I found most of Markus Popp’s point resonating to me. First, I also believe that seeing the big picture in every way is important for everyone to not loose track in his or her life. Having a goal can justify one’s question about the purpose of life and not involving too much, meaning solely involving in his or her career path and point of interest, can make him or her a full person. Seeing the big picture also means being an observer. When standing in a third-party perspective, I can see the development and trend of a field in a more comprehensive way. I took this class for similar reasons as an engineering student. For me, I would love to engage in work such as research and product development engineer but not as a pure researcher or task-oriented engineer as I want to engage in actual solutions that can make people’s life better step by step. Engaging in creative activities can let me think outside the box and see new things in new perspectives that a normal task-oriented engineer would never see. I like to see my contributions adds their effects to the world as a whole. Second, I reckon that developing the previously said “big-picture” way of thinking can help add your touch to the field you are interested in. For example, his familiarity with perfumes and scent can aid his music composition and “signs” his albums with tangible themes uniquely to him such as scents, romance, etc. Third, he also emphasized the importance of punchline thinking, triumph moments, and moments that surprises yourself. These can reassure you that you are on the track you original envisioned to accomplish when feeling too dragged by necessary technicalities and details (e.g. Marcus uses these to mediate his music making process when being drawn to sit at a laptop for 16 hours due to the detailed work of using the music software).
However, I was initially a little baffled and now partially disagree with his drastic distinction between the artist and content creator. To me, although people, in terms of their goals, may aim more towards answering to his or her own instincts or to create content when asked by others, everyone should be the mix of the two. They complement and develop on each other. For example, some content creators may find it useful to add his or her personal touch to a content creating process and some artists are also creating content for this world to some extent in order to live. They may also share the same goal but work towards it in different ways. I also partially disagree on his current position on avoiding the AI until there exists an established effect of AI on the creation of music. Although I believes that using AI purely may let the artist tend to use it for the whole creation process, losing the small propulsion and sense of achievements from the regular triumphant moments as well has the creator’s soul, uniqueness and aim for perfection, completely avoiding AI is not a good practice. AI can be an aid for lateral thinking, it is like having an friend that has perspective and thinking process completely different from anyone you can find (obviously because they are wired completely differently from any human). Using AI for hints and brainstorming or gathering inspiration can actually be quite helpful in my opinion.