focused on transferring that experience to others. Otherwise, you become the same as somebody who is on a really cool LSD trip in the middle of a roomful of stone cold sober people; we don't really care about all the revelations you've found in your thumbprint -- unless you figure out a way to communicate it.
For much of art history, artists considered themselves to be craftsmen doing a job; many didn't sign their work. They knew it wasn't about them. Artistically, as Pink writes, they "give their client something it didn't know it was missing." They give a gift. Which brings us back to Lewis Hyde again, and the difference between a gift economy and a transaction economy. One of the many subtitles Hyde seems to have used for different editions of this book is "How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World." The artist is the conduit, the vessel for the creative spirit. The artist is a midwife that brings into existence a new life.
I am a teacher, and one of the hardest things for a teacher to realize is that it's not about me. It's not about my brilliance, it's not about my insight, it's not about my rhetorical skills or my ability to create really scary tests. It's about the student, and what the student learns to care about. Once I learned that lesson, teaching became much, much harder because I had to pay attention to what my students were saying, thinking, observing. I had to interact, not just expound. It's not about me.
If artists could adopt this attitude of humbleness and humility before their art and before their audience; if they could give gifts rather than participate in exchange; if they could allow themselves to be transparent to transcendence, as Joseph Campbell was fond of saying. Well, I suspect that the artist wouldn't be regarded with so much suspicion and disdain, but rather would be embraced by the community.
Everyone loves to receive a gift, and gifts are about the receiver, not the giver.
OK, to be honest, this was not one of my most blazing posts. There were only a few comments, and nobody took offense. It’s possible that others responded on their own blogs, I don’t remember, but it does have a few thorns in there. And while I still for the most part agree with what I wrote then, I’d probably make some changes today. Irrelevant.
Anyway, how might Seth Godin have said something similar? Copy and paste, and here is Claude’s version:
The Doorway Artist
Artists are doorways. Conduits between the real and the imagined. But too often, they get stuck trying to be the door itself.
It's a trap, this idea that art is about self-expression. That it's all about the artist and their own brilliance, their own journey of self-actualization. This inward focus is a dead end.
The great artists know a secret: Art is a gift, not a transaction. It's about giving people what they didn't know they were missing. Making the stone stony again for those stuck behind the scrim of everyday life.
Art connects us to what transcends the day-to-day. But the artist can't get addicted to their own journey, their own revelations. That's someone locked in a private LSD trip, unable to communicate the magic to anyone else.
No, the artist is a doorway, ushering others to insight. Not lecturing, not self-aggrandizing. Just opening up a new perspective, a new feeling.
The artists who choose humility over arrogance, gift over transaction - those are the ones we embrace rather than merely tolerate. Because a gift, freely given, creates a connection far more powerful than any prima donna's monologue.
Become the doorway, not the door itself. That's how you'll transform the world.
When Claude offered this up, I laughed out loud with admiration. Perfect. In fact, I told Claude “LOL. Perfect,” and “he” responded: “Thank you, I'm glad I was able to capture Seth Godin's punchy, metaphorical writing style in summarizing the key points about artists needing to be humble conduits focused on giving gifts to their audience rather than being self-absorbed. His blog posts and books often use concise, provocative language and vivid imagery to make their points in a compelling way.”
What a hoot.
But I couldn’t just stop there, right? I mean, what I’d been wondering was how I’d incorporate AI into a class. So… First, I decided to take the position of a student: how might a student set Claude lose on an essay they have to read in class—say, in the general education course, Humanities 414:The Contemporary World, that I taught for a number of years. At first, I thought it would be fun to have Claude turn Eisenhower’s Farewell Address into Godin’s voice, but then I wanted something more difficult. I chose African-American feminist Audre Lorde’s justly famous “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” I won’t quote the whole essay, but here are a few paragraphs to give you a flavor:
Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.
As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong. Traditionally, in American society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as American as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children's culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.
OK, so you get the idea. It’s reasonably understandable, but not a breeze. If you want to read the whole thing, you can read it here.
I couldn’t wait to see how Claude handled this:
The Norm Myth
There's a myth we're sold from birth - that the ideal human is white, male, straight, and rich. This mythical norm is packaged as the prize, the one with all the privileges and power.
But norms are a trap. They reduce the world to us vs. them. They breed a scarcity mindset, making us fear that embracing differences will leave us with less.
The oppressed are expected to constantly justify their existence to those invested in the myth of supremacy. It's a rigged game that dehumanizes everyone.
The women's movement got duped. White feminists tried to rebrand "sisterhood" while willfully blind to the realities of race, class, and sexuality. They treated the experiences of women of color as too "alien" to comprehend.
This is how the myth perpetuates itself - by dismissing perspectives that shatter its illusion of normality.
Progress doesn't come from ignoring our differences. It starts by re-humanizing what the myth tried to make other.
The old tools will never dismantle the old power structures. You can't cling to the mythic norm and expect transformative change.
Embrace the different experiences, perspectives, and truths that make you uncomfortable. Let them be confrontational catalysts that reset your reality.
This is the path to exposing the norms as mere constructs, built to privilege some and oppress others. When you deny someone's truth, you deny their humanity.
Our shared way forward? To be architects of new norms, steadfastly rehumanizing one another's differences as we go. That's how we replace exhausted myths with ethical, equitable new realities.
At the end of this, Claude wrote: “That's my attempt at rewriting Audre Lorde's powerful essay on difference, oppression, and identity in Seth Godin's metaphor-rich, provocative style. I tried to capture her core themes about rejecting mythical societal "norms," embracing our differences as a strength, and the need to continually unlearn ingrained assumptions and power structures.”
Well done, Claude!
Lorde’s famous sentence, “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” has now been reduced to “The old tools will never dismantle the old power structures” — not nearly as memorable or powerful, but the rest of the essay feels a little more comprehensible. If I were a motivated student, I might want to have Claude offer a summary in a more accessible style (like Godin’s), and afterward read Lorde’s original. Would students do that? I guess the more motivated ones would.
But what if I gave an assignment in which I tell them to have an class reading translated into someone else’s style, and then in class tell me how they differ. What would this accomplish? Well, they might start learning how to recognize the personal style of different authors, and how style affects the effectiveness of an essay. I’d also say that, by having them have to “compare and contrast” the styles, they will have to actually pay extra attention to the ideas themselves. And also, well, it just sort of makes learning sort of fun, doesn’t it? I’d love to see what combinations the students came up with. What does Albert Camus sound like if rewritten by David Sedaris? What if a scene from Hamlet was translated as if it were an episode of Sex in the City?
As far as my own writing, while I have no plans to abandon my own punchy, tart, conversational style, I could see taking a paragraph I’m struggling to make clearer and ask Claude to write it in the style of…George Carlin, or David Brooks, or H. L. Mencken.
Regardless, AI is here, and while we may not like it, we’d better figure out a way to use it to our benefit!