I've been losing sleep over AI generative art recently. It probably doesn't help that both my parents are illustrators, and indoctrinated me in the sanctity of art from childhood with a conviction usually reserved for suicide bombers.
I feel a real grief for all the concept artists and illustrators who have had their work scraped and regurgitated by scrapists.
I draw for a living myself, and I understand that for people who love to draw, that high is irreplaceable. All the detachment of an opiate, but you leave your dream restored. I wish more people drew, and this technology guarantees many-- particularly marginalized and financially precarious people with vision-- will not. All at the low low cost of our environment.
As an author and sometimes a screenwriter, I have every confidence our sociopathic corporate overlords will try and jerry-rig the next 50 Shades out of a chatbot. They have said so, to our faces, at the negotiating table ahead of the WGA strike.
There will be an AI best seller, polished by a ghostwriter, and the tech bros will jeer in our faces about that too.
Although I have no doubt, it will take a great deal of ghostwriting. LLMs simply do not have enough quality material to train on. There are a billion lines of codes yes, there are not a billion novels as good as War and Peace or scripts like No Country For Old Men. So someone will be the ghost in the machine, and they will get paid next to nothing, and their dream will live darkly deep inside and die with them.
The current AI output-- with its requisite human assists-- charms philistines, but unfortunately a lot of people are philistines. Every stone on the road to cultural hell is engraved with the words "Good enough."
But the worst, the worst thing you can say about a piece of art is that it is derivative. What we have are machines that literally derive. A kaleidoscope of good-enough, an amublatory graveyard of been-done ideas, is now sitting at the bottom of the ladder for upcoming artists and grinning at us: "leArn To PrOmpt"
Yet the goal of all art is to say something new. You can't find the new in what has been done. You cannot scrape the new.
My reaction to this overwhelming anxiety has been to immediately acquire a print by my favorite living painter. I am listening to new books read by talented voice actors who have heard people I will never meet. I am writing about how I feel right here, as a human with a finite life who only does things with my time when they matter to me. And this is what I'm writing:
No amount of good-enough excuses us from reaching for the new.
And if you are an artist who uses your hands or voice, please know that I love you.