The Artisan's Dilemma

Reclaiming and Retaining Agency in the Age of AI

In the 1040s, the first movable type was invented, supposedly by the blacksmith and alchemist Bi Sheng…..This climate of innovation did not stop scholars from despairing that the printing press was the end of culture. Some worried that the quality of books and of scholarship would decline. Zhu Xi (1130–1200), the great philosopher of neo-Confucianism, worried that with cheap printed books people would read inattentively and stop learning texts by heart.

Norberg, Johan. Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages (pp. 195-196).

Since the earliest times, those who see themselves as the guardians of culture have seen technology as a threat, particularly when it threatens their control of the world inside their walls.

Our ambivalent relationship with AI is no different. It is creating opportunities that will undermine many aspects of traditional professions and skills, from accountancy to coding. Artisans are not immune:

When AI companies name their products "Artisan AI" and promise to replace human craft with "autonomous AI employees," something unsettling is happening. When we can now create digital doppelgangers - AI avatars that look like us, sound like us, and even mimic our creative style, we have to get to the core of being an artisan. The very word "artisan" is being appropriated not just by algorithms, but by our own digital twins.

In traditional folklore, seeing your doppelganger was considered an extremely bad omen - often a harbinger of death, illness, or misfortune. The doppelganger was believed to be a supernatural entity that appeared identical to someone but lacked a soul or reflection.

Sounds rather like the fears we have about what AI will do to jobs.

Until we get to Agency.

Abstract noun from Latin agentem (nominative agens) "effective, powerful," present participle of agere "to set in motion, drive forward; to do, perform. Etymyonline

We have an “agency paradox”; as AI becomes more agentic, there is a danger we become less so. The attraction to large companies of AI is compelling, and the ability to create efficient interactions is improving all the time - but those interactions have no soul. They are sequences of words with nothing connecting them - no pauses, no “ums”, no hesitations or laughter.

It’s as though those creating the systems have never encountered a customer other than as a data set. It makes everything transactional, with none of the chemistry that happens between humans. It would be refreshing if an AI threw a hissy fit…..

And as the soul is sucked out, so is creativity and spontaneity. Interactions are sterile, with nothing nurtitious in which serendipity or insight might sprout. I came across an interesting piece in Nature, showing that people were most creative when writing a poem on their own, compared to first receiving a poem generated by an AI system and using sophisticated tools to edit it.

I think AI has enormous “priming power” for busy people. It enables them to produce acceptable mediocrity quickly, compared to the slower, more authentic work of creating originality. Perhaps, as a large company, operating at scale, performing at a slightly higher level of mediocrity is profitable for a while. It doesn’t though, work for us if we are commited to the work we do.

We’re seeing it in recruitment - people are increasingly recruited to bounded projects, not to a company. Salaries are lowered, and performance bonuses are increased making for a very temporary, transactional relationship. There is no commitment, and little notion of purpose beyond the project.

It raises interesting questions:

• How do we distinguish between AI systems that enhance human agency and those that create autonomous "Artisan AI" that entirely replace human creativity?

• Traditional craftsmanship relies on encouraging artisans to continue to produce craft and to pass their skills and knowledge onto others, particularly within their own communities. How does AI disruption affect this knowledge transfer?

• Does what goes for craft, increasingly apply to the professions?

• Who owns the work created by your digital twin?

• Can your doppelganger preserve craft knowledge, or does it commoditise it?

• When knowledge is ubiquitous, what is our role as humans?

The most cutting-edge challenge facing creative professionals becomes not just competing with AI, but maintaining identity and agency when AI can literally become them.

When everything we have written, sung, made and discovered is reduced to data and made available to anybody with the tools, or increasingly the tools themselves, the basic work contract goes up in smoke.

The gap between us and our avatars resides in what we think, imagine, see and sense but have yet to articulate. Because that is where progress comes from.

Our strengths lie in recognising the inherent weakness of doppelgangers.

• They do not grow with us, they replicate us at a point in time. Our defence is to grow.

• They cannot exist independently.

• They are morally empty - they have no soul.

Perhaps, though, most of all, they cannot handle true uncertainty. They rely on precedent. They cannot improvise or respond to radical uncertainty, defined by encounters with the unknowable.

Doppelgangers fail when knowledge runs out. We do not.

As organisations in search of efficiency recruit doppelgangers, using doppelgangers, who work for other doppelgangers, they are relying on capitalising what they already know how to do.

They are not using the edge to grow the middle; they are getting the middle to feed on itself.

Growth, true growth, is messy, unpredictable and surprising, just like humans.

As artisans, whatever our field, agency is what makes us different. We need to recognise, value and develop it, cede to AI what it does well, and move beyond it, where it cannot, for now at least, follow.

Every Wednesday, a group of us gather on Zoom to consider the questions we face, and help each other tread our own paths. If you would like to join us, drop me a line.