I must confess to being a little confused whenever someone suggests AI-generated text as a way to triumph over writer’s block. If you can’t bring yourself to write and get AI to write for you, you still haven’t gotten over the block. You haven’t written anything – you’re still blocked.
It sounds to me like saying: “Oh you can’t paint? Get someone else to paint for you. Then you will be a painter.”
It’s almost as if people don’t understand what making something means anymore, as if there is some grand confusion about what creating art entails. Or even that humans don’t understand what being human means.
To be sure, this is not a new confusion. There are many who confuse creativity with productivity. They think of churning out text as writing, and the production of pictures as art. Perhaps because they themselves only ever get to see this process effected from the outside, the inside workings of the creative mind remain strange and incomprehensible to them.
I remember someone in the sales department once asking a creative colleague why a certain artist was refusing to make something they needed made. There was genuine bewilderment in the sales guy’s voice when he said, “I don’t get it. Why won’t they do it? They are getting the money, no?”
He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that a creative person was not a tap he could turn on and off at will in exchange for cash. That the creative mind could be motivated by factors beyond something he recognised (and was providing) was not something his imagination could conceive of.
If you browse the social web, you will find a lot of people talking about making art. There are writers and artists and musicians who talk about their work and even impart advice about how to go about doing what they do. But it all kind of tends to hover around craft and the physical actions that make up the process of bringing a product or an object into existence. Writers will talk about recipes for designing characters and plot, painters will discuss brushes and tools, musicians discuss instruments and ways of playing them. They do this of course because these things are easy to understand. They can be observed and replicated by those looking for creative instruction.
But there is an aspect to creativity that is not so easily translated into easily actionable advice. It doesn’t get talked about because it is hard to talk about. Writers spend their careers trying to find the right words to do it, painters the right colours.
It is life, and all that life makes us. It is where the desire to make something – anything – emerges from in the first place. It is why the artist makes art.
This why doesn’t live inside a neatly-shaped capsule. It has no clear form because it is different for everybody. Writers write to communicate their why. Artists paint to show their why. Musicians sing to help people understand theirs. In a kinda sorta circular way, art is the reason behind its own existence. It doesn’t exist because people are creative. It exists because people exist.
And this is exactly why generative AI being part of this discourse unsettles me. Sure, the need for a product can be satisfied using a chatbot or an image generator. But it is not coming from the place art comes from. The finer details of a work of art – the way the words flow, the way the colours sparkle, are not incidental to artistry. They are a direct result of the life that the artist has lived. They are the shadows of the artist’s joys and sorrows and all that they have loved and hated as life happened to them.
To think of AI-generated slop as art is to fundamentally misunderstand what art is. But more tragically, it is a misunderstanding of who we are. The consumerist cultural framework that the web operates under right now (thanks to Silicon Valley thought leaders) seems designed to aggravate this faulty understanding. But I am hopeful that we will emerge from this confusion pit with a better handle on what makes us us.
