Cline's Analog Art

Some days, I lay in bed at night and feel this odd tinge of loneliness and I ask myself why did I do all of this? Why am I doing this and who am I doing this for?

I do love working in AI. It’s one of the most joyful endeavors I have ever pursued and I have given up many of my comforts, my home country, my undying love for traveling and snowboarding.

But sometimes I deeply relate to this guy, who left his AI safety job at Anthropic to work on poetry and I can see how pursuing poetry can be a deeply soulful decision.

For me, I don’t want to leave AI just because of a few bad moments, but I do think that the answer to my angst is somewhere else. I like to think that the missing puzzle piece of doing great work in AI is to both be relentless in effort and execution and even more importantly not lose our humanity as everything we know about intelligence and humanity is going to change very fast.

I wrestle with this question a lot and while I don’t have a great answer here, I like to believe that observing beauty and making beautiful things in the analog world will bring our souls back. I like to make things with my own hands and feel the textures of a physical creation on my skin. When I stop looking at the screen for a blissful minute, beauty still abounds.

I remember painting a shirt for the first time and it felt so jarring as it wasn’t like code where you could race through it and ask Opus 4.6 to fix your mistakes. It felt so consequential and real.

I am sharing some of my artwork partly because I like validation and fake social media points and partly because I want to encourage other people to make art in their own ways and fall in love with the process of making things.

Here’s some of the analog art that’s come out of @cline: some from me, most from others:

These next ones were drawn by a the kid of one of our teammates. He reimagined the Cline mascot as different characters, and they’re some of my favorites:

I really enjoyed doing this. I loved gossiping with friends for hours while using “creating artwork time” as an excuse. I gave away most of the art here anyway. I just wanted people to have something cool to wear and show around. How often do you get to wear a shirt you painted yourself?

Its also just a deep joy to feel so soulfully connected with the physical world. I think soulfulness is deeply lacking in the AI space and we must do what we can to stay in touch with our humanity as we spend more time building in this space. I truly believe the world will be a better place if poets, philosophers and artists get into the AI space and if working at some company doesn’t feel right its perfectly okay to leave as well.

I want to stay “locked in”. I don’t regret all the things that I have given up to pursue the most amazing rush of my life but I want to do it the right soulful way.