Sculptors And Gardeners

• A powerful line emerges from two distinct methods: additive gardening and subtractive sculpting. Gardening grows many possibilities; sculpting cuts away all but the essential.

• Both methods are acts of perception, not just creation. The gardener selects the most promising growth; the sculptor sees what to remove to reveal the form within.

• Today's LLMs are token-level gardeners. They excel at generating endless options but lack the sculptor's instinct to refine by removing.

• This lack of a subtractive, chiseling ability is why AI writing often feels verbose and soulless. It can't strip an idea to its bone.

• We can teach AI to sculpt by training it on tasks like blackout poetry—finding the essential text hidden within a larger block.

• A truly creative AI would alternate between these two modes: gardening to generate a jungle of possibilities, then sculpting to find the single, perfect line within it.