I don’t want to paint or write long-form fiction in the age of AI.
This isn’t me going on strike or anything. It’s just a report from my soul-crushed inner landscape of not feeling like making art and not having felt like making art for the past few years.
Doing everything by hand feels pointless and tedious like writing a desktop app in all assembly without macros would be in the age of compilers. “Kind of like construction work with a toothpick for a tool.” as the lyric goes.
While combining AI and my own penstrokes into one image is taboo in this age of anti-AI sentiment. Using AI for flatting or backgrounds or art assistance is just as frowned upon as full-on prompt-jockeying and slop-pushing.
I can’t bring myself to paint or write longform. It’s like how stairs become that much more tedious to climb once an elevator is installed next to them. The hacker mindset, right? We want to do things for the first time and solve problems generally and recursively, solve a whole class of problems in one go.
As a painter I embraced G’MIC and brush-editing and scripting and path effects. 3D-modelling some blocks to help me with perspective lines that I then painted over. The digital equivalent of stippling with a toothbrush instead of placing dot by dot with a finetip. That was core to my whole art ethos: I make tools in order to make my art. I’ve made auto-masking scripts, Emacs comic lettering modes, auto-hatching brushes, stamp sprays, feathering path effects. For writing it’s been working on outliners and text metadata and timeline sorting tools.
I always try to look for the general solution.
Please don’t get the wrong idea that I’m trying to blame this bleak ennui on the anti-AI crowd. I think some of their arguments are great and I don’t look at AI art either. This isn’t a manifesto, I haven’t figured out an answer yet.
I’m not trying to push a context where I could combine AI art and my own art into one work, where I could make a comic mixing my own drawings and AI, where I could figure out some way to have AI assistance when writing that’s still primarily my own voice, without it getting hate and without me getting bans.
I understand full well the reasons why it can’t be like that. People in my bubble hate everything that AI has touched and they hate it not out of irrationality but for good reason and I do to.
It’s just me feeling hopeless since everything I used to do—write, paint, make music, write programs—that’s all gone. I don’t have any other skills. I can’t do anything else and everything feels so meaningless and tedious.
So that’s the main soulcrush: I wish I could use the tools in conjuction with my own hand, like how a camera was both a blessing and a curse to realistic painters. When the camera was invented it ate that them but they could also use it as a tool for reference. But mixing in AI with art production is rightly condemned since this time around the camera is evil. It’s more like horse&buggy vs a gas-guzzling, earth-wrecking automobile than it is like canvas vs lens.
The secondary soulcrush is that even if I make art, publishing that art into this AI world doesn’t feel fun either. Not that I worry that AI would learn from it (I have consented to that. This web site has 1300 text posts and 300 images all made by me and most of them CC-BY-SA and I have not minded if AI wanted to learn from them. That’s been OK by me. I haven’t fought scraping), but trying to upload music into in a world where 40% of the hit list is fully AI made just isn’t something I want to do. I don’t want to be put on the same plate as an AI dish.
I know I harp on the Monet/Turner/Twombly exhibition all the time but putting Twombly up with Monet and Turner felt so wrong. I don’t want to slag Cy Twombly because I do like his art too. It’s just that it felt like such a staring-at-finger-and-missing-the-moon moment. “Oh these three artists all look blurry so they belong together” where Monet and Turner are impressionists, the ultimate right-side-of-the-brain sublime-what-you-see conduits, Twombly is a lexical symbolist. That is the opposite.
If I were any one of the three them I’d feel slightly offended to be equivocated is what I’m saying. All three of them are good but it’s like “If you think we are the same you don’t understand what we were trying to do”.
I pour my heart and soul into this stuff—I’m “painting my nightmares” as a friend said when I was painting with him around—and I don’t want it served up on the same menu as a bunch of machine talk.
Or for another version of the same metaphor: ever been to a party and as you’re in a productive but exhausting conversation with some privitive screwhead that you’re giving the 101 to, up comes a even more wrongheaded schmoe and starts “agreeing” with you and now you’ve got two problems because you’re stuck in the middle of the original argument and the “whoah what did you just say?!” Completely hecked-up new argument.
Yeah, yeah, when I hate AI the least I can think of it as sort of a rhyzomatic L-space, an organism that grew through roots of a million voices. It’s not a machine talking, it’s us—it’s just been filtered and composted and regrown into new meaning by this organic-like ginormous ANN. But any such appreciation for AI I could possibly twist and turn and force my mind into feeling, I’m gonna put on permanent hold until the two biggest problems—first is is the extremely externalized and un-accounted-for costs to the planet and to other humans, and second is the increased centralization of means-of-production ownership—are solved, and it’s looking right now like they’ll never be.
I’m right there with y’all: When I find out that a song I’m listening to is AI, I turn it off. That’s happened twice now. I believe I can tell right away when a text or image is AI made but I know for sure I can not tell when it’s music. So it’s not out of repulsion I turn it off. I don’t know why. I just do.
I fear that a misread of the main text and of this appendix is as some sort of passive-aggressive slag agaist the AI-hating crowd. That I’m trying to be all sly and smug and friends-romans-countrymen about it. But that’s not it. I do understand where the hate against AI is coming from. I think some of the arguments are really bad and I don’t agree with those parts of it (as a copyright hater I’m especially sickened by those arguments relying on a proprietarization of visual expression) but I’m trying to be super frank and transparent about that. I’m not trying to be swifty or satirical here. We’re all stuck in this wrongheaded world during this utterly misguided era and navigating it best we can. To the exent that people feel threatened by AI, I do too and that’s the whole point of this essay.
My entire reason for living has suddenly been swept away and with it my footing. I don’t know what to do for a job and I don’t know what to do for leisure. It all feels so meaningless. Don’t worry, I’m not about to [end it][ei]—my mental health toolbox is jam packed and I get by with a li’l help from my friends. For now. But on an existential and philosophical level (and on an income level because what’s my job gonna be?), I’m like what the heck? Where do I even go from here? I don’t know how to do anything other that this. I thought I was renaissance and multi-field with my writing and music and art and programming and game-design but it’s all been fell-swooped by this slop singularity. I’m too dyspraxic for woodcarving or sewing. All I could do was this stuff.
I’m not saying never. Maybe I’ll just pick up the pen or the guitar one day when I for some dumb reason feel like it. The most recent batch of art I made was all pen & paper. Scribbling every mermaid scale by hand. Gillian Welch has a song lyric “We’re gonna do it anyway even if it doesn’t pay” (originally a pro-copyright screed and that part does not sit well with a copyright abolitionist like me, but that’s okay since it’s such a great song). Yeah, maybe we are. I just don’t feel like it and I haven’t felt like it in a long time.
Last time the world faced this problem, just over a hundred years ago, what happened was modernism. When the machine (the camera, in that case), mastered the means more than we could, what was left to us was pure ends, pure expression. Maybe this time around the machine has encroached a little bit too much on the expression part of things—for sure it has on the slop algo side of things, but that particular variety of suffering is optional—but maybe it can still become a vehicle, a communication tool for what we want to tell each other.