AI and the anxiety of endless ideas

I’m constantly churning on ideas. The ones I don’t have time to process during the day have a habit of resurfacing late at night. My notebooks are jammed with random fragments, sketches and musings.

These days I find myself jotting down fewer ideas and tossing more to AI. I enjoy the brainstorming buddy, and I spin up prototypes on the fly. AI loves to riff, and who am I to resist.

But AI makes ideas seem more plausible than they really are. What was just a sketch in my notebook appears to be much more tangible, backed by reasoning, designs and code. It feels like it should work. Florian Blaschke calls it plausibility overload.

While they begin with such optimism, the vast majority end like a jam session that can’t find a song. I have a pile of unfinished ideas littering my computer and taunting my waking hours. My notebooks, by comparison, look sane.

It’s hard to finish ideas, but it’s easier than ever to start them. AI makes divergence nearly free while convergence remains hard. “Which may explain why proximity to people with proven judgment suddenly feels more valuable again,” Blaschke writes.

For most of my life, ideas felt scarce enough to save. Now they’re so abundant, I need to get better at throwing them away.