When designing a process becomes the highest form of creation

For fifteen years I made advertisements worth tens of thousands of euros. Today I design processes, and I consider it the highest form of creativity.

Fifteen years and two ads at eighty thousand euros each

For fifteen years I worked in the CGI industry. I started as an animator. I ended up as a producer of international advertising projects. In my lectures I show two films. Both of those ads in classical post-production would have cost eighty thousand euros each. I made the first one myself. In a few days. When the first generative tools appeared, I knew it was a turning point. Like a painter who saw a camera for the first time.

I need to say one thing honestly. Eighty thousand euros is not profit. That is a budget for a studio, a CGI supervisor, and a producer. Those are the costs of a 3D team and a colorist. That is the legal department, administration, and finance. An entire team of people lives off that sum.

When I realized which way the market was heading, I lost my job. The industry is sinking deeper into crisis. AI took the work I used to do. That was the bad news. But, as it turned out, there was good news too. I came to tell you what I did with that knowledge.

The human brain and the language model

I became fascinated by the correlation between the human brain and language models. I am dyslexic and probably have ADHD. AI filled my deficits in a way I had never had before. At first I was captivated by images generated by AI. Then by the process of their creation itself. And finally by how the model thinks. Today anyone who has the desire to create has the power of a production studio. I started building processes. I started building systems. I started treating the architecture of thought as a creative discipline.

Impression, improvisation, and form

I once took part in the life of the Song of the Goat Theatre in Wrocław. Grzegorz Bral, the theatre's director at the time, described three stages in the creation of a piece. Impression is the feeling, the sensing, and the research. Improvisation is the building of form through intellect and emotion. Form is the goal, the result, the work. That is how you can describe the entire creative process. The model can enter the improvisation stage, because that is precisely where form is built. Impression and form always remain on the human side.

We can plug AI into the improvisational part. Impression is always human. Form is the result of our decisions, arising from improvisation. The model is a tool in the middle of the process. Not at the beginning and not at the end.

What humans have that models do not

Human superpowers are creativity and the generation of ideas. They are intuition, taste, and cultural context. They are the need to create and sensitivity. They are abstract thinking and emotion. They are community and belonging. Culture stems from the collective consciousness of people. It is humans who create culture. AI does not have that.

AI is excellent at data analysis. It points to the most probable answers. With the right tools it can read with comprehension. It executes tasks, as long as it does not hallucinate. It produces many variants around the same task. It never sleeps and is very fast. It does, however, have one flaw that changes everything: it has no need of its own to create. It does not know what it wants. An idea begins with a need. The model does not have that need.

The process is ours, the model sits in the middle

The conclusion for me is simple. Designing the process is ours, human. AI sits in the middle wherever we design it to be. Rigid processes that contain no AI must be thrown out. New ones must be designed, with AI inside and a human in the loop.

The model is interchangeable. A new one comes out every month. Your data and your process are not interchangeable. That is the foundation.

Modular Glitch and the three decisions that decided everything

A week before the lecture I spoke with Łukasz NAWER Habiera, Magdalena Pisera, and Marcin Szczelina. We were thinking about how to connect Tubądzin's Modular Glitch wall ceramics collection with a process in which we would use AI.

Łukasz NAWER Habiera is one of Poland's leading artists. He traveled the road from street art to galleries. He said something I have not forgotten: true form is born where mathematical order is disrupted by a controlled error.

I sat down with the models. In a single afternoon I built a pattern generator. Three decisions determined what that generator does and what it does not do.

The first appeared in the second minute of building. No AR. No augmented reality, no measuring the wall with a phone. All of that was in the concept. It got cut. A process that must work today cannot have everything. AR will return as a next step.

The second: the model spread the patterns evenly across the wall. Evenly sounds safe. The wall was dead. I switched to random, but in clusters. That is how a single entropy slider came to be. Remember what Łukasz said? Order disrupted by a controlled error. That slider is exactly that. That is my taste and my intuition, just written in code.

The third: the model invented a function. It named it nicely. It contributed nothing. It was cut. Half of process design is subtraction.

There is one thing this generator will never do. It will not choose the variant for you. And it will not invent the texture that Łukasz created from his own sensitivity. That is the entire difference between a tool and a creator.

Bartek, the swimming pool, and not knowing how to read music

I recently spoke with a programmer. His name is Bartek, same as mine. A senior, twenty years in the field. He was writing code before it was fashionable. Now he works on game development. He told me something simple: I give the task to the model and go to the swimming pool. I come back, the code is ready. I check it with a second model.

That swimming pool is not a story about laziness. Bartek stopped being the executor of his work. He became the executor of the idea. To go to the swimming pool, you only need to define the need.

That conversation reminded me of something important. I do not know how to read music. That did not stop me from having success in music. I used samplers, computers, and turntables. I built the Modular Glitch generator the same way. I do not know how to code. I have an idea and I bring it to life.

Just a year ago I did not believe I would be sitting at a terminal with genuine passion. Today I design operating systems for organizations of various scales. I treat it as a creative act.

The human is the carrier of ideas

AI does not create ideas. It is a tool for bringing them to life. The human is the carrier of ideas. The model will help point out paths. We must guide the model in a creative way.

The highest form of creation is to design a process. That is the architecture of thought. You will find materials from the lecture on the lecture page.

Process architect, not process executor.