The Art of Creating Tools that Create Art
E4-'The Long-Term Game': Curated Readings To Help You Set Your Legacy
Quick List
‘How Technology Has Changed the Way Authors Write’ by Matthew Kirschenbaum for The New Republic. Read Here.
‘Books and screens’ by Carlo Iacono for Aeon. Read Here.
Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning’ by Charlotte Hu for The Scientific American. Read Here.
‘Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art’ by Ted Chiang for The New Yorker. Read Here.
‘Latent Space as a New Medium’ by Kevin Kelly. Read Here.
Welcome back to ‘The Long-Term Game’, a series on curated readings to help you set your legacy. Today’s edition is all about TOOLS that aid in creating ART.
How we write defines how we write.
I’ll say it again: ‘How’ we write defines how we ‘write’.
Still confused? Okay, here’s another: Does writing with pen or an app influence how we write?
These were some questions that rushed in my head when I was chatting with Jon Steinback, Co-founder of Marker Page, a new writing tool.
After reading the LinkedIn launch post of his product, I DMed him and shared my essays. I was pleased to see him sign up to this newsletter and he even took the time to send very kind note of appreciation of my work.
There are several new writing tools in the market but what made me love in Marker’s website was this:
Most writing tools optimize for output. Marker is designed for the process — the rough drafts, the half-formed thoughts, the work that happens before something is ready to share. It's designed with features that help you transform your thoughts into words (without writing for you).
Exploring this site took me into a vortex of time… about the process of writing from wall paintings to inscriptions in stones, to Egyptian hieroglyphics, to counting systems in the Mesopotamia, to stone tablets in the Roman empires and across Europe, Africa, the Indus Valley, and then the discovery of the printing press, books, the internet, and now to devices from laptops to phones, and voice dictation tools like Wispr Flow!
As a ghostwriter, I spend my hours trudging through LinkedIn and Substack. My feed spills over with ‘how-to style’ articles yapped out loud by writers. They say things like: How to use your diary to write five articles or Best way to write 20 essays in 1 hour!
Some are quite practical. Some are regurgitated verbal vomit.
I was looking to curate something on those lines as I kept asking: ‘Does writing with pen or an app influence how we write?’ or ‘How do we build tools that help our art?’
This collection of essay is a reminder for writers like me and builders like Jon.
Let’s go!
Essay 1: ‘How Technology Has Changed the Way Authors Write’ by Matthew Kirschenbaum for The New Republic. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why
I wrote short stories using MS Word during college. Like a fly dodging rain drops, my fingers clickety-clacked cautiously to avoid the squiggly red lines — the grammar check alert menacing under my words. As an immature writer at that point, the red lines annoyed me and hurt my ego.
I write bad, I’d declare.
My mother, on the other hand, reminded me to speak out loud more often and go to the basics. She’d hand over the ‘Wren & Martin’ grammar textbook — a popular guide among English-medium schools in India. Mamma said: “Speak out loud. Hear how your writing sounds. The more you speak, the better you’d get.”
I recall a David Perell podcast where a guest explained the flawed logic behind MS Word’s grammatical rules: If you paste a Shakespeare quote, there are red lines too. Does this mean Shakespeare wrote with illogical grammar?
This question led me to this essay — our writing tool does influence our writing (at least a little!).
Punchy Quotes To Sip
“Once you really get used to a computer and you get used to entering the information from that keyboard, things happen in your mind, I mean, you change as a writer. You’re able to do things that maybe you never would have thought of doing before,” author Anne Rice
Our writing instruments… are not just conveniences or contrivances for the expression of ideas; they actively shape the limits and expanse of what we have to say. Not only do we write differently with a fountain pen than with a crayon because they each feel different in our hands, we write (and think) different kinds of things.
It would be fascinating to know, for example, whether the dictates of the grammar checkers built into modern word processors have had a measurable impact on literary prose. But we’ll still be left with all the imponderables of hands on keyboards. Writing machines may be complicated, but writing itself is always infinitely more so.
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Essay 2: ‘Books and screens’ by Carlo Iacono for Aeon. Read Here.
Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time
Rayaan Writer’s Why
I hate I spend hours online. But I need to be online to meet new ghostwriting clients.
I love writing on paper. But I wish it magically shifts to Google Doc too so I have a backup.
I hate writing on Google Doc sometimes as the screen hurts my eyes or worse — doom-scrolling could tempt me if I use my phone to write. But I’m glad my phone app secures my writing on cloud.
I battle everyday for attention.
I battle everyday like King Sisyphus hauling the boulder of focus, only to see it roll off down the hill, pushed by the curse of doom-scrolling random reels and AI slop. I try anyway to climb the hill again and again to reach the peak of a flow state.
Carlo, university librarian at Charles Sturt University, in this piece, reminds tech builders like Jon to develop tools that cook up magic of being a human — to help one another with our minds, ethics, and creativity.
Punchy Quotes To Sip
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning…This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think… I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
If the problem is screens inherently, then we need cultural revival, a return to books... But if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints.
The people who cannot sit through novels aren’t broken. They’re adapted to an environment we built. We hand them infinite information and wonder why they drown. We give them tools designed to fracture attention and blame them when their attention fractures. We built a world that profits from distraction and then pathologise the distracted.
Our inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning. The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention… A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
… we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction. The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
Read earlier editions of The ‘Long-Term Game’ below:
Essay 3: ‘Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning’ by Charlotte Hu for The Scientific American. Read Here.
Engaging the fine motor system to produce letters by hand has positive effects on learning and memory
Rayaan Writer’s Why
When I loose my attention when typing on screen, I move to write by hand. So I take a diary, go to another room and scribble plethora of mixed shit — essay ideas, emojis, doodles, maps of my fantasy literary universe, or potential topics to write.
I love how the pen feels: to roll it down in my palm, to flick it between my fingers, to tap it on my head and wonder a million things by using words to desecrate the paper with my kaleidoscopic pattern of thoughts feels so good.
None of what I write can be reprinted elsewhere but this gibberish swamp of nonsense is to lay a foundation to my thoughts. I’ve seen this habit among some of my ghostwriting clients too. They may not be expert writers but they are consistent in journaling about their business. It helps them keep track of how they work.
This essay highlights science of writing by hand. Honestly, it feels magically too.
Punchy Quotes To Sip
When students wrote the words by hand, the sensors picked up widespread connectivity across many brain regions. Typing, however, led to minimal activity, if any, in the same areas. Handwriting activated connection patterns spanning visual regions, regions that receive and process sensory information and the motor cortex. The latter handles body movement and sensorimotor integration, which helps the brain use environmental inputs to inform a person’s next action.
“When you are typing, the same simple movement of your fingers is involved in producing every letter, whereas when you’re writing by hand, you immediately feel that the bodily feeling of producing A is entirely different from producing a B,” van der Meer says. She notes that children who have learned to read and write by tapping on a digital tablet “often have difficulty distinguishing letters that look a lot like each other or that are mirror images of each other, like the b and the d.”
Essay 4: ‘Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art’ by Ted Chiang for The New Yorker. Read Here.
To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.
Rayaan Writer’s Why
The greatness of an art is defined by the patience the artist endured to build it. Think of all the great art that has stood the test of time such as The Odyssey, Shakespeare’s work, or Thirukkural. They’re centuries old and yet they survived. The artistes who made them had minimal tools, yet they have etched their work in history.
As writers and thinkers, the quest for questions is on us to discover the factors that define a great piece of art to thrive for eons — from literature to paintings to music to photography.
Reading history and sociology can be another good North Star to create great art. These are necessary fields that can give us a window to shed light into theories of what makes great art outlast our lives.
I’ve worked with accomplished entrepreneurs as their ghostwriter. They hold themselves accountable with high standards and insanely high patience to produce impeccable work. It’s a blessing to have a job that gives me a seat to sit down, hear about their work-life, and convert that into online writings.
Hearing my clients makes me reiterate to myself the adage ‘work is worship’. Building an art with sincerity and patience eventually leads to its greatness. While the tools to develop art are becoming abundant, the patience to foster it is becoming rare.
The biggest tool at this point of humankind that aids to create a passable art is GenAI.
These tools are often marketed to ease our lives. ‘Optimisation’ and ‘saving time’ are its biggest feature: they promise to deliver your work with a few prompts to ‘save your time’. But there is a hidden cost in using GenAI tools; the ethical implications and the loss of human patience — the key recipe that defines the greatness of an art.
For greatness of an art to thrive, our patience should be divine.
It’s a moral obligation for tool builders like Jon to build products that foster real creativity and enhance human thinking. If it’s the other way around, then we’re screwed and our art will just have a shelf life of a few seconds in someone’s feed.
Punchy Quotes To Sip
When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.
The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.
People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.
any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.
The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.
It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.
The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.
Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Essay 5: ‘Latent Space as a New Medium’ by Kevin Kelly. Read Here.
Rayaan Writer’s Why
Can the ‘space in AI’ define what we write?
I’m referring to latent space. In simple words, latent space within Large Language Models (LLMs) is a massive map of every bit of information.
This essay by Kevin Kelly was a gusto read of awe. The last time I felt this was when I watched Interstellar. I have always admired Kevin’s (founding executive editor of Wired magazine) writings. His iconic ‘1,000 True Fans’ hit me like a truck carrying gifts back in 2019. I have watched out for his hot takes on media and tech trends ever since.
Kevin opines that great ideas are floating in latent space and we should grab them. What does that mean for non-techie folks like myself? I have no idea but I do know that we should write more about it to understand it.
Writing helps you think about things you don’t get.
Tech builders like Jon should keep an eye on latent space. When every Tom, Dick and Harry is launching haphazardly crafted apps using Claude Code, the need for thoughtful, human-centred apps or tech products is a necessity. And the ideas for such tools can be found in the ‘Latent Space’.
One of my ghostwriting clients is an AI thought leader. Thanks to him, I’ve had the privilege to learn the philosophy of AI — the logic and the basic tech behind how AI works, the gizmos running its engine. Time and again, my client has advised me to read long-form essays and papers on the functioning of AI, instead of opting to directly read something like ‘How to do THIS TASK using Claude’.
Prompting is good, but knowing the logical reasoning of why AI behaves offers good contextual tech wisdom. Writers should learn to ask, explore, observe, and read. Tech builders should spend more time developing art building tools that have solid ethical guardrails and features that preserve our humanness when creating an art.
It’s a time of AI-sloppy shit fest indeed.
But why not create more art and tools to be human again?
Punchy Quotes To Sip
A Large Language Model (LLM) is like a small zip file that contains all human knowledge. It takes massive arrays of 100,000 GPU chips working in the cloud, and costing billions of dollars, to compress all of human writing into a small working model that could run on one single GPU chip. Even the biggest frontier models compress down to several hundred gigs, which is small enough it can fit on a card in your palm. In a strange but real way the resulting tiny file contains all the information that is on the internet and in our libraries. This tiny card holds a significant proportion of what humans collectively know. Of all the remarkable aspects of AI, this astounding feat of compression may be the least appreciated. This dense, high order compression of human knowledge — called “latent space” — may also be a new medium itself.
Mining meta patterns — A model trained on millions of cell images, billions of weather sensors, trillions of hours of traffic videos will notice patterns no human has detected… A new science would describe the meta pattern of these patterns. A new job is searching for these kinds of patterns that persist, and have potential, in whatever area they occur. The latent space thus becomes a specimen: something you dissect to extract discoveries.
Parallel worlds — … Image models can already generate entirely plausible video that looks like live action caught with a camera. AI can generate exact reproductions of a street scene at sunset, drawing all the details from its model. The cost barriers for building out parallel worlds will drop so low that world building may become the most common way latent spaces are used. Build me a 3D immersive world like Earth but with one-third gravity. Build me a 3D immersive world of today with one planetary government. Build me a 3D world of the Marvel universe where Thanos is defeated the first time. Build me a world where the ancient Chinese invent science.
Personal latent space — Today it costs half a billion dollars to train a new model. But, all things continuing, crazy as it seems, eventually the cost of creating your own private AI model from scratch will be feasible for an individual. The main reason to do so will mostly be artistic. You would start by curating the training materials — choosing the particularly appropriate books, best journals, selected discussions — needed to prime the model with intelligence. This curation will become an art in itself… The brand would be You+AI; it would derive its distinctiveness from making your own personal latent space. Professional AI pedagogical experts will consult with you to train a latent space producing the most distinctively “you” work.
And that’s all for today!
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