I've been thinking about something lately, and I'm not even sure I can explain why it keeps coming back to me.
But the question hasn't really left my mind.
When people talk about AI, the conversation usually starts with the answer.
Was it accurate?
Was it useful?
Did it solve the problem?
But the more I look at it, the more it feels like the most important part happened earlier.
Before the response appeared
Before the result was generated
Before anything became visible to the user
Every system makes decisions long before an answer exists.
What gets prioritized
What gets filtered out
What gets ignored
Most of those decisions are never seen
And because we never see them, we rarely think about them.
Instead, we judge the final output
We evaluate the result
We debate whether the answer was good or bad
But maybe that's not the whole story
We assume the answer is the decision
But the decision may have happened long before the answer appeared.
The more I think about it, the more the answer starts to feel like the final step of a process that began much earlier.
That's one reason I keep coming back to @OpenGradient when thinking about this.
Not because it changes the answer.
Because it shifts attention toward the process behind the answer.
And the more I think about that distinction, the harder it becomes to overlook
If the most important decision happens before the answer exists...
How would we know whether we're judging the right thing?
#opg $OPG @OpenGradient
But the question hasn't really left my mind.
When people talk about AI, the conversation usually starts with the answer.
Was it accurate?
Was it useful?
Did it solve the problem?
But the more I look at it, the more it feels like the most important part happened earlier.
Before the response appeared
Before the result was generated
Before anything became visible to the user
Every system makes decisions long before an answer exists.
What gets prioritized
What gets filtered out
What gets ignored
Most of those decisions are never seen
And because we never see them, we rarely think about them.
Instead, we judge the final output
We evaluate the result
We debate whether the answer was good or bad
But maybe that's not the whole story
We assume the answer is the decision
But the decision may have happened long before the answer appeared.
The more I think about it, the more the answer starts to feel like the final step of a process that began much earlier.
That's one reason I keep coming back to @OpenGradient when thinking about this.
Not because it changes the answer.
Because it shifts attention toward the process behind the answer.
And the more I think about that distinction, the harder it becomes to overlook
If the most important decision happens before the answer exists...
How would we know whether we're judging the right thing?
#opg $OPG @OpenGradient