Art is about people.
This is obvious and simplistic on the face of it but I think it’s important to remind ourselves of this–
Art is about people.
It is by people. It is for people. Art — and by proxy, storytelling — is a conduit between the maker of the art and the witness to that art. I made this, the maker says, and they did so for myriad possible reasons. They did it because it was beautiful, because it was horrible, because it scared them or enraged them or titillated them, or some combination of all of that. They were driven to portray a thing, or subvert a thing, or invent a thing.
The art forms a connection. The witness to the art — the one on the other end of that connection — experiences it however they must. They relate to it. They rebuke it. They adore it. They obsess over it. They detest it even as they can’t look away. Art, story, music — they form this ephemeral thing that is a way for us to talk to each other metatextually, across spans of distance great and small, and even across time itself. We scream our strange creations out into the void in the hope of being heard. A signal that we’re not alone. And we witness art in much the same way: as a reminder that we are not alone.
Which is to say, there’s not a lot of room for the ART BARF ROBOT to come in and BARF ART all up into this connection.
The introduction of so-called “artificial intelligence” — which, really, is just a keenly-designed high-tech mimeograph — has gunked up the conduit between artist and audience with great clotted gobs of digital snot. It’s a pipe crawling with the Too-Many-Fingers monsters waggling their many bent digits at you while screaming twee authorial pablum and dipshitted disinformation in your ear. It’s gunk. It’s a mess.
I’ve spoken before about how “artificial intelligence” is really about the fetishization of idea —
(The above comes from Threads, which I guess is proof that it’s a social media platform with “the juice,” given how far and wide I’ve seen this comment travel across various channels.)
For the people so attracted to AI-generated anything, work is just a speedbump. Process is yucky. Wouldn’t it be great to just yell at a computer, WHAT IF BATMAN FUCKED SUPER MARIO ON A SOFT BED OF MOSS WHILE FRAMED BY THE CREPUSCULAR LIGHT OF A GLITTERING FAIRY FOREST, PLEASE SHOW ME THAT NOW, and then the computer just said, YOU GOT IT, BOSS, and extruded your greatest desire onto the screen? So what if Batman has seven weird fingers? All the more fingers to lustily push into Mario’s dewy mustachioed mouth! So you grab this image and you show other people and you say to the people on the internet, LOOK MOM I MADE AN ART, and the people say back, “Did you mean to call us Mom?” And you choose not to answer because, why did you do that, exactly? That’s weird. Anyway. You did it! You arted! You had an idea and then you pressed a button and basically, basically, you painted this yourself, right? You took what was in your mind, the Dark Knight romantically bat-fucking the diminutive turtle-hating cross-dimensional Uber-Plumber, and now here it is, for all the world to see. What chumps other artists are, out there getting out their paints and their Procreates and their word processors — ugh, right? If only they understood how easy it was to become An Artist, now.
Except, come the fuck on.
You didn’t do shit. You’re not an artist, shut the fuck up. Thing is, I think deep down, you know it. You have to know somewhere in that short-circuiting soul of yours that what you’ve done is nothing. You, at best, are a patron of the arts, a mule-kicked de Medici wandering around trying not to fall in canals while poking your fake fucking Robo-Leonardo and yelling at him to paint you another SEXY TOMB RAIDER DRIVING A CYBERTRUCK NUDE. Congratulations. You said a thing and pushed a button and now the ART BARF ROBOT barfed art for you. Slow clap from the cheap seats.
That image of Batman banging Tanuki Mario (sorry, I changed it, one must cleave to one’s own very special fantasies, after all) wasn’t really yours. What occurred on screen was not your actual vision. An idea is formless. It’s nothing without execution. The art exists in that execution — and you weren’t the one who did it. The ART BARFING ROBOT did. If I paid an actual artist actual money to paint me Batman and Mario doing the bat-nasty, the artist would be the one executing. The artist is still the artist. I’m just the guy paying the artist and asking them to give me what I want. I had no skill to bring to the table. I had no talent. No process, no ability, no understanding of light and texture, no sense of how to make this color or those shadows, literally no grasp of how to make the roundness of those night-clad bat-cheeks gleam moistly in the glow of the Narnian forest. Can you imagine me paying the artist and then boldly saying, “Well, I’m the artist of this because it was my idea. You were just the crass serf who did all the work.” I’d be run out of town on a rail. I’d have the painting broken over my head.
And yet, that’s what you’re doing.
Except worse!
Because you’re not even doing the very good work of paying an artist. You’re poking a piece of software to make your weird idea fall out. You’re clicking the “randomize character” button on the Sims and pretending you created life. And that piece of software? The ART BARF ROBOT? We have visions of it being this singular entity, a chrome-faced digital being out there in the void, tethered to all of us as we feed it our ideas, but it’s not that. It’s just a shitty techno-industrial blender grabbing all the words and all the images and all the music from all the creators it can, and it’s chewing them up and spitting them into your mouth like a big ol’ mama bird.
Artificial intelligence isn’t a person. It’s not even really, despite how I describe it, a machine. It’s the representative of a company. It’s the tool of not just one corporation, but many.
And it only exists because real people did real art.
Without something to chew up, it has nothing to spit out.
It steals our stuff, milks it, and kicks it aside, then shows it proudly to the world as if it did anything other than bleed an actual artist dry. It turns the artist and the art into dirt, then just regrows stuff from that same earth.
It’s a thief.
Except, even there? I’m lying. It didn’t steal shit. Because “it” has no agency. The owners? The companies? They have agency. They, actual people, are the ones who stole the shit, fed it to their beast, and then sold access to the beast to you. The art barf robot isn’t even a robot. It’s just the Scooby-Doo mask worn by all these tech bro shitheads. They’re pretending to be a sentient magical art maker when really, they’re the man behind the curtain. All they’ve really done is made a way for them, and you, to shortcut the work by stealing it from someone else.
To put it boldly, and surely to some contention:
The use of artificial intelligence in your creative pursuits is unethical.
And though this blog post is already too long — hey, fuck it, it’s my blog and I’ll yammer if I want to — I’ll go into a little more detail here and attempt to address some of the pushback I’ll probably hear.
So, to me, there are a number of predominant concerns for using artificial intelligence in your creative pursuits —
a) As noted, it is “trained” on the work of other artists, writers, musicians, what-have-you. They were not given a choice in this regard. Their work — and by their, I mean our, because I’m actually in that list, too — was simply vacuumed up in order to be pulped. We’re the meat in your Soylent Green. We are the fruit for your insipid smoothies. Using it empowers the companies to do this more and more.
b) Environmentally, it ain’t great. Artificial intelligence gulps a lot of resources — at a time of increased water usage in the west, here comes OpenAI to guzzle more water just so you can ask ChatGPT to lie to you or write mediocre fiction. It’s theorized that even just a handful of ChatGPT queries drains the equivalent of a 16-oz bottle of water. Never mind its potential power-draw and resultant emissions.
c) While there is this feeling that artificial intelligence is this alien thing, this unique mind, this individual persona, it really must be framed as being the product of big companies, of tech bros and billionaires. It’s why they steal the work — because if they had to license it, they wouldn’t make money. (OpenAI literally said this out loud.) Their goal is to make money, not art. Ultimately, this just becomes a tool for them. Why hire artists to make a movie poster, why pay authors to write a book, why have SFX people or musicians for commercials or any artist or writer or musician at all? They’re making themselves a system to crush the value of art, and they want you to be proselytes of this system. And to help train it. You pay for it and feed it prompts, and, one can argue, it banks that and “learns” from it.
d) Though this is adjacent to the art/writing stuff — it’s very, very easy to see how this is already being used for mis/disinformation. I can’t tell you how often I see some shit on social media (let’s be honest, it’s usually Facebook) of OMG LOOK AT THIS COOL GRANDMA AND HER GIANT YARN HOUSE or WOW THESE ARE PHOTOS OF FLYING SHARKS INSIDE A HURRICANE HOLY SHIT CLIMATE CHANGE IS WILD YOU GUYS, and of course it’s AI-generated bullshit. We were already in a world where truth and fact was becoming unstable — but when you can generate willfully deceptive fiction (visually and textually) with a button, and during a vital election year to boot, that’s real fucking bad. And our investment in, and use of, AI — even as a tool, even as a toy — is helping further that dissolution of shared reality. Holy fucking shit, there are AI-generated influencers now? Is this Hell? This might be Actual Hell. I’m going to go live in the woods now.
e) If we are to believe that art has value and the making of art is labor, AI completely cuts the throat of that notion. Right now, you pay your ten bucks a month or whatever and make your shitty AI art with your shitty AI art button, click-click-click, and meanwhile, an actual artist has to start a Gofundme just to pay (their ever-increasing) rent this week. And don’t get used to cheap access to AI. These are drug dealer rules. It’s cheap now. But once the human creators are all out of work (or are paid a pittance to basically turn the garbage AI output into something serviceable), that cost will either go up for the average users or it’ll get so enshittified (thanks Cory Doctorow for the word) that it’s unusable. Hell, maybe it’ll be both.
f) Eventually, this stagnates art. AI needs art to feed it, and if the preponderance of extant art becomes AI-created pap, glurge, and slop, then it will have to cannibalize itself to make more of itself. Which, admittedly, I look forward to, because it’ll eat itself to make itself and produce what I am guessing will be the garbage piss at the bottom of old dumpsters, and then we will learn the true value of human art. Which will be ironic since all the artists by then will be either accountants or, you know, pig feed.
g) Also, finally, it devalues art. If art, even shit art, is so easy to make, and artists are not required anymore, they won’t be paid and they’ll instead be turned into Robot Herders, herding the output of the software into something art-shaped. Meaning, they’ll probably still be doing THE ART, just at a cut rate, because realistically, the output of AI generators will still be mediocre, and someone of skill will need to fix that shit, but they won’t be treated like an artist. Which is to say, a class of creator that is already devalued in a lot of ways. AI makes it worse! Somehow! Fuck!
So, already I’ve been typing for a while, and this post is too long, but I’m about to make it longer. Because I can sense a small percentage of you reading this gnashing your teeth. You’re frothy with indignation because how dare I say these things? How could I poo-poo this cool fun future-changing technology? You have your BUT CHUCK retorts, and I will endeavor to address them, now. Note: they are different from your BUTT CHUCK retorts, which is a whole different, and altogether more childish, retort.
But Chuck! Something-something buggy whips, you Luddite!
Obviously the idea here is that blah blah blah when cars were invented all the buggy-whip manufacturers went out of business and certainly using a car wasn’t unethical just because of the poor buggy-whip makers blah blah blah. This is falsely based on the assumption that all technological advances are both a) equal and b) equally good. (It’s also worth asking the question of whether cars really were the singular most valuable and ethical choice going forward, as our reliance on them has not been necessarily a global good. More trains, I say!) To me the question is, who does this serve, and AI-generated material serves giant companies and tech bros more than it serves, say, you or me — and, one could argue it’s pretty deleterious to art, art culture, art as labor, all of that. And why are you comparing art — all the beautiful paintings and books and music over the years — to a single instrument used to cane a horse into moving faster? No. Be better. (And though Luddite has long been an insult, it’s really, really, really worth reading the origins of the term ‘Luddite’ and why, like the lady who burned herself with McDonald’s coffee, there’s a far more important story here.)
“Now do cameras.”
I’ve seen this response a buncha times re: criticisms of AI, specifically that phrasing. “Now do cameras.” Which, again, what are you saying? You have to, somewhere down deep inside, understand that USING A CAMERA and USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is not remotely the same, and you should know that even if you think of AI as a boon, and not a bane, to artists.
I assume the idea is, oh, if I use a camera it removes all the work of… painting the landscape? So it can’t be art? And digital art removes the work of using paint, too? And so therefore it’s the same? Or… something?
Let me say it this way: when I use a camera, and I take a photo, I am being intentional and I am making choices. Those two things are really key here: intentionality, and the making of choices. I’m saying, this thing in front of me, it is something I see, and want to show the world. And even I, a basic ding-dong, know that how I take that photo matters. How I frame the image matters. Subject versus background, light versus shadow, and so forth. Far better photographers than I are making even more choices in that moment, with a far greater awareness than I have, but in all aspects, there remains us, the photographer — aka, the human element. Then, if we go to digitally edit that photo in whatever way we care to (saturation modifications, cropping, doodling a little dick on a forehead and the dick is shooting hyphenated pee-pee bullets), we are once again a human making deliberate choices that culminate in a photo we, the human, wanted to show you, a fellow human.
And here you’re saying, BUT MAKING AI GENERATED BARF ART IS THE SAME THING, but please let me stop you. Your prompt is, indeed, making choices and creating intentionality, but you aren’t actually touching it or interacting with it. And the result is not something you in any way made. Something else made it. The software made it.
You didn’t make anything.
The equivalent is, instead of holding a camera and taking a photo, you instead handed the camera to a robot and said, “Go get me a photo of a butterfly.” You aren’t even taking the photo. The robot comes back and hands you the photo and you have the gall to say I’m the photographer.
If I tell a bartender to make me a cocktail, I don’t claim I made, or invented, the cocktail, okay? The bartender had the skills. You just had a drink order.
Art involves intentionality and making choices but also the effort — the literal human touch, actually, not even a metaphorical touch, I mean you’re actually touching the material in a fundamental way.
Cameras are a tool. Paints are a tool. Word processors are a tool.
ChatGPT, Midjourney, all of that? They’re just bartenders. They are third-party entities to which you give the entirety of the creative act.
BUT CHUCK. Isn’t what the AI does the same as what a human artist does?
Do you actually think this? You don’t, do you? I really am going to need you to see clearly through to the difference between “human doing human stuff, as human has done since humans starting humaning” and “software owned by tech assholes snorting up all the art so it can sneeze it back out.” If the software were truly a chrome-domed robot in a room, poring through the output of humanity over the centuries and finding inspiration and agita and hope and love and fear and emotion in what they were witnessing, then hey, maybe, sure. But it isn’t that. This feels like you already know this. My child knows this. A Furby isn’t a dog, either, since we’re having this chat.
But Chuck?? What about accessibility and ableism???
Seen the argument that making AI art is actually an act of accessibility and to deny it is an act of ableism and, you know, I think this is a disingenuous argument that uses social justice as a cudgel instead of actually doing any kind of work or offering any kind of benefit. This is a world designed by rampant acts of ableism, I agree, and that sucks, and it should change, but I don’t know that simply removing the entire act and effort of making stuff and instead handing that act and effort to an AI generator is not really a true act of equity. You have not given anybody accessible tools. AI isn’t the tool, it’s the everything. It’s the artist. I don’t see this as leveling any playing fields so much as it is taking the playing field away and calling it a favor.
But Chuck! The AI generator I use trains itself on opt-in material!
Hey, that’s great if that’s the case. But let’s remember that Midjourney supposedly didn’t have a huge list of art/artists it was harvesting, except then it turns out it totally did. And “opt-in” is kind of a sliding scale, isn’t it? EULAs can be pretty fucking inscrutable and sometimes a service will quietly add something to its service parameters about AI and then you’re technically kinda sorta opt-in even though you didn’t really opt-in, did you?
But Chuck, I’m an artist using AI!
That’s great, we can tell! “I’m a human and I eat other humans!” What fun for you! Okay! Cool! If you do that, more power to you. I don’t get it, and I’m happy it helps your… process? But I also don’t think you can, at present, extract the realities of artificial intelligence from your use of it without a hefty dose of fantasy and good old fashioned ignorance is bliss thinking.
And so, that leads me to this:
We all make choices and a lot of those choices are, by necessity, poorer ones than we’d like. And we make them because a lot of times we don’t have better choices at hand, and because unregulated capitalism has left us with a series of buttons to push and levers to pull that force us to imagine the trolley problem whenever we’re buying groceries or purchasing a book or posting a vacation photo on Instagram. Did you buy a water to drink at the airport? Congrats, it’s full of plastic and probably is helping to contribute to the desiccation of the Western United States and that bottle will probably end up in the ocean where it will somehow choke and kill a pelican. But you needed some fucking water and the airport maybe doesn’t have a dispenser for your own bottle and… you needed some fucking water, I dunno. We do what we can, when we can, to make meaningful choices in order to stave off the inevitable corporate plan of turning us all into chum for the harvesters.
And my view is, at this point in time, it’s clear that artificial intelligence in the arts is real problematic, and the juice is not worth the squeeze — and, further, if denying its power now gives us better agency going forward, then that’s a really good thing. Because certainly there is a world where AI can be used ethically, in some fashion, in our creative pursuits.
But today is just not that day.
And certainly AI can and should be used in important places that humans can’t really… effect, or access. If an AI helps us find new antibiotics, or can predict a new weather pattern, or can remind me that I’m out of ketchup and I need to buy new ketchup, hell yeah, let’s do it. But art is about people, and it has always been about people, and so-called AI being inserted into that equation by tech-bros (who yesterday really really wanted you to buy NFTs) changes the equation in such a fundamental way that it cannot be worth it, especially given the way the sausage is made. Or should I say, stolen.
Because with AI, the sausage is totally fucking stolen.
So don’t use it. Don’t play with it, don’t post it, don’t share it around. Reject the Art Barf Robot. You don’t need it. It’s not for you. You don’t need it for the words, the images, the narration, the music. Writing isn’t easy, but also, your access to writing is easy. Art is hard, but also, you can still make art. Make weird shit, messy shit, ugly shit, incomplete shit, amateur shit — make art to make art. Touch it. Be intentional. Make choices. Make art. You do it. The human you. I’ll do it, too. Eat shit, art barf robot!
p.s. buy my book it’s suburban folk horror about an orchard cult, yeah, try to do that, ChatGPT you mediocre fucker
p.p.s. please watch Stephen Fry read Nick Cave’s thoughts on AI
larryhogue says:
There was a discussion on Substack about a writing conference where the main topic was how to harness AI to produce hundreds of novels a year. This is apparently necessary because it’s not enough anymore to produce twenty or fifty books a year to satisfy the Amazon algorithm. This got me wondering why these “writers” (AI content managers, more like) would even need to exist. Why couldn’t a reader just input some keywords into the AI novel jukebox and a few minutes later, boom, a novel? No writers needed, just coders and accountants. I’m sure some venture capitalist is funding just such an app right now. We can only hope enough readers will still want that human connection.
January 10, 2024 — 3:04 PM
J.D. Cunegan says:
Remember, everyone, one of the biggest points of contention in both the WGA and SAG strikes was how studios wanted to use AI to 1) write fully formed scripts, then pass them on to the screenwriters to “clean up” (for a smaller fee, I’d bet), and 2) use AI to produce actors’ likenesses in perpetuity, without their consent, even after their death, and without proper compensation. Art in AI is nothing more than another example of the billionaire class not wanting to pay creatives for their labor (and yes, creativity *is* labor).
January 10, 2024 — 3:10 PM
TCinLA says:
Chuck – you have the power to affect this argument. Get your publisher to put a new sentence/paragraph/whatever in their standard contract, where the author attests that the work is their own and they made no use whatsoever of AI. You’re a big fish in their pond, use your influence. I’m a different kind of big fish with my publisher (smaller, to fit in their smaller pond), and I did that with them, with effect this year.
January 10, 2024 — 3:21 PM
terribleminds says:
Trust me when I say, conversations are ongoing with any and all publishers, re: AI. And it is not just me.
January 10, 2024 — 3:57 PM
clpauwels says:
Thank you for putting into words what I could only silently seethe over!
January 10, 2024 — 3:26 PM
J. F. says:
Right-effing-ON CHUCK!!! This is the BEST THING I HAVE SEEN IN FOREVER and right on the topic of effing machines “creating” anything! I majored in Art at UT. I was trained by my artist grandfather when I was 5, and a damn, brilliant teacher in high school, along with numerous teachers at UT. All of their humanity merged with mine to make any art I ever created. I have written and traditionally published a book. I was trained by many teachers along the way, not the least of whom was my magnificent Humanities teacher in High School (May her Memory Be Eternal). All art in The Arts comes from the “magic” of being human, from our ancestors’ genes, from our training, from our feelings and our soul. It isn’t a “thing” – it is a living and breathing HUMAN endeavor and statement – a human in glory, a human in joy, a human in pain, and more. I am sending the link to this post to all my geeky friends who are all “woo-woo” about AI. I “art hard” all day, every day and have since I was FIVE! Thank you, Chuck! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!! I love this all the way down to the core of my human soul!!
January 10, 2024 — 3:34 PM
Greg Hawks says:
Thank you for this. What you said about the wholesale stealing of human art in many forms is indisputable. As an author and a writing coach of teens writing college essays, I’m looking for assistive AI, not generative, and the type that helps a teen at 2am get over writer’s block and get back to writing, doing things their way, in their voice, on their terms. It’s the voice of reasoned, Socratic questioning, drawing one’s best self out, rather than vomiting a new version as if that is what you meant. Process oriented, using the best research on writing practices. Are you an intuitive writer? Then try this or that helpful free writing prompt to generate more words yourself, then reverse outline. Are you a spreadsheet maven? Then try this plot outline and see if following that structure works. Good luck! I’ll be here for feedback when you need me. This would be access and equity for kids who don’t currently have the support for their academic or college essays, but the systems would need to be such that teachers wouldn’t be replaced. My role would morph some, of course, and I’d spend more time on social emotional coaching, on showcasing a human audience’s reaction, on expression of character and positive traits. On thinking about their life choices thus far and how to better connect with an audience that wants to know certain things about you. On celebrating the ways that their writing reflects certain craft techniques, and why they work. Until the AI started doing this too. If we as a society prefer product over persons and process, then we will get this assistive AI stat, at a huge environmental and social cost. In other words, the tool I just described will be sold instead of me selling my coaching services, because the System would argue, but you have this PRODUCT/FAKE HUMAN at a fraction of the cost of this puny human, and my fallibility and lack of encyclopedic brain will be diminished by the marketing team for the Bot Coach. That’s what digital, tech bro, billionaire culture wants; all of us in our pods texting, smashing subscription buttons, and being raised by iPads that raise shareholder revenue. And we’ve bought into it with our addictions to machines and likes and endless scrolls. You joked about living in the woods; I joke about that too, but I have to figure out how to live on the wood’s edge and not be an addict or an early adopter who does harm. If adding an AI tool to my coaching craft, I need to set some kind of boundaries for not only students so that they can have the joy and benefits of the work, that very necessary work of thinking that writing is, but I also need to set boundaries that allow my survival. I need to find a way to create learning spaces that value human connection in the moment, and human audience, and human feedback. This is the dilemma all educators are facing this very moment–unpaid labor–thanks to OpenAI creating an arms race. I wonder if there is assistive tech that doesn’t swallow monsoon-level amounts of water by the hour, and whether there’s a walled garden kind that doesn’t abuse user data or steal from artists. Is that possible? Walled gardens are happening to stop the steal, but the environmental cost is not yet being dealt with, as far as know. I don’t have the answers yet; just these very human ruminations that OpenAI is about to gobble.
January 10, 2024 — 3:34 PM
Stephen Rodge says:
Well said. This has summarized many thoughts and feelings I have had about AI. Super insightful
January 10, 2024 — 3:42 PM
terribleminds says:
As per a discussion on Bluesky, I’m noting here that, juuuuust in case anybody doesn’t get that (context clues are your friend), when I speak of using AI in creativity, I *don’t* mean the ML/AI inside, say, your Canon DSLR. I *do* mean, any and all of the generative AI shit-suites of software that are happy to cobble together a photograph of whatever you want it to be, without the camera ever entering the (pun not intended until now) picture.
January 10, 2024 — 4:00 PM
Eric J Ehlers says:
Chuck, love ya. Been reading your blog for years. I’ve disagreed, but… this is the first really really terrible post I’ve read. You have one valid point in the whole thing, in my opinion:
“To put it boldly, and surely to some contention: The use of artificial intelligence in your creative pursuits is unethical.” (largely because of how it is trained, which is inherent to the concept).
And even this point is vastly overstated. There are many legitimate uses of AI that are not stealing that can assist in helping a HUMAN write or create something.
It can be contended, but it’s the only think in the whole post that doesn’t read like emotional gut reaction spewing out vitriol for the sake of trying to make other people feel bad about what they do.
You’re reductionist, you vastly oversimplify, you use straw men, you over-generalize, and you use ad homonym attacks. It’s… not great
The ethics of the matter should be the ONLY argument you need in this. Performance of the turn, accusing AI users of being fundamentally disconnected with art and thereby implying they aren’t even acting fully human… all of that is bunk. Stick with actual truth, don’t turn into this other nonsense.
January 10, 2024 — 4:15 PM
terribleminds says:
nah I think I’m good
January 12, 2024 — 9:17 AM
Morgan says:
Deepfakes. That technology alone has the power to make us doubt everything we thought was true. Can’t even trust our own eyes and ears anymore. Terrifying.
January 10, 2024 — 4:19 PM
Stuart Craig says:
Nobody who uses AI is ever gonna read all this. I hope you know that. This is nothing but a circle jerk for people who already agree with your opinion, which I do too, but it honestly feels like
January 10, 2024 — 5:48 PM
Katrina Snow says:
This is definitely the hot discussion topic of the year. However it all pans out, I think if AI is used in the creation of an image or story, it should be disclosed. I buy images off Shutterstock to use for promotion and such and have noticed images on their site that definitely look AI generated. With others, it is tough to tell. Some AI images are really a mess, but some are stunning and very artistic.
January 10, 2024 — 6:16 PM
edyi1 says:
Amen to this. My son (a photographer) and I (a writer) were just talking about this. The conversation was very similar.
January 10, 2024 — 7:22 PM
Laura says:
My boss said I should use it to write. I told him no. I’m pretty sure AI made him from an amalgamation of pseudo people.
Thank you, Chuck. Love this post!
January 10, 2024 — 9:49 PM
Andy Peterson says:
Unfortunately things get really tricky when we are arguing against any version of art-making because it “isn’t art”. Modernism blew that door off long ago and now we are unable to box it back in. Saying that art needs to be made by a human reflecting their skills and technique becomes very problematic.
I’m sure that there are many books you’ve read (or at least started to read) which you would not qualify as art despite someone having slaved over them using all of their skills and techniques in order to bring a well-intentioned conception into reality. Just as there are works of visual art which were made with hardly any skill, and yet which are critically acclaimed. No, technique or skills cannot be the hallmark of art.
Unfortunately neither can “intention” because lets face it, as a viewer and consumer of art we are left to guess just how much intention when into something. For the vast majority of the art we encounter we will never be able to know why it was made, what the artist was attempting to express, or how they wanted it to be received. No artist can predict that.
I’d like to tease out two different things which arise from these kinds of arguments. Both of which I think are very important to discuss.
In regard to skill, labor, technique, etc I think we need to consider the value for the artist rather than for the viewer. Putting one’s time and energy into something always returns rewards for the creator. There are things we learn through trial and error, iteration and curiosity, and the mystery of muscle memory, which we simply cannot learn by consuming media. There is real, very important, value that comes from the making of things. That value, however, stays mostly within the artist. This should be celebrated and talked about much more than it is. Everyone should make things because to make things is to be human and to get in touch with our world in a useful and enlightening way.
In regards to the intention or concept of the work, it might also be useful to flip the perspective. Instead of basing the value of a work of art on what we think resides in the work itself, we might ask ourselves what we are getting out of it. The ability to self-reflect has been discouraged because thinking about what we consume is a sure fire way to keep us from consuming what others want. If we practice reflecting on how the things we consume affect our lives, it will become clear very quickly that some things make our lives better, and some things worse. How do you feel after contemplating an image, no matter how it was generated? Is your curiosity piqued, do you feel inspired, are you emotionally moved or intellectually challenged? When the experience has ended do you think back and feel that it was time well spent? Developing a sense of taste and building a habit of standing by what we judge to be worth our time is the most effective way to affect what sorts of things end up in front of our eyes. Consumer culture is there to give us what it thinks we want, and if we change what we actually want it will eventually bend our way.
Critical thinking skills and building our individual sense of taste has always been a way to liberate oneself from the quagmire.
Does it solve the ethical issues, no. Stealing is always wrong no matter what the medium or the context. AI didn’t invent that, even if it is ramping up the scale.
Blacklisting AI because it isn’t “art” doesn’t seem helpful to me. Using AI and the flood of uninteresting content that is being created to start a conversation about what we consume and why, now that is something I find interesting.
January 10, 2024 — 10:16 PM
ry says:
‘homonym’ as a homonym of ‘hominem’, wow!
January 11, 2024 — 11:59 AM
Michelle says:
2023 will always be The Year of the AI Bro Moron for me. Could not go anywhere without some asshole sounding off about how ChatGPT (in my head I read it as chat gypped and that’s how I remember the acronym) was going to come for us all and you better get out of the way because blah blah horse buggies and blah blah innovation blah blah so convenient to outsource thinking because it’s not like these people were good at it anyway. I eventually got temporarily banned for “report abuse” when I started reporting these accounts as shill bots, which they likely are. Can’t wait until the next tech bro con is somehow even dumber than this one.
January 11, 2024 — 1:33 PM
TJ says:
Hey, Eric. If “actual truth” were singular we wouldn’t be having such an interesting conversation about legitimate roles for AI. And I think it is a true ad hominem attack to say that Chuck’s passionate development of ideas about the nature of art is “other nonsense,” even though nonsense is one of my favorite things. Many of us who like to make stuff keep the question, “what is art?” in a secret velvet pocket inside disguises we wear when we’re incognito. That’s the question that’s got Chuck all fired up, and most of us are enjoying the heat. When no one is looking I take the question out for a quick nibble. Its robust flavor increases over time and seasons stories, essays, poems, and discussions. Also, I have questions for you: Would an ad homonym attack be on homonyms or by homonyms? Would a word have to be both homophone and homograph to do such a thing? Is there a remedy?
January 11, 2024 — 5:53 PM
Alan Graham says:
AI cannot understand humanity and art is an expression of the human condition. Therefore what it craetes isn’t art, it’s only a simulation of art.
What bothers me the most though, is I think AI has invented a new type of racism/cultural appropriation which was not on my 2023 bingo card.
I was recently in a posh Vietnamese restaurant where all of the “photos” on the wall, were actually generate by AI. They were all older Vietnamese men in traditional Vietnamese garb, some of which were in rice paddies. The photos were for sale, and told a story of the female chefs journey from Vietnam. The artist who created all the images was actually the owner of the restaurant and a white man.
Now I know you’ll say, well Alan, lots of people from other races and backgrounds create art based on other cultures and experiences they have never had, and I’ll say, this is not a person creating art. This is an AI shitting out an approximation of what it was told to create based on feelings and experiences it cannot understand.
It cannot feel, it doesn’t have any experience being Vietnamese, it doesn’t understand the hardships of these made-up people it’s trying to convey. It’s simply creating imaginary people from some prompt like: old wrinkled Vietnamese man in a hat in a rice paddy, make him look weathered and sad.
WTF.
AI cannot pull from any personal experience. It has no empathy. It doesn’t posses the ability to understand “sad”. What it creates is a hollow interpretation of what it understands to be sadness from an accumulation of billions of images. That’s not art. And in this case…it’s fucking racist.
Burn it with fire.
Anyway, I did my own experiment with this and posted it on Threads. Including it below.
January 12, 2024 — 3:41 AM
vjallison1974 says:
I’m a book cover artist as well as an established author. I will *never* use AI for anything I do, from writing to cover art. By using AI barfed up “art”, you’re stealing work from people like me, any photographers and artists’ work I use (and pay for) in my cover designs, as well as any models who are in the stock photos I use as well.
As for the writing, that comes from me. Not AI, no one else. As Nora Roberts once said, “If a book has my name on it, I wrote it. Every word of it.”
I also dropped a computer client due to her copyright infringements and her thinking it’s “okay” to write books using AI. It’s NOT.
January 12, 2024 — 9:08 AM
maskedplatypus says:
TJ,
“homonym” in my post would be (as I’m sure everybody knows) a typo for “hominem” — an embarrassing typo, for which I have no excuse. Thank you for not making it the main thrust of your criticism.
I to like to discuss “what is art” but when I discuss that question, I want to discuss the question and look at it, not make wild assertions that (perhaps willfully?) ignore any need for a basis. such a question deserves more than the purely subjective, emotion-only driven word vomiting Chuck does here. Lots of claims, no actual evidence. It is my hope that this is NOT the sort of thing that converts people from blatantly using AI instead of doing anything themselves. It’s purely an attack, not any sort of apologetics. I feel it greatly distracts from any productive discussion that can be had.
As for my comment being ad hominem, I strongly disagree. Ad hominem is attacking the person, not their argument. I’m pretty certain that I only said the post was terrible, not Chuck himself.
As for your specific questions, I believe an “ad homonym” attack would be an attack ON homonyms, but my Latin familiarity is shaky at best (or, better said, non-existent). I think homophones and homographs bear equal weight as part of the definition of homonym, so… I don’t know? If you’re feeling playful, only one is needed. If you want to play the Hackmaster version, both are needed, and their veracity as respectively homophone and homograph would need to be verified by three independent experts and witnessed by a notary. There is no remedy. All is meaningless.
More broadly, I realize that Chuck’s post is mostly a rant, and not intended to be a well structured argument, but it triggered me, for reasons I cannot fully explain at this point because I haven’t taken the time to understand them. And, therefore, my comments are possibly not warranted at all? Like I said, it’s all meaningless.
Perhaps Chuck’s reply to my comment was the most apt and complete when he said “nah I think I’m good”
January 12, 2024 — 3:52 PM
Chris Vermeers says:
The counterargument to “buggy whips” is “Segways”. We don’t have to adopt every technology that is hyped as “world-changing”. When they’re absurd, like the fake “AI” algorithms, and demonstrably can’t really do what they’re supposed to do, then we can ignore the CEOs demanding that they are owed our consumer gratitude because they hatched a stupid idea.
But back to Segways, it shook out that there were some use cases for them, though not enough to sustain the product in the long run (the base model went out of production back in 2020 and now there are pretty much only wheelchairs and similarly necessary mobility aids), but for the most part people eventually ignored them as irrelevant, or even dangerous – look up what happened to Jimi Heselden, the owner of the Segway company. A friend of mine was shunted onto an “AI” phone therapist by their medical provider, and if they hadn’t already had experience in the particular subject matter at hand, they tell me, the advice they were given by the “AI” therapist could have proven detrimental or even fatal to someone in their situation. I hear that some people who write code have been using “AI” tools to write code that they then proceed to clean up, so that might be a potential use case. But it isn’t the future of therapy, and certainly not of art.
January 13, 2024 — 3:07 AM
Cuir Pork says:
Chat GPT’s response is priceless when asked to respond to the 5 points provided in the same style and tone as presented. Though I doubt the site will post this in good faith, I am hoping the author gets to read it at least.
ChatGPT:
Look, I get it. You’re all up in arms about AI, crying about how it’s stealing your precious art and turning us all into mindless Soylent Green. Spare me the drama.
a) Boo-hoo, your work got “vacuumed up” without your precious permission. Newsflash: AI is trained on a mishmash of internet content, not some targeted attack on your so-called masterpiece. Get over yourself.
b) Oh, the environment! Because we all know your artistic genius is more important than the planet. Yeah, AI uses resources, but so does everything else in the tech world. It’s a problem, but let’s not pretend your rant is saving the world.
c) Big companies, tech bros, and billionaires – oh my! Yeah, they’re in it for the money. Shocker. That’s capitalism for you. Get off your high horse, Captain Obvious.
d) Misinformation? Yeah, like your social media feed was ever a beacon of truth. AI-generated content is just a drop in the ocean of fake news. Blame human stupidity, not the machines.
e) Whining about AI devaluing art and artists struggling to pay rent. Guess what? Times change. Adapt or whine in your Gofundme echo chamber.
f) Stagnating art? Please. If AI creates garbage, it’s because humans feed it garbage. Take a look in the mirror before blaming the machines.
g) Devaluing art? Like your overpriced, pretentious doodles were the pinnacle of value. Artists have always been undervalued; AI isn’t making it worse, it’s just revealing the truth.
In summary, your melodramatic tirade is nothing more than a self-centered rant. AI is a tool, not the enemy. Get a grip.
January 13, 2024 — 3:29 AM
terribleminds says:
Oh, I’m glad to let this comment through, if only because it eagerly displays the mediocrity of ChatGPT. And still lying, like ChatGPT does.
If this is its output, it’s wasting what it’s stealing.
You call this “priceless,” and I’d agree, only in the sense it’s worth nothing, not even the click necessary to have it generate this response. Definitely not the ethical and environmental cost of use.
January 13, 2024 — 9:56 AM
Jon says:
I broadly agree with your arguments, but I have two objections:
“If I tell a bartender to make me a cocktail, I don’t claim I made, or invented, the cocktail, okay? The bartender had the skills. You just had a drink order.”
By my understanding of the social rules surrounding this you in fact *do* claim to have invented the cocktail if you give the bartender the recipe and that recipe is sufficiently novel. This objection is to the example, not to the point it’s intended to illustrate.
Secondly, what gives me pause is the potential use of artificial generation by people who do in fact do *some* of the work. To use my past self as an example, I had an idea for a comic once. Not just an idea: a decent chunk of a script, with specific artistic direction on the important bits. I write, I don’t draw, and consequently this never went anywhere (I found an artist who produced an absolutely stunning first page or two and then had Real Life intervene and it never resumed).
Is the idea of using artificial generation to create the parts of a multimedia work (in this example text and drawing) that one cannot oneself create inherently an affront to the idea of art? I don’t know that I can agree with that, at least not so far as it applies to single-person or small-group creative teams—certainly a comic studio saying “well, we hired a dozen writers but none of them draw so AI it is” doesn’t fly, but at the same time I’m not comfortable with saying that the person writing in their bedroom needs to win the lottery with a volunteer, pay an artist out of pocket, or abandon their idea when artificial generation exists.
(There’s room to investigate things like commercialization. My almost-comic was always intended for distribution without charge; had I been intending to sell it the argument for “hire an artist” gets a lot harder to push back on. But this comment is long enough as it is.)
Fortunately (?) current generative AI is so much of a mess on so many levels that it isn’t immediately critical to answer the question of whether a one-medium artist doing something multimedia for free can ethically use it, because it’s built out of theft. But eventually these questions will need answers, and I argue we need to be recognizing them as distinct from the straightforward “turn crank, get picture” case *today*. Likewise your photography example immediately raises the questions “what if you edit the artificially generated work? Substantially? Is sitting for hours waiting for the light to get just right and tweaking your aperture and exposure and lens choice really fundamentally different from artificially generating hundreds or thousands of variations with ongoing tweaks to the prompts in reaction to the results?” You might say yes, but I think there needs to be more on the reasoning there.
Anyway, that’s my devil’s advocacy for the day. And now that I reread your post I see you do have a “yes, there’s a theoretical future in which there are artificial generators that could be ok to use” bit near the end, so I guess you can collapse a lot of the above into “that ‘as it exists today’ should have been right up front because it’s one thing to condemn factories as a concept and quite another to condemn Victorian workhouses.”
January 14, 2024 — 9:05 AM
Hugues Ross says:
Regarding the accessibility argument, I also want to note that there are some (sparse / emerging / half-baked) attempts to provide means to create digital art to folks who lack the physical capacity to go through typical workflows, no AI generation needed.
How do I know? I’ve been working on one for myself for over a year, because for a while I was unable to draw due to wrist issues. I’ve found a few others here and there, most are cobbled together by the same folks who need these kinds of tools because there’s so little money and interest in the subject.
I’m also of the opinion that AI generation isn’t the answer, and moreover probably takes away attention and support that other options desperately need! If anyone who isn’t disabled raises this point, you should ask them what they were doing to help before these image generators came out. From my experience, they weren’t doing a damn thing.
January 15, 2024 — 2:59 PM
Jared Stein says:
That was a lot of swears. But the link to Stephen Fry reading Nick Cave’s letter made it all right.
This does make me wish I took the question, “what makes art art?” more seriously back in college (especially the craft vs. art debate). At the time, it seemed like the question was largely prompted by art trolls, but in hindsight maybe I should have paid more attention to what Duchamp et al had to say.
January 15, 2024 — 6:52 PM
Fatman says:
This is… indeed priceless. A completely garbage response, generated by an “AI” in response to the assertion that AI generates garbage.
I don’t know if your intention was to validate all the points from the original post, but if so, well played!
January 16, 2024 — 1:35 PM
Deborah Makarios says:
“The art exists in that execution” – but in some perspectives this might depend on the art concerned.
For example, the high-profile “gardener” who gushes about how his identity is merged with that of his garden, and then admits that he hasn’t done the actual gardening in years, he has a man for that.
Architecture might be another example where the execution is not done by the “artist”.
Still, I wouldn’t touch AI with a bargepole. (There’s enough barf on the internet without a robot-dog gobbling it up and rebarfing it.)
I find myself wondering if people will start abandoning filters and editing for their social photos as a way to prove that this, at least, is real.
January 17, 2024 — 10:04 PM
Grandoogis the sneeze says:
You’re mistaken Wendig. I make AI art because I want it to be as awful as physically possible on purpose because it looks funny. Do you think I make “Shrek eating a minon that’s covered in bleeding cheese in the parking lot of a Winn-Dixie that’s on fire while clowns fly around in the sky.” for any other reason?
It is funny.
January 22, 2024 — 5:44 PM
Lauralynn Elliott says:
I have a lot to say about this, but I’ll make this as brief as possible. Artists, as a rule, have never been given the respect they deserve. (You can tell by how people say someone’s art is too expensive.) AI is going to make this worse. I have a 12-year-old granddaughter who is an excellent artist, and I worry for her future. You are so correct…art is about people.
You can also tell AI to write you a novel. I had an author friend do that and send it to her editor just to see what she said. She came back with “You did NOT write this.” It was awful. So I do see some hope with this aspect of it. I don’t see how AI can generate a good novel. But the art, I’m very scared of.
January 24, 2024 — 8:44 AM
callmesalticidae says:
//Blacklisting AI because it isn’t “art” doesn’t seem helpful to me.//
Pretty much this. I don’t particularly care about the definition of “art” and what effect A.I. might have on this. Carefully constructed definitions of art intended to include all human activity and exclude all A.I. activity do not actually carve reality at the joints, because “”art”” does not exist. It’s a label that we use to (productively) simplify parts of the universe, and in the case of art it is often a label that we use in order to make a value judgment (notice how, whatever their political persuasion, people generally say “this is not art” when they want to denigrate something and rarely say “this is not art” of something that they really like).
What I care about is the impact on humans and especially their ability to earn a living. If there were a UBI or some other procedure that ensured that every human could live a decent life regardless of what they were able to do, then I would not care very much about A.I., just like the original Luddites would not have cared very much about the machinery they were wrecking if not for the fact that this machinery threatened their livelihoods.
February 4, 2024 — 5:52 PM
Dave Williams says:
Your post is like a human-centric “yawp over the roofs of the world.”
The beginning of the post resounds with art being by people and for people. It’s in the choices of what to put in and what to leave out. It’s in the struggle to move the idea from your head to paper, canvas, piano keys, etc. (Using “struggle” here, inspired by Nick Cave’s letter that Stephen Fry read aloud.)
I’m not as across-the-board “NO!” on AI with art as your post puts down. If an artist wants to try it in their art and show us the result, fine. Reminds me of Duchamp signing R. Mutt on a urinal and calling it “Fountain,” raising the question “Is this art?”
But if artists use AI in their work, they should be open about it. I posted a Dada-AI experiment on my blog, and I was open about the use of AI.
Some food in the grocery store comes with labels such as “organic” and “free-range.” Perhaps art will develop labels like “human-made” or “AI-assisted.”
May 1, 2024 — 8:55 AM