Brian Eno on AI, Creativity, and Why There’s No Such Thing as a Self-Made Flower

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Hey friends,

This week on Life With Machines, I got to do something I honestly still can’t believe — talk with Brian Eno. Yes, that Brian Eno. Composer, artist, ambient music pioneer, deep thinker. The dude who made airports feel profound.

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Team Recommendations

A few things we’re reading, watching, and mulling over:

• Oblique Strategies Online — Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s legendary deck of prompts for creative disruption. Try them out!

• What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, by Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse​ — A richly illustrated exploration of how art fosters community, expands perspectives, and transforms individuals

• Brian Eno’s foreword to Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad's book Citizens — An insightful reflection on how embracing the "Citizen Story" (where individuals actively engage as citizens, not just passive consumers) can help fix our messed up world.

Baratunde’s Take

Some thoughts I’ve been mulling over since the conversation. So much mulling.

Baratunde, Brian Eno, and Jon Alexander (who introduced them), at Brian’s studio in London

(1) There’s No Such Thing as a Self-Made Flower

Brian dropped this phrase early on, and it’s been blooming in my head ever since. There’s no such thing as a self-made flower. Meaning: even the most singular, awe-inspiring thing — a flower, a painting, a hit song — doesn’t make itself. It emerges from an entire ecosystem. Soil, water, bees, sun.

Brian uses a lot of natural metaphors when he talks about creativity, and this one stayed with me. Because I talk for a living. I stand on stages and say things into microphones. But those words don’t come from me alone. They’re built on a whole stack of life experience, conversations, books I’ve read, random stuff I overheard at the airport.

And now AI is straining that ecosystem. One of its big promises is that you, the solo creator, can make everything. Music, art, film, code — all by yourself. But the tools aren’t actually solo. They’re trained on the work of thousands, maybe millions. We’re talking about machines that remix other people’s labor, other people’s thinking.

That’s no singular genius. That’s a more extreme form of collective creation, what Brian calls “scenius” — I love that. And it forces a question: Will we keep misreading what creativity really is? Will we double down on the myth of the lone genius entrepreneur? Or will this AI moment reveal how connected we’ve always been?

I hope it’s the second one. Because the truth is, even in a conversation that feels private — like me talking to ChatGPT — other voices can cut in. That happened to me just the other day: I uploaded a transcript, and what the bot gave back had nothing to do with my file. It had pulled from someone else’s conversation entirely. And for a brief, glitchy moment, I felt plugged into the hive mind. Like an old analog phone picking up someone else’s call.

Accident or not, it reminded me: we’re all more entangled than we think.

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Below the line:

• Audio version of the newsletter in Baratunde’s real human voice

• Expanded thoughts on Brian’s notion that the problem with tech is who owns it

• My experience doing improv in Chicago and the potential value of generative AI to introduce useful randomness like Eno’s Oblique Strategies