Another thing I'm thinking about:
It makes a ton of sense to me that you could be legitimately writing good stuff right now with the assistance of AI. I think if I fired up Claude or Chatgpt or whatever, right now, and asked it to give me a plot, or to give me a scaffold, or to add a complicating element, I could write something really good. Because I'm a decently good writer, and more than that, I'm a decently good fanfic writer—I'm used to folding in ideas and plots and story elements that aren't original to me, and doing something fun with the result. I think I could use AI to make something, in this moment, that was 1) inclusive of sincere artistic labor on my part, and 2) a really fucking good story.
I bet there are a lot of writers who are doing exactly that, and who feel angry that people are treating the whole work like it came from nowhere, instead of something that they made themselves, when they DID make it themselves—most of it, or part of it, or the seams of it, or something. That really makes emotional sense to me. I would absolutely, ABSOLUTELY be doing this if I were nineteen. I cannot stress how much I would be doing this, and feeling happy and proud of the output—and I wouldn't even be wrong, because I WOULD have put real work into it, and it WOULD be good.
but aside from all the other reasons I find genAI repulsive—the climate damage, the theft of time and labor and expertise, the damage it's doing to literacy and truth and the foundations of what it means to communicate with another person across time and space—I'm a big enough age to know empty calories when I see them.
that story would be good!!!
but it wouldn't help me with the NEXT story. what it would teach me as an artist is how to write a story with AI, and that's naturally the skill I'd keep leveling up, because whenever I hit a weak spot, I'd use the AI to help me, and my other creative skills would atrophy and atrophy and I wouldn't be learning how to do anything NEW, and eventually, you bet your ass my taste would atrophy too, because that is how palates work. it's olestra for the brain. it feels like it's filling you up, but it's not. it might taste like a real potato chip on the tongue, but you'll die of malnutrition if you tried to live off it (and you'll have a really bad time in the bathroom later.)
again, no real conclusions except that I'm really grateful I get to shield my nineteen year old self from this kind of decision, and I feel really, really bad for the nineteen year olds trying to be creative right now.
gummygunk
pixelskylines
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