My favorite book is "Maps of the imagination : The writer as a Cartographer" by Perter Turchi. It's my favorite book and I've still haven't finished it. Because each page is so interesting that it makes my mind devolve into so much thoughts about writing, art , and the process and intent of creation, that I find myslef stuck and keep re-reading it from the start each time.
Inside I've found concepts of writing I didn't know how to explain and philosophical approches to art and creation. There is a chapter that only consist of talking about what INS'T in a piece of art/story.
And this first chapter gifted me with quotes I keep in my mind and that I love. And with the rise of generative AI (that I despise), these quotes arm me with answers to explain why I despise this so much (if we ignore the theft and consequences to the environment. These quotes comes from another book, called "A Giacometti Portrait", where Giacometti, a painter and sculptor, paint the portrait of his writer friend James Lord. The book is the erratic story of how the portrait was made.
Lord : I said, "It's difficult for me to imagine how things must appear to you."
Giacometti : "That's exactly what I'm trying to do," he said, "to show how things appear to me.
Lord : "But what," I asked, "is the relation between your vision, the way things appear to you, and the technique that you have at your disposal to translate that vision into something which is visible to others?
Giacometti : "That's the whole drama," he said. "I don't have such a technique."
(ie : AI cannot do perfect art because even real humans cannot do perfect art, AI try to solve an unsolvable problem. AI cannot gives you the perfect technique because it doesn't exist)
Giacometti : "Sometimes it's very tempting to be satisfied with what's easy, particularly if people tell you it's good. . . . What's essential is to work without any preconception whatever, without knowing in advance what the picture is going to look like.... It is very, very important to avoid all preconception, to try to see only what exists. . . to translate one's sensation."
(ie : Ai doesn't follow the essential principle described here. It works with the intent in mind. AND it's the easiest way out)
And my FAVORITE QUOTE from Giacometti :
"Well," he said, "we've gone far. We could have gone further still, but we have gone far. It's only the beginning of what it could be. But that's something, anyway."
THE CHOICE OF "STOPPING" WHEN YOU ARE CREATING ART IS ALSO A WAY OF DEFINING WHAT YOUR ART IS. By stopping you define that your art is THIS and nothing else. It's only what is in fron of you, on your notebook, on your screen, on your canvas. You expressed what you wanted to express and stopped because you decided it's finished. There is as much intent in stopping as there is in beginning and creating. And AI cannot do that, because with a prompt you stop as soon as you begin, the intent is butchered in a sentence and the process of intent dissapear.
Generative AI is shit, keep creating art and what makes you happy.
