By Sonia SuperSonic

How do we know we are improving?
Depending upon your line of work, this question can only be answered by the end result of sales numbers on an upward trend.

If you are fortunate enough to be selling, you have an objective form of feedback from the marketplace: the beautiful and true signal that other humans value your work enough to pay for it with money.

For the business-phobic among us, this is the symmetry found within business, sales, and production. You make something or generate an idea that has value for other people, and other people exchange their money for your wares.

Along the journey from idea to increasing commas in the total of your net worth are a million points at which we may become stuck.

What does the entrepreneur with the glimmer of a product, buttressed mainly by the wings of an idea yet to take flight, do in times of blocked momentum?

How does the solo studio artist learn a new path to explore that will excite their existing collectors and new ones, too?

What about the musician laboring over their composition, seeking depth, connection, and conclusion to their masterwork?

How do we know if we are on the right track, improving or missing obvious connections when our world is deeply isolated despite the glut of connectivity?

It might sound strange to some, but the use of technology has long played a part in the feedback cycle, be it analog or digital; tools that capture, assess, and allow sharing of our in-progress creations are embedded in the process of many a creator, and all domains and disciplines.

I personally use my voice memo app to capture fleeting lines of a poem or a pitch; when these ideas come, they don’t ask if you are ready with your pencil. The voice memo app is an evolution of the tape recorder, a tiny analog companion to reporters and private detectives of yore. Sometimes, it sports such a stylish design that even the analog-phobic might be tempted to purchase a pocket-sized memo taker just for the simple, accessible elegance.

Of course, the convenience of the smartphone app is a game-changer, and within your phone, you have installed (by default and/or by selection from an app store) a plethora of tools and utilities to save your ideas, images, and half-baked concepts.

Image credits: @coconnor — Your voice is what makes your art yours.

Enter AI

The game changed when a confusingly structured company, not sure if they were born for the good of society or the good of capitalism, deployed a simple chat interface to the open internet.

OpenAI was not looking to create the next wave of transformational products when they glued ChatGPT onto the first LLM ready for public testing.

The team at OpenAI thought the chat would be an easy way to get feedback on the technology they were building that definitely, or most likely they thought, would be a transformative product, but how exactly would people use it?

That was yet to be determined.

The explosion of interaction between humans and AI, the reinforcement training resultant from the exchanges through OpenAI, and a cornucopia of similar chat experiences are the stuff of venture capitalist dreams.

Still, we are just beginning a much larger evolution in our thinking and our experience of what it means to be an intelligent entity.

The chat interface is a humble and simple way to engage with data, and our internet journey has exposed most browser-savvy technophobes and technophiles alike to a chat “bot” at some point, long before the enigmatic ChatGPT opened our minds to more.

This simple interface, once reserved for the frustrating exchange between pre-seeded support query responses and the human needing actual help on the other side, at once became the portal to a latent intelligence and the shortcut to finding information on just about any topic the internet has ingested, all the good and all the ugly. Humanity is an experience laden with oxymorons and cliches. We created AI in our image, indeed.

Evolution Trends with Revolution

For the human beings engaged in the quest of uncovering true utility in AI, the experience of engaging with the mega-portal of knowledge to all of the biased, meme-ish, and chaotic b.s. that is the internet, the question of value may remain a question mark.

There is a story about the first ships spotted on the horizon by the indigenous people of the Americas when the early explorers neared the shores of their future conquest. The story goes that the first ships were not seen as vessels moving across the water but as spirits from the ether, too vast to be of human origin.

Before we understood the nature of the universe to the extent we do today, eclipses and shooting stars were sentinels from the otherworld, messengers from one or many gods, depending on the civilization of the beholder.

Long ago, before Grace Hopper invented Flow-Matic and her all-female predecessors invented Cobol, computer code was considered beneath the level of computer science—a debasement to binary magic.

The purists claimed that making the computer more accessible (with coding languages more like human language than numeric computer language) was dulling its exceptional ability. History may not remember well the gender representation of early computing (the first idea of code was also conceived by a woman, Ada Lovelace, over a century prior); nevertheless, we cannot but raise an eyebrow askance at such snobbery and equally laugh at its nativity.

image credits: @coconnor

Making tech accessible is a win for humans, and standing in the way of progress is an excellent way to get steamrolled out of the third dimension.

Flat-Earth-ers and Flatland-ers alike may not recognize progress occurring external to their myopic and dimensionless experience of reality.

Still, a lack of belief or an abundance of ignorance does not change the objective truth of scientific fact. We might even forget the progress made to date in gaining knowledge of collective experience.

Even so, the truth, though again unnamed by (once again) ignorant humans, remains the truth.

Technology transforms, and transformation means uncertainty. Despite, or because of, our eternal relationship with entropy as inhabitants of an inconceivably large universe with minuscule lifespans and physical size, we humans abhor uncertainty.

Our short lives, which may comprise six or seven adult decades, give or take a few years, cannot compare to the immense nature of all that is, so we name, explain, and mythologize our way through existence. The core of our intelligence is the ability to share stories and make meaning.

Before writing, oral traditions passed knowledge between generations. Before the printed book, religion bound clusters of populations into societies with shared values. Before the phone, the telegraph, the letter, the carrier pigeon.

We have sought to progressively build upon the collective knowledge base of learning as long as we have sought to explore beyond the threshold of the known.

An automaton or a puppet master

image credits: @coconnor - The mirror of time continues to reflect.

Dictatorships rise and seek to control or destroy knowledge, for that kind of power is weak when ideas are exchanged freely. Corrupt and fragile human egos are equally crushed under the weight of change with all that stands in the way of the tide. Dictators fall as quickly as they came, and in their smoldering remains spring new versions of societies, unfettered by the ideas of the now-extinct past.

Unfortunately, as far as we know, humans cannot live beyond the mortal coil to experience the ideal future should it come to pass.

We, humans, are trapped within the realm of our fragile wetware and the brief existence it affords us.

We can spend our time here railing against the tides of the lowest among us, attempting to hold back the force of time through procedures, chemical cocktails, and exercise routines, or we can focus on our one truly unique gift, our creative intelligence.

Enter the Curators

TheTechMargin is rooted in curious exploration and practicing what you preach. For the past two years, my exploration of AI has evolved from prodding various LLMs for their prowess in domains in which I felt I needed extra help, read: business messaging, developing community, creating grounded messaging around esoteric ideas (like creativity as an untapped superpower, or tech as a medium for creative exploration) to creating purpose specific siloed AI for answering questions about a single topic or exploring and iterating upon concepts within a private siloed AI space.

TheTechMargin was a solo adventure until late last year, when the cross-section of expertise and desire for change united forces, and the idea for a new direction in creative exploration took hold.

My partner Chris and I are both artists. Over the years, our conversations with one another and with the many creative friends in our network have always landed in similar territory: the art world is a gamble, and there are unknown rules you have to figure out to make it big and to make it in any way. Obviously, this state of affairs is immensely frustrating to all who seek to hone their craft and sell the product of their practice.

Creativity as a discipline relegated to the stuffy halls of museums and confusing gallery experiences (visit Chelsea, NYC) has bifurcated our minds and detached us from our humanity.

Image credits: @supersonic — The realm of creativity without logic is equally a place of imbalance. As the logical mind with the poverty of thought to assume creativity merely a flourish.

Balance must be restored. Creative humans who own and love that rainbow of ideas that never offers boredom when imagination reigns; we too must learn to tether our balloons to the mailbox and sit down to the taxes, keeping inventory, the books, and marketing ideas and execution. We must hold our ideas to the torch of critical feedback and relish in the exploration of technology as a tool.

Logical leaders of finance, politics, and law, remember the very industries you dominate so deftly are creations from the spring of human ingenuity. The logs you keep and the plans you execute are pre-played out in your mind, creativity unfolding.

We have personality or character; this creates a specific lens through which we experience the world. To push our little boats out into the water of possibility, i.e., the opportunity within uncertainty, we humans need to grow.

Stagnation is illness; fixity is death.

Growth is essential for life.

How to grow if you are also living inside the human experience?

We live in societies and have responsibilities to lives that cannot stop for a complete overhaul. If you are an artist preparing for an exhibit, or an amateur actor growing your experience while working in sales, your best chance to succeed at your passion is to grow.

How to Grow

• Expand your level of awareness by challenging beliefs you currently hold.
• Listen (and feel) your body when triggers emerge.
• This could be loud sounds, bright lights, rough fabric, certain phrases or words, conflict, people who remind you of someone from your past, etc.
• Challenge your core beliefs, especially in relation to triggers.
• Accept that what is hiding behind your fear is what you need to know.
• Be like the water buffalo and run into the storm.
• Journal all of this.
• Take care of yourself, this is intense.
• Play and explore. Remember to have fun. Fun, fun, fun (we're going to repeat that until we believe it). Be curious. Allow for f*** ups. Take stock of what worked. Make more messes, create new order.
• Find and connect with other explorers.
• Use tools, embrace your curiosity, and try things with a fearless urgency (a skill you can cultivate through necessity as a founder).

Beyond the Page

Co-founders and artists Sonia & Chris are your guides in the next wave of studio tools.

AICharmLab is the heart of creative exploration at TheTechMargin. We are building workflows and community in an ecosystem of useful and engaging tools for those who want to grow and never become stagnant.

If you would like to learn more and join our BETA tester waitlist, this survey will get you in.

Until next week — your faithful writer, Sonia a.k.a. SuperSonic

TheTechMargin | Sonia SuperSonic | 2025