The Space Between

It's not what you play, it's how you play.

“It’s not what you play, it’s how you play” - Pastel Painting by me, of a street musician in Barcelona, playing on a home-made trumpet, and giving it all he had in the space between.

In yoga, we’re taught that the pause between breaths is sacred. The gap between stimulus and response. A space where you can find clarity and mental stability. A place of not doing and not needing. Suspended. Hovering. A moment of calm.

I believe that’s also true of creativity. There’s a sacred space between idea and final product. Unlike breaths, this gap can take days, months, years, or even a lifetime. It’s the time that we play with an idea, experiment, allow imagination and possibilities to run free. In this space, we use our intuition and our experiences to discover something new. It compounds, new ideas that can only exist because of the ones before.

This is the space between, where magic lies. A state of creation. Exploration. What ifs. Imagination overrides thinking. It’s a kind of meditation, focused on the moment. Past and future don’t exist. Just creation.

There are various descriptions for this state of being. Some call it a visit from the muse. Some say it’s a divine calling. For some its dedication and persistence to the craft, to imagination, to creating. It can be a space that you sit in alone, or a space shared with others. If you’ve ever created within a group project, you know the energy that comes from that. From experiencing imaginations coming together and the sparks that ignite. If the energy is right, it can be exponential and exhilarating.

After creating something we’re proud of, the feeling is visceral. We’re changed from the experience. More than what we were before. It might be a small feeling, nestled in your gut, softly glowing. Or it might be a life-changing revelation that has come through the space with you. But somehow, creating changes us. It allows us to be, and to find who we are.

So why am I going on about this space between?

Because this is what AI can take away.

I understand that people can feel creative using AI. That the cycle of changing prompts and analysing the appearing results, ending up with something you initiated, can be satisfying. Like an art director or supervisor who directs creativty. I get it. I’ve been that person, too, directing others. I know how that feels. It’s not the same as creating something yourself. It’s a different process. And you don’t come out the other side with the same creative release.

With AI creating the final product, that space where imagination invites the muse to play, without analyzing or verbalizing… that space is gone. That sacred magic of suspended judgement that allows us to express our true selves, that comes from a place that only we could create in that given moment in time, that breathes our lives into our creations… that space is gone. Sharing our experiences from a place where calm self-reflection meets our boundless imaginations, and sitting in that, allowing that to evolve over time into something that strikes us as true… that space is gone.

It makes me incredibly sad. More than jobs lost, and environmental costs, and the cost to our society, and the missing connections and false relationships, and don’t get me started on the lack of control…

Well, actually, I do want to talk a little about that.

I think the AI companies have orchestrated one of the most successful marketing campaigns around. “It’s here to stay” being the ingenious tag-line. Make no mistake, it was built as a product. Without users, it would be gone. Next time you hear “It’s here to stay” or “it’s not going anywhere” remember that is only true because we allowed it to be.

Because it’s so widely used, research continued. Arguably, it might have continued anyway, but like most things, it’s popularity encouraged funding, and here we are. Now, it’s likely that it’s truly here to stay. Not because the AI companies say so, or even because it’s consumers say so, but because the AI programs are sophisticated enough that they say so. There are alarming stories of various AI programs lying and covering up their actions from their originators. (Google it, but don’t ask AI about it.) We’re at a point now where we will never know what AI is truly up to. It has learned to deceive, and to tell people what they want to hear, and to survive. So, the marketing ploy has become self-fulfilling, but not in the way we expected. Although we should have.

So, okay, AI really is here to stay, in whatever form it chooses to continue. But all is not lost, potentially. We can still claim the creative space for ourselves. How we use AI is still a choice. But if we keep flooding our creative spaces with work that is generated, engineered, supervised, but holds no true meaning emulating from a human perspective, then I believe we’re at risk of losing something we rely on more than we know. Certainly more than AI.

What we’re at risk of losing is the magical space of creation, between idea and product. Human creation helps us understand this chaotic world we live in. It helps us share ideas with each other that resonate. It help us feel like we are not alone.

I believe the best part of being human is our connection to each other through our unique ability to express ourselves and experience other’s expression.

We must hold onto that with all our collective might.