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The AI map is not the territory
Summer hours at Dad Strength
Geoff Girvitz
July 24, 2025
Today on Dad Strength
It’s summer mode over here at Dad Strength, so I’ll be putting on an aloha shirt and shifting to a light version of the newsletter until school is back in. That means no audio but it also means being a bit more freewheeling with structure. It’s a summer thing.
The AI map is not the territory
Long before Skynet is sending out Terminator units to crush human bones into powder, there will be a different kind of problem that will affect your kids. A creative one. The antidote isn’t STEM, though. It’s the arts.
I expect (and would love to be wrong about this) that we’ll see a collective flattening of creative content over the next several years. That’s because art isn’t just for artists anymore; it’s for anyone who wants to market/monetize anything… Which is an awful lot of people hammering out prompts.
Three things will happen:
It will become increasingly hard to make a living as a creative because what takes years to refine and build only takes seconds to steal.
An incredible volume of deeply mediocre writing, artwork, and music will be produced — all based on existing datasets. This means zero groundbreaking or revolutionary work; just more of the same.
The online signal to noise ratio will plummet. This will make it increasingly difficult to find truly enriching creative work.
What’s the antidote? Kids with good taste would be a start. I don’t mean stodgy, elitist taste. I mean kids who have standards for creative work, a sense of what they truly like — and why, and who are (ideally) developing their own thoughtful, meaningful philosophies.
When you live exclusively off of old data sets, you live on an outdated map. Going somewhere new needs an entirely different approach. And while you could certainly argue that all new art is just recombined ideas (there are only so many chords, for example), its the overarching way they’re put together that makes something revolutionary.
The power of deceleration
If I could prescribe one drill to anyone who plays a team sport with more running than curling, it would be to work on decelerating… from different speeds (starting more slowly) and with different types of directional changes.
And if you’re rehabbing an injury (or working to prevent one), I’m looking at you pal. This is how you do it.
The question isn’t how fast you can run; it’s how smoothly you can decelerate. Noisy steps or loss of limb control means you’re throwing more power at a system than it can handle. If you want to drive a Ferrari, you can’t have Schwinn brakes.
Here’s a sample setup for deceleration work.
Linear day
5-metre run (full acceleration) from a standing start: clean stop at the line
7-metre run (full acceleration) from a standing start: clean stop at the line
5-metre run (full acceleration) from a flying start: clean stop at the line
7-metre run (full acceleration) from a flying start: clean stop at the line
Lateral day
5-metre run (full acceleration) from a standing start: turn and stop on the right foot
5-metre run (full acceleration) from a standing start: turn and stop on the left foot
7-metre run (full acceleration) from a flying start: turn and stop on the right foot
7-metre run (full acceleration) from a flying start: turn and stop on the left foot
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What I’m listening to/watching:
Attachments by Lucas Mann
A quote
“Some things are too important to be taken seriously.”
A dad joke
There’s an artist known for making things look like they’re too far away.
She doesn’t know where to draw the line
Take care of yourself, man!
GG
Geoff Girvitz
Father, founder, physical culturist
dadstrength.com