Generative AI Is Amazing…and Boring. Settle Down.

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoYiQ8Qsozk.

I was a little irritated recently when John Gruber quoted Daniel Jalkut on Mastodon, who said “My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it” — and Gruber’s comment was: “I concur with this take completely.”

Well, John, I am “for” AI, but since I started writing about the topic in early 2023, I have been on a mission to temper any notion of collective over-enthusiasm. Perhaps I have been doing too much of this work in person rather than in writing, so back to writing it is. (Regular readers who have noticed my lack of recent writing should know that there is a good reason: for the past ten months, I have been working with a publisher on a book that covers humanity and technology; if the book sees the light of day, you will be able to enjoy a lot more writing like you are about to absorb. Fingers crossed; stay tuned!)

In the first half of 2026, I spent considerable time talking with younger folks about generative AI. As you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, many are unhappy with the prospect of AI eliminating the possibility of a stable career. College students at the most progressive universities are being taught how to fit generative AI into their nascent careers, but to say that these young graduates have mixed feelings is an understatement, as an opinion piece in the New York Times (“It’s No Wonder Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers”) makes painfully clear.

Other young folks who have made the leap into the workforce find themselves embracing generative AI as the next coming. I spoke with one such young man recently, who shared, with great enthusiasm, how his company is using AI for everything from coding to business analysis. It was a lively conversation, and he eventually asked how I was promoting and applying generative AI in our companies. I took a moment to share how I’ve encouraged our employees to play with and learn the available tools to develop fluency with them, and how we’ve identified that AI is best at helping drive rote tasks. I referred to something I’ve found myself repeating since February 2023 after reading Steven Wolfram’s groundbreaking blog post: that generative AI will not — cannot — generate anything truly original.

He stopped me cold and asked: “What do you mean?”

I took a moment to share Generative AI’s mechanics, and it seemed that this was a bit of news to him, yet he challenged me with words something to the effect of “well, for now.”

I’ve heard this retort more than a few times since late 2022, and it always brings me back to my April 2023 essay. When humans put words, sounds, notes, smells, flavors or other concepts together for the first time, it may seem that such things could be emulated by computers via stochastic process. I will admit that it’s trivial to get generative AI to work stochastically, but there is a significant difference between stochasticism and intentionality. When you hear John Lennon sing “Expert texpert choking smokers, don’t you think the joker laughs at you?” in I Am the Walrus, you might wonder why he wrote those lyrics, and what they are supposed to mean. If, though, a machine conjured that phrase, what is there for you to wonder? When we are presented with a product of human imagination for the first time, we are tuned to consider the person or people behind the product more than the product itself. We wonder what led to that moment of inspiration or creation. We might admire or disdain the result. This is what it is to be struck or moved. These are big moments! They inspire us in their own ways, not stochastically, but deliberately. It is in this deliberateness that human beings find purpose and delight.

After pondering this young man’s assertion for an hour or so, I had an epiphany: young people are, simply due to time and exposure, more likely to find generative AI output novel. I suppose that my advancing age was well-reflected in my opening line of ‌ChatGPT Challenges Us to Focus on Better Things: “While I am not exactly mesmerized by ChatGPT…” Now nearly four years later, I am still not mesmerized. I find everything that Generative AI does to be perfectly boring, even when it’s incredibly useful.

But Drew! What about its ability to solve maths like the planar unit distance problem recently covered in Smithsonian magazine? Well, dear reader, math is a form of logic; it is focused on what is valid and what is not. It is a set of well-defined concepts and constraints. Complex math problems are complex in their tedium, and computers are, almost inarguably, humankind’s best antidote to tedium. Creativity in math sometimes involves clever applications of concepts and constraints that can lessen the tedium, but math has no room for the irrational creativity of music and other pursuits. This is why we are supposed to laugh when someone utters the phrase “creative accounting.” When we remember that a computer’s only function is to repeat tasks at speed, we appreciate that even a videogame is a set of repeated tasks (receiving input and drawing output), however breathtaking the result may be. This is why the Smithsonian article rightfully concludes:

While humans’ time is limited, A.I. can tirelessly hammer away at any given problem.…“Certainly, this is an idea that, as far as we can tell, humans did not come up with. This is not an idea that humans couldn’t have come up with,” Sawin tells Gizmodo’s Gayoung Lee. “It’s not that A.I. solved an impossible math problem, but it’s not nothing. It’s somewhere in between.”

This brings me to the thread that ties my life together: music. In Adam Neely’s video, “Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future,” posted February 3, 2026, we watch deep philosophical arguments behind AI-generated music. The video is cinematic in length (an hour and 30 minutes) but it’s well worth watching. Many young people find themselves delighting in AI-generated music because it naturally sounds novel to them. They are satisfied with what is essentially a distillate rather than its distilland, and primarily connect their considerations of intent to the “taste” of the person who operated the AI switches to produce the product. They may or may not consider the indirect human intent within the distilland.

Let’s go back to today’s young people who are troubled by AI. When we are young, our incomplete picture of the world is fertile ground for creative thinking without boundaries. The most memorable work from most great musicians — Mozart to Elton John — is composed in relatively youthful times. The young mind is unshackled. It is filled with half-thoughts and questions. It is filled with hormones and emotions and unsettled things. It strives to be heard. It believes it is different. It is different. It is punk.

Generative AI is the opposite of punk. It is wholly and deliberately unoriginal; it is derivative; and it is merely, boringly, and extremely useful. When you are young and smart, this is disturbing, and it should be, because you know — you even feel — that there is endless need for original thought.

In October 2020, on The Progressive CIO, I wrote a short essay about strategy:

Many blog posts — including my very own — seek to provide inspiration through some length of writing. But some subjects are so overthought that brevity brings greater insight. Strategy is one of those things.

Do you have strategy meetings? If so, does the very idea of them turn your stomach? Why do you suppose that is?

I say: all too often, it’s because people have a hard time differentiating the tactical from the strategic, and the meetings lack focus. Here’s a way to get that focus:

Tactical items are the things you have to do.

Strategic items are the things you choose to do, to make yourself different from your competitors. These items are always, always optional. But they make a difference.

Paying people is tactical.

How you pay people is strategic.

You take it from there.

Genuine strategy is about finding a way to be different. Sometimes, though, the problem is that we don’t have all of our tactics in order. Generative AI assists us with tactics; our opportunity is to spend our newfound quality time on strategy. This is precisely the message of ChatGPT Challenges Us to Focus on Better Things.

People of any age who enthusiastically confuse generative AI with original thought are unwitting tacticians; young people are particularly vulnerable because of their lack of experience, and this is a danger we would do well to address. People of any age who fear generative AI because they value human thought are on to something; they are, perhaps, our most unwitting strategists. Both sides have a point, and both sides are missing a point: there is endless tactical work to be done, and generative AI is well-suited for that. It is imperative for humanity to appreciate generative AI’s lack of magic — to comprehend its utter boringness — and use it for the tool that it is, so that we can spend our time together creating great new things with our hearts and beautifully irrational minds.