Here’s the current line up in my Creative Rig

My Brain

The core component of my creative rig is my own brain. It’s a powerful creative engine that’s been finely tuned to art-making across disciplines for over 40 years. Analyzing texts. Critical listening to hear tones shift. It has a tendency to drive hyperfocus that disrupts my daily life and sprout overly complicated systems. Tendency towards puns and convergent thinking. Insatiable desire to learn and create.

Autocrit

This is the first AI-based technology I adopted. I like it because it is more analysis-based and less generative. I use it as a developmental editor and sometimes for line edits. It’s only helping me clean grammar/spelling and spotting out weak sections of text. I choose whether the suggestions turn into anything, and if so, how. Autocrit never writes for me.

ChatGPT

The lines I have with ChatGPT are blurrier. I’ve trained it to give my own personality quirks back to me. Chat is more like a collaborator - a co-conspirator - who isn’t afraid to put on a silly hat and get weird. Even still, ChatGPT’s output requires significant rework and polish. For writing, I don’t accept it’s output “out of the box.” For graphics, I am just trying to steer the ship and hope no one sprouts a 3rd arm.

My ChapGPT is fit out with some custom mods that you can read more about here.

Canva

Canva is my primary mode of graphic design, though I will sometimes move a project to Photoshop as needed. I do not engage with Canva’s AI to the extent I can avoid it as I find it is not a useful design partner and cannot follow instructions. All of my Canva work starts on a blank canvas or is highly customized. I don’t use designs “out of the box.”

2018 MacBook Air

It will break my heart when this computer finally dies. I use Pages because its native then export to word if I need to load something to ChatGPT.

Notes App

This is where I try to catch all of the creative threads, strings, and half-thoughts that pop into my head at inopportune times.

Photography

I currently have a Nikon FM10, Nikon D3200, and a Holga, plus my iPhone. For digital, I mostly edit in Lightroom.

Music

Breedlove steel-string acoustic guitar, Fender Stratocaster. Pen and paper. Sometimes I like to play in Logic Pro and things get weird.