Comment by drakythe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drakythe | Hacker News Reader

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Years and years ago I became friends with someone who has started a series of companies and created at least one game with each of them (Web, mobile, mobile, crypto, web again). While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution. His ideas are great, in my opinion, though perhaps not unique. However, each success or failure, has come down to the execution. A couple of projects ran out of funding (Didn't execute fast enough). One was a flash game around the same time Apple stuck a knife in Flash, bad timing. Another was backed by a major publisher and was largely a success and the company was sold after 2 proven products shipped.

AI "democratizing" creativity is the biggest crock of lies. Everyone has ideas. Even people who aren't typically thought of as "creative". Ask anyone who watched the last season of Game of Thrones if they thought it could be better and I bet most of them will have "ideas" for how to make it better. Hell, the show runners had IDEAS. But the execution of season 8 was awful, and execution is where an "idea guy" becomes someone who created a product/story worth remembering.

LLMs remove the execution process, which is why they are so attractive to everyone who has ever had an idea and why they are abhorrent to nearly everyone who has ever executed on an idea. Lots of people thin execution is just busy work, but execution is also a major component of being creative.

Creativity is a series of small decisions over the course of the entire execution. To write a poem is not to have it fully-formed in your head. You go down and edit and see what turns up and what new interesting ideas come out of that.

I'm very sympathetic to this view, and it would be a nice counter to claims of AI creativity, but I'm not convinced this is the only way creativity can express itself. There are examples of strokes of genius, hence the term.

I suppose you could say such strokes of genius are the outcomes of a lifetime of creative work but that seems different from your example of editing a poem.

Strokes of genius could be considered the "exception that proves the rule".

We are operating deep in the grey area here so I suppose that case could be made. Personally, I see creativity as more of a life long process which can express itself in a multitude of ways including strokes of genius and the daily iterative grind. I don't think any creative act occurs in a vacuum but I also think that there are moments where big things occur.

AI, as it stands, does not have a lifespan over which for creativity to occur.

Oh, this is an excellent way to phrase it. Thank you!

The problem runs deeper: AI doesn't just remove execution, it replaces it with probabilistic averaging. Mastery of execution in film or code consists of thousands of micro-decisions, like light a bit to the left or pause a bit longer. Current diffusion models make these thousands of decisions for you based on what usually looks good. Democratization won't happen when the Make it Beautiful button works, but when we have tools to control these thousands of micro-decisions without needing to learn to draw pixels by hand. Right now we have randomization, not democratization

>While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution.

It's even trickier: execution is irrelevant too (if that means great execution, a polished well executed product). What matters is a works-well-enough for adoption product, plus luck, connections, funding (to continue existing and undercutting), marketing, and things like that.

This is all true. It is amazing to me how many people don't want to acknowledge how much luck or connections play in the success of large brand names.

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