A thought

The other day I had a thought about a new word, mindmade. Here’s what that might look like in a dictionary:

📖 mindmade | adjective | ˌmænˈmeɪd

Created through unassisted human cognition without algorithmic or AI assistance.

“The architect, her designs were mindmade, each calculation and aesthetic choice personally rather than generated by software.”

Synonyms: thoughtwrought, cognitively original, unassisted.

Antonyms: AI-assisted, algorithm-generated, prompted.

Usage note: Term emerged in the late 2020s as a value marker in creative and intellectual work, analogous to “handmade” in craft production. Often appears in contexts requiring authentication of human cognitive labour: academic work, fine art, legal testimony, and artisanal intellectual products.

Will we start valuing “mindmade” the way we value “handmade”?

In 1913, Ford’s Model T showed the way of the future. The heavy manual work was now done by machines whereas people were placed in-between the machines, doing isolated repetitive tasks, using or supervising specific machines. Before, you needed highly skilled craftsmen. These were few and very expensive. Think of the (10,000+) hours that go behind the mastery of one’s craft! With machines, you could now scale with many novice workers, easy to ramp up.

I think the industrialisation of physical things also led to us valuing certain handmade things a lot more. We appreciate handcrafted items like art, fashion, items of luxury. Handcrafted signals value because of uniqueness, care, craft, and human attention.

100 years later, OpenAI’s ChatGPT revolutionised the way we interact with AI.

As AI becomes our cognitive extension, I can see the industrialisation of mental work. We are already talking about “human-in-the-loop” for something that will be mostly AI-generated.

I wonder if we’ll soon desire to distinguish work that will become a minority and an item of luxury, that’s … “mindmade”. Work that is painstakingly thought through by a human mind. Work that is crafted with care and passion. Work that is uniquely quirky through its imperfections that makes it valuable and emotional.

Imagine saying something like:

“I liked this new mindmade game, it keeps surprising me of how it works. It’s weird but I keep coming back to it.”