Throwing my hat into the AI debate (warning: long pro, anti, and AI neutral post ahead. TL;DR at the end) in response to the many posts I see absolutely scandalized that anyone would degrade their faculties/stick their brain in the metaphorical dehydrator by employing a digital language scrambler for anything. Someone likened using ChatGPT to write a grocery list to “choosing not to be human” and I think we are losing. The plot! 🙃
On the intersection of creativity and AI (yes, I think these things can intersect):
I’ll start by saying that imo, pointing the entire finger at people who treat art as a product (and thus something ideally created with minimal effort) is missing the point. It’s not laziness or foolishness that makes some folks disconnected from artistic process or effort, or that encourages some folks to see generative AI as a solution to everything.
(I would even contend that the idea of some people being just totally lost to AI automation—i.e. putting their brains into an eternal dehydration chamber and handing over the juices to chatGPT—is a strawman. People remain creative. They also like to simplify tasks. That’s not inherently wrong, and it’s not on its own a destroyer of creative impulse. But more on this in a sec.)
Nonetheless, I also think the problem of people outsourcing too much of their own language ability to AI, especially young people, is very real. It would be cool if folks were good at deconstructing their own and others’ opinions using language. (Seems pretty convenient how many people, as evidenced by social media anyway, spend very little time cultivating the ability to do so—convenient for the fascist state I mean! There’s a reason the online bots are stupid.)
The reason for this state of affairs is not personal failing, laziness, or foolishness. (Shortsightedness? Maybe. But people can’t always see past their immediate needs and concerns, and that likely includes you, reading this.)
The reason is political and structural.
All that is of worth and value in our society, whether it’s housing or food or social recognition or praise, comes from the ability to successfully make and sell product. A degree is a product, one you pay for with a lot of money and by producing baby products (essays). Your own time and effort are products you must sell 5 days a week (or more) in order to afford necessities, which are all products. Food is a product. Clothing is a product. Art is a product.
Push product to live, push product to be successful. This is a fair description of the overpowering nature of our socioeconomic system, inside which people must function, and inside which people strive to be seen and to self-actualize to whatever degree possible.
Art, by any non-capitalistic definition, is something deeper, more joyful, holier, that belongs to all of us equally.
AI cannot replace art, because art is in the nebulous process of building a Thing. Or should i say, Building a thing.
Given this, AI can in fact—I cower in fear as I say it— be a tool of artistic process.
And—I further cower—IS a tool of artistic process, already.
When AI is used by coders who want to make a software they didn’t have the skillset to make before—something I’ve personally observed in the context of Sanskrit linguistics/South Asian studies—or by writers who want a safe space in which to consider their own ideas, isn’t there undoubtedly creative pleasure in such pursuits? When you call such people empty headed dullards who have forgotten what it means to be human, are you sure you’re entirely right?
All people (all life, all atoms and molecules) have creative impulses that can never be “replaced” by AI (where would they go?) But most people DO NOT get to act on their creativity in any meaningful portion of their daily lives. Most people pursue creative impulses very little, and subduct their creativity to the need to sell or make product very often. Is it any wonder they then use this new tool not just to build cool new software or have a meandering conversation about their OCs, both of which I would consider creative, artist-driven pursuits, but also to spare themselves some of the compulsory misery of writing and making stuff they don’t want to, for a proverbial bossman who wants them to?
Creativity requires AUTONOMY. Making your own choices. Making something you want to make. It isn’t just for writing your novel after work. It’s for constructing a shared world.
Yet the very fabric of people’s lives involves heavy restraints on their ability to create ANYTHING. Can I plant a garden in my (landlord’s) yard? No. Can I decide how my taxes are used? No. Do I have to write 500 cover letters pretending to want to participate in some exploitative or bloated industry that will suck me dry and bleed someone in the global south even drier? Sure do.
And don’t cut one single corner doing it, either, because someone on Tumblr will call you an idiot!
How can we say that people are stupid or lazy for sidestepping inauthentic, compulsory tasks, when wanting autonomy is part of being human, and being creative?
How can we judge people for being unable to extricate creativity from productivity (like someone using AI to help first-draft their own stories—an example I saw discussed on tumblr) when society did it first, by trapping us all in a never-ending engine of needing to produce constantly and produce quickly, in every aspect of life from education to work to entertainment?
Is it even an issue of individual laziness that some students want to skip writing an essay and get to the part where the essay gets the grade? Or is this a pragmatic, sensible, and inevitable desire for children coming of age in this system, where life and livelihood are made conditional on a degree, and learning for its own sake has been starved out of the educational system from the top down? (The education system often isn’t about learning, and the kids know that! Their apathy is telling us something.)
What insight is there in asserting that people who use AI just plain lack creativity, curiosity, or ethics, and that therein lies the whole problem? Do you think what lives inside them (and inside you) is so worthless and replaceable? Isn’t that collapsing art and product into one? (“YOUR product isn’t art; mine is. Therefore I am a real artist doing real art.”)
How can we say gen AI users entirely lack a creative process, when AI is a means INTO artistic process for some? (Isn’t that what they said about photography, that it was too easy compared to brushstrokes, that it took from the world wholesale without room for artistic interpretation?)
AI doesn’t threaten art; it threatens our claims to productivity through our art. (“I actually MADE something! You didn’t!”) Those two things are not the same. Our goal is to free creativity from its equation to product, and recognize that it lives inside process, which is ephemeral and which materiality can only gesture at.
Don’t get me wrong, I love slow mediums and art that showcases process. I love crafts that come to us from a time when we had fewer tools. I love chipping away at a project, and I love work as a path to meditation and grounding. Count yourself lucky if you get to nurture the slow, creative, process-oriented parts of you that others by DESIGN have lost touch with.
But have the humility and the humanistic grounding to recognize that even AI, even this insane corporate tool that’s guzzling fuel and vampirically drawing financial value from work whose monetary compensation it threatens, can be a tool of ideating, curiosity, and play for many people. Can give them back the time, energy, and capacity to find greater access to those things in themselves.
It seems like a messed up contradiction that generative AI could enable anything genuine or good, but do you not see how much of our enjoyment in the Western (and wider middle-upper class world) is already tied up in exploitation due to the structure of our global economy? You have to fight the exploitation, but you don’t get there by denying the functionality of new tools both for succeeding within the fucked up system AND for reclaiming some freedom and experimentation along the way. Despite evil, AI can enable beautiful things. Now what? What do you do when you can’t just close your eyes and dismiss the use of AI as pure laziness or selfishness or stupidity? What if other people aren’t simpler than you?
AI is a new and interesting tool from an ontological and linguistics perspective. Do you really have no curiosity what is going on there? Is it really as simple as “Using AI makes your brain dead?”
(I don’t doubt it can aid the process, don’t get me wrong. But people said the same thing about Google, and were both right and wrong. They said the same thing about social media algorithms, and that time were 100% right.)
The question is, how are people using these tools? To the good as well as to the bad? If you want to dismiss other humans en masse as stupider than you and suddenly devoid of meaning-making impulse or ability, maybe you’re also suffering from not using your mind enough in this moment, in favor of clinging to a story that is just too simple and self-aggrandizing to be true. (Maybe that’s because you feel threatened by something that plays with language and image but isn’t human, because you think it’s those Things—products, even—that make you human, and not the ineffable experience of being, which no one can take away from you.)
Simplifying reality means you’re not going to be able to confront it honestly. It is a waste of energy. Protest, lament, fight, and shape the ongoing trajectory of AI, but consider not totally demeaning people’s inner lives and impulses as lazier and shallower than yours. They’re not.
TL;DR In a world where product is everything, generative AI has an outsized role to play. But where creativity is nurtured without a mandate of productivity (i.e. where meeting material and spiritual needs is not conditional on selling product, thus freeing up creative energy), AI cannot threaten anything that matters to us. Fight for that world for the good of your fellow human beings!
