Don't Feed the Machine - Creativity over Artificially Generated Efficiency

It started with ads for AI assistive writing software. Then AI-generated books, videos, and pictures started popping up on every Internet space imaginable. Then that amped up to ads purporting to teach me how to make money off a book I can write in 2 minutes with AI. Even in your everyday lives, you’ve undoubtedly encountered people using generative AI to do schoolwork.

There’s a spectrum of usage: from initial generation of ideas, to technical/grammatical assistance, to asking ChatGPT to write a novel for you as a fully autonomous side grift (as countless tutorials online will teach you how to do - it’s become a fully fledged practice). There was even a case where an author accidentally left an AI prompt inside her published book, with a paragraph reading ‘I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style’ (another romance author). 

The influx of AI-generated books on Amazon, music on Spotify and art on Etsy oversaturates an already saturated market and sidelines talent from people who genuinely love the work, instead of seeing it as a grift ‘til the next shiny thing. So it’s really about which practice you’d rather support. It also doesn’t help that these companies have an incentive to allow AI-generated ‘art’, as uploading it to their platforms allows them to circumvent paying dividends to the artist if the ‘artist’ in question is a machine, and therefore pocket all the money. Generative AI models will always protect & advance corporate interests, because discouraging critical thought, sidelining the individual for the machine, and reducing art to a product with a monetary end are all inherently good for the corporate status quo. (I guess part of me also enjoys the irony of the literary industry being seen as an easy way to make money. That was not what I was constantly told growing up.) 

It’s not about ‘making art more accessible’ when anyone with access to AI, due to having a device, also has access to word-processing software, free music-creating software, and paper & pens. The ‘accessibility’ argument, then, can only refer to the talent & hard work part of it, meaning that all AI serves is an undeserved shortcut to reap rewards you didn’t sow. 

It’s not a Luddite symptom of being cast aside by the times, either. People love to rebut with e.g. sewing machines, but the key difference is that art has never been about efficiency. Art has always been a process as opposed to an end. Think of all the popular criticism leveraged against ‘modern’ art (loosely applied), that ‘it has no meaning/intention’ and ‘I could do it myself’: doesn’t that apply perfectly to AI-generated art? 

Of all the things to outsource to machines, I can’t fathom the rationale of creative writing (or any of the arts in general) being one of them. Why would anyone want to read something that has no intention, no mediating consciousness, no worldview being imparted? The machine doesn’t want to express anything; it just wants to appease the prompt-writer so they can make 20 cents and call it a day. How is art going to make you feel something if its artist didn’t also feel something while creating it? 

Humans, by virtue of being humans, are constantly trying to stand out. Large language models, by virtue of generating most likely outcomes, are constantly trying to be average, unremarkable, middle-of-the-pack. That alone should be enough to disincentivise their usage in favour of your own, or supporting other people’s, genuine efforts. 

Ultimately, we live in a world that’s inundated with companies jostling for every bit of space this planet has to give. The only space they can’t get at is the 1200 cm³ of your mind. Consequently, its associated machinations - thinking, learning, creating - are the most important things you have. Don’t hand them over to billionaire corporate overlords.