randomness as context

my ideas come from connecting the problems i'm working on with random tokens from the real world.

i was on the bus the other day and saw this older lady totally lost in bubble shooter on her phone. something about the way she was flicking those bubbles made me think about a slingshot interaction for this app i'm building. then later, in the shower (where all the good thinking happens, right?), i remembered how my dad used to cut out & collect newspaper articles for me. there was this one about Madras Music Academy. he saved because he knew i loved them. suddenly i'm thinking maybe the user highlights in my app could look like newspaper clippings? worn edges and all.

it got me wondering about AI and creativity though. like, an AI has this massive memory, but it doesn't have a dad who saved concert review or the experience of watching someone play a game on a crowded bus.

to quote Good Will Hunting:

"If I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written... but I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel."

but maybe it doesn't matter? ai has consumed so many human stories. somewhere in that massive training data, someone definitely wrote about cutting up newspapers after hearing that bald singer with the blue face paint. someone blogged about subway surfer games. all our weird little life moments are in there somewhere.

the problem is we don't ask it to use those random connections. we only prompt with the "professional business stuff" and miss out on life's beautiful chaos... which is where the good ideas hide. it's so good at finding the best answer in a dataset, but can it ever have that random "oh shit" moment that comes from living a messy human life? from having weird experiences that shouldn't connect but somehow do?

computers struggling with randomness isn't new. cloudflare takes photos of lava lamps to generate truly random numbers. so what's ai's lava lamp? how do we get it to make those weird connections that feel truly creative instead of just predictable?

maybe in 2025 we shouldn't just be asking AI to do our work. maybe we need to stop asking it to be so efficient all the time. maybe we should be asking it to visit museums, to go down rabbit holes, to make mistakes, find unexpected connections, fall in love, and make lists in its notes app... just like we do when inspiration strikes.