Conclusion

Making After AGI was one of the biggest risks I’ve ever taken. My academic credibility suffered while pursuing this research, as I employed a method many academics considered unsophisticated and unconventional. I also risked my artistic credibility by embracing AI into my creative process. AI is viewed harshly by the arts community as a cheap alternative to human labor, typically deemed unethical and unjust. If I had known the stress I would endure to finish this project, I would never have embarked on this naive pursuit.

AI turned out to be useless in many ways. The final work relied mainly on me: every line, every component, every instrument was chosen by me. I had to produce new material without end. Every day I had to reengage with an emotional subject, write it, perform it, and edit it. Frankly, the fear of embarrassment was the most effective motivator I had; that, and a genuine fear for our future.

P12: AI Emotional Support isn't Strange

My last principle is that AI Emotional Support isn’t strange. Making art is an emotional rollercoaster. Some days you can feel what you are making is fantastic. Other days you can’t stand watching or listening to anything you’ve created. This fluctuation is normal. At least normal for me.

I’m not saying you should rely on AI for emotional help in managing these fluctuations. I find that having other non-artistic projects or engagements is the most helpful way to ground yourself during a creative process. Being involved in activities outside your creative projects places them within the larger picture of your life and artistic journey. No single work defines your skill or determines your success as a creative person. The important thing is you are actually making work, because it is not easy! Many people give up their creative passions; please don’t become one of them.

AI’s gentle encouragement during your creative process can be practically useful. The most important thing is to keep going, at whatever pace is right for you. Gentle nudges and alignment checks can help you avoid spiraling out of control. Simple statements like Claude's greeting messages, “Treyden’s back at it again,” would give a subtle emotional boost when I knew I was locking in for another nightly work session.

I never spoke with AI directly about feeling discouraged or anxious. I would walk through detailed plans with AI whenever I got overwhelmed by deadlines to gain clarity amid the uncertainty about whether I would succeed. During these emotional moments, coming back to the practical to-dos was usually enough to get me back on track. But I do want to encourage a less judgmental look at leaning on AI for gentle emotional support.

If I felt less social stigma for speaking with AI about my stress related to this project, I might have explored using it more in these situations. I don't endorse using it as your therapist, and I don't think I'd have related to it that way. For serious emotional difficulty, the answer is a person, a friend, a professional, someone who can actually be with you. But for the ordinary anxiety of a deadline, or the spiral that comes at 3 am when a project feels unfinishable, these are intelligent tools, and there's no reason to be ashamed of using them that way. Using this intelligence to aid my shortcomings when getting caught in the stresses of work would have been useful. It's impossible to ignore that your emotions are a key element to take care of when in a creative process. And if you don’t have someone to help walk you through your concerns, AI can be useful if used safely.

Being reminded of your checkpoints, your progress, and your end goals can help you see that your circumstances are less dire than they feel. If deadlines need to be broken or deliverables need to be adjusted, speaking with AI can help you find a solution to your concerns. Again, the most important thing in a creative project is to keep going. Using AI to help you adjust the way you think about urgent external pressures and expectations can keep you aligned with the mission of finishing your work. Just please! Keep going until you're finished!

So did AI augment my creativity?

If I had allowed AI to write the script and given it more control over the direction of After AGI: The Techno-Apocalypse Musical, it might be even better than the version you can watch now. We can’t really know. But in actuality, I wasn’t interested in the product being better; I was interested in how AI would augment my skills, not replace them. Making this commercially successful or great in others' eyes was not my main goal. Of course this would have been wonderful! But part of me just wanted to know if I could do it. Another part of me just wanted to see what a techno-apocalypse musical would look like. Another just wanted to understand whether AI would be helpful along the way.

Since the technical expertise required to create has fallen, the importance of curation, deciding what is good and what to make, has become primary. I don't buy that craft no longer matters, but it is certainly evolving. The distinction between how an algorithm generates work and how a human does can be thin, depending on how it's argued. And yet: scrolling past a piece of AI slop or a tech demo is distinctly different from experiencing real artwork.

In augmenting creativity, my focus wasn’t on realizing fancy products. The goal I set out to understand is how it strengthens my abilities but also deepens my reasoning behind creation: my personal growth, vulnerable human expression, and a personal pursuit of existential beauty. Regurgitating variations of past artworks misses the potential this new technology affords us. Sure, you can use AI to generate hundreds of new songs that sound like Louis Armstrong. He’s one of my favorites, so I am not totally opposed. But I hope I've demonstrated the aim can be so much higher.

Making After AGI has been a life-changing experience. The risk had its rewards. Through this process, I’ve used AI to learn to make music. My growth in this domain has only just begun, but I am inexpressibly grateful to have this ability in my life. I’ve also built an entire digital world around the musical; a scale I couldn't have reached alone. And more fundamentally, if it wasn’t for AI, I don't know if I would have believed in my ability to create this ambitious project. In a real way, it gave me the confidence I could do anything. And regardless of whether it directly impacted my ability to make this work, that alone was the biggest augmentation I needed.

Are you a Future Creative?

The age of specialists is over! I don't intend to be hyperbolic. But AI is not only encouraging transdisciplinary work; it is an antidisciplinary tool [cite]. We are already in an age of abundance when it comes to tools available to help you realize your ideas. There is only more to come. Creating a game, film, building, app, or even a company is now within the reach of a single person or a small team. A truly unimagined potential awaits us. Currently, this has resulted in an abundance of content for all of us to sift through without a clear improvement in quality or form. But by building a co-creative practice, you will realize that this technology allows you to become a new type of creative person. And what we can build has entirely changed.

Learn a new skill. As I said in Become an Expert in Cross-Skilling and Agent Management, the age of specialization is ending, and you will need to diversify. This won't be easy. Begin by learning the tools of the craft, as in Learn the Tools of the Craft, and at some point, I promise, you'll be able to build a personalized tool for that domain yourself. When working with AI, try Treating Yourself Like a Generative Algorithm. Explore vastly. Set ambitious goals that would seem impossible without AI's help. But along the way, maintain your authorship. Don't let working with agents degrade what you hold as your standard of excellence.

I met with my advisors on this project only a handful of times. In contrast, I spoke with AI nearly every day. This is the future from now on. I suspect most of us will end up speaking with an LLM more than with any single person due to its pervasiveness, efficiency, and abundance. I'm not sure yet whether we can call this a completely bad thing. But we know we need stricter limits and rules to guide our workflow when interacting with AI, including limiting engagement for environmental purposes. When using AI consistently in your creative work, be intentional with principles and guidelines for your practice. This will give you confidence and help you clarify your stance on the ethics of your work. They will also help you become an intelligent user and keep up with the rapid pace of technological advancement over the coming years.

But don't forget to engage with people! If you're on the fringe and don't believe people need to understand your work, more power to you. But remember to bring people into your practice. Collaborators who are friends or family will shape your voice in ways AI can't. Having people's support for your practice adds a necessary element of self-care. Even if you are just creating work for yourself, care for yourself as you create. AI can be useful in this process, as mentioned in AI Emotional Support isn’t strange because you want to maintain your creativity for the rest of your life.

Ideally, this Human-AI Co-Creative Framework helps you evolve with our rapidly changing environment. When developing your own co-creative practice, use the 13 Co-Creativity Principles when they resonate with you. Ignore them when they irritate you. Make new principles if they call to you. If you have any suggestions for new principles based on your experience with AI, please share them at book.afteragi.io/principles.

Also, try making a Co-Creative Loops map for each of your projects to more intentionally decide how much you want to use AI across the generation, feedback, and iteration phases of your work. This should help clarify the many roles you are actually taking on in a transdisciplinary capacity and the new skills you will need to acquire. Try building your Map and exporting it as a PNG at book.afteragi.io/maps.

Help Safeguard our Future.

Jobs in the creative workforce are already changing due to the pervasiveness of AI tools and the massive financial investments we have put in them. This shift may seem scary. We are moving into an unknown future. Your job requirements might become less technical and more visionary. Few in the future will be writing each line of code. In parallel, what gets called "AI slop" — clips, images, music — is flooding our digital feeds. The use cases for these tools to augment creativity are widely varied: positive and negative. After AGI is intended to put my co-creative process under a microscope to make clear the blurred line between human and machine authorship when attempting to augment creativity rather than replace it.

The future I want is one where creative people from any background can use these tools to make professional-level work with a deep sense of meaning. Right now that isn't the situation. As I described in Chapter 03, running multiple agents over a month can cost thousands of dollars, which means capability is gated by budget, and a large share of people are simply priced out. My principles don't address that, and I don't think a framework can. What it needs is pressure on pricing, on open weights, and on public access. Artists need to get proper credit and compensation for the work these models were built on. That's an ongoing fight.

Regardless of whether you want to work with AI, it will be embedded in the world around you. Try to avoid it. Break it. Scream at it. Or fall in love with it. Whatever you choose, talk to other people about why. I spent a year finding out what I believed by making this musical, and I have more questions than answers. That's not a failure of the method; it's our condition. There isn't one right thing to do here, which is why we all need the courage to fight over what is right, together.