Why I find the push to use AI in art so infuriating

There are plenty of useful things that AI can likely be helpful with, but like a lot of writers, artists, and other creative types, I find the corporate drive to the replace the act of creation with a machine to be infuriating.

The worst thing about generative AI for writing should be the simple fact that beyond a curiosity, who gives a shit what a computer has to say? More objectively, the fact that some markets are closing to open submissions because they’re getting flooded with this crap is deeply troublesome and will mean fewer and fewer opportunities for new authors.

That said, that’s not what bothers me the most. What for some reason bothers me the most is the way AI is being marketed.

I see these ads on Facebook all the time: “Do you have ideas and don’t have the time to write them? Have the AI do the writing for you. Blah blah blah.”

This represents some of the most annoying thinking. It’s the “idea guy” mentality. It’s the sort of thing the biggest douche in the office would say: “I’m an idea guy.”

And this is extra annoying when it comes to art. Like it’s the “idea” that matters. While I’m certain that there are examples of having a really unique concept so compelling that it’s the concept that mattered, I can assure you that in most books and other works of art it’s not the concept that mattered but the execution. It’s not the idea of a novel but the telling of it that matters.

I’ve written seven complete novels. Four were published, one will never be (got destroyed by the pandemic), and two are currently being shopped. Every one of these started I think with a pretty good concept, but that concept pales to what I discovered during the process of writing. The best parts of all those books came because I had to do the work. In particular I’m thinking that in End Times At Ridgemont High, there were all sorts of funny moments with Dean and even important changes to the plot that came when I spent time with him and the other characters. Putting myself into his stoner-slacker mindset helped me come up with the parts of the book I liked the most. I don’t think generative AI can do that. The best it can do is copy what someone else has done and most likely rather less well, like a faded text as a printer runs out of ink.

One of the two books I’m looking for a publisher for now has my absolute favorite moment from anything I’ve written, maybe anything I’ve read. It’s toward the end of Act 2. Every time I read this during editing I cracked up. It doesn’t just make me proud that I thought of it, I genuinely enjoy revisiting it because imagining it happen makes me happy. I didn’t have that moment in mind when I had the concept for the book. I didn’t have it when I outlined the book. I knew the characters had to come up with something at that point, some means of resolving that threat, but I had no idea what that would be until I got to that point in the writing and it revealed itself to me. And this thing the characters do is so unique to this book that’s there’s no way that a glorified chat bot that’s been trained on other books would ever come up with it.

I have no idea where this mad drive to give people something so few of us want will end up going. There seem to be so many problems with the current uses of AI, but the powers that be seem so invested in its acceptance that they’re unwilling to give up on it. In a way it’s a shame because there’s probably interesting research to be done, but because the way our market system works, everything needs to be rolled out immediately, especially if the powers that be think it can exclude labor from the economy. All I know is that this is never going to result in the clever bits, the feeling bits, the bits that make art so important.