I intended to write about marketing this week, but instead, my brain is on another topic. Like every other thing these days, it touches on AI.
But really, it’s not about AI.
No. It is not.
I’ve said it before.
My favorite thing about AI is that it’s made me think deeply about what it means to be an artist. What it means to make art. And, indeed, what, exactly, art might be.
This is why I can say definitively that someone who simply pushes a button is definitively not making art.
Except for when they are.
I came across an interesting discussion in which David Perell interviewed Andy Weir.
Being a science fiction guy, I listened in while I was busy doing some of the more mundane bits of work it takes to be an Indie. Weir is an interesting guy. He’s a true nerd, and he clearly has fun with his writing. He also attempts—not always successfully—to tiptoe the line of politics.
I’ll leave that at that.
Weir is not an AI guy, but like any self-respecting nerd, he’s played with it.
He sees the writing on the wall, even if he can’t say exactly how it will eventually read. His take is that relatively soon (a few years from now) AI will tell stories better than we do. He also envisions a future where people will request customized stories that AI will create to our personal tastes.
This is not a new idea.
I don’t really buy it. At least I’m not sure the market will be large for this kind of storytelling. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
If so, will those stories be considered “art?”
Will it matter if anyone learns to write?
I say that with at least a serious hint of irony.
So, how does one learn to write?
How does one learn anything at all, really?
All week long I’ve run into the topic of learning, as in “how does one go about getting better at something?” For creative pursuits, this is a loaded question. Artists are always learning. Or they should be. At least I’ve never met an artist who, when directly confronted, didn’t want to be doing something new.
It is an artist’s plight to be never finished.
The creative world today is split into warring camps, though—one on the warpath and another hunkered down in bunkers, trying to weather the storm. Those on the warpath are wringing their hands about writers losing their ability to write (or never learning to), simply by touching AI.
Either you know how to tell a compelling story, or you don’t.
This is silly—except, of course, for the ways it isn’t.
I mean, yes, if a writer stops exercising their storytelling muscles, they can atrophy, but simply using AI isn’t the problem.
At the end of the day, I think people who know how to make art will use AI to do better art (or at least do art differently), and people who don’t know how to make art will use AI to make classic slop. That’s to be expected. Every beginner, using AI or not, makes a lot of slop. Then they find their voice, and suddenly they make art.
The question that keeps coming up in this world of AI, however, is: “How will an entry-level person ever learn how to do the work if AI does it for them?”
It sounds like a real gotcha.
In the world of art, though, I’m not so sure that question is the flex we think it might be.
Artists who use AI will learn to make art the same way that artists who don’t use AI learn. By immersing themselves in the work, whatever that is. By assessment and through iterating. By looking at work other people do and trying to incorporate techniques they’ve used.
Artists who use AI will learn to make art through the process of comparing output they make with the image they started with in their minds.
This, I think, is maybe the root of voice. Or the core of taste.
Artists teach their minds to make what they see, or see what they make.
This will be true even if Andy Weir is right about his supposition that AI will become better storytellers than we humans. Note that Weir does say there will always be artisan writers—always be humans who write and tell stories, no matter what, just as there are portrait painters today, even though most of us just snap pictures.
Many years back (1999, to be precise…the post is now gone, but here was my reply), a very established writer friend of mine wrote a blog post for April Fools’ Day in which he announced a new word processor named “Writer’s Block” that took a block of granite and chiseled away every piece of the rock that wasn’t a story.
Sounds interesting, right?
Also, many years ago, I was in a museum of modern art. I think it was in Chicago.
On the wall was a rectangular canvas, maybe two feet tall and an inch wide. It was painted blue.
Nothing else.
Just a tall rectangle.
Blue.
Its title was, as I remember it, “The Thin Blue Line.”
Is that art?
Yes. It is.
Did I appreciate it?
Not particularly. But, you know, the idea was there.
And I still remember it.
So, yes.
Writers will learn to tell stories by telling stories—generated or not.
They will learn by reading stories. Mimicking. Writers will learn by seeing reactions to stories they write. By working harder. By wanting to find the right way to express that thing they have inside, regardless of what they use to express it. Writers will learn by making a new manuscript. Or by throwing away the last 5,000 words because they don’t go where the writer wanted them to go. Writers will learn by any means necessary.
And they will learn by following that sense of internal joy they get from having imparted themselves into their work—that wondrously tingly sense of having created something that started as a glimmer in your mind is the joy of expression, isn’t it?
And the fact is this: The creator of anything is the only person on this earth who can say when they feel that spark.
I remember a friend in high school who ran into class just before the bell rang, desperately clutching a piece of white stock. On it was a magenta, blue, and yellow squiggle of watercolor. It was, as I recall, attractive enough. Kind of cool for a squiggle.
“Look at this,” she said to me, cheeks flushed. “This is exactly how I feel today.”
When someone feels that spark, and you try to take it away (even when their work doesn’t appeal), you’re the asshole.
That last bit is important.
At least I think it is.
I hear you, though.
There is a sense of stolen valor inherent in these modern-day discussions about writing.
At least in some writers in the camp on the warpath. They are writers like me, who grew up having to chisel stories out of raw Microsoft Word. They don’t like that a person can go to Chat or Claude or whatever, and get a wad of text, and then call themselves a writer.
Their indignation and disrespect come directly from a sense of stolen valor.
“How can you call yourself a writer when you didn’t write anything?” they say.
I completely get that.
It makes sense. Except for when it doesn’t.
Here’s another interesting video. Seven minutes. Titled “The AI Slop Debate Just Got Real.”
So. No.
This essay is not about AI.
Really, it’s not.
This essay is about art. What it is, and how we learn to do it.
I still don’t know the answer, but neither do you.
Except for when we do.
And that, my friends, is the wonder of being an artist.
Note: I wrote the earliest parts of this with pen and paper. Two pages’ worth (scratch-outs and all). I transcribed it by taking pictures of each page and asking ChatGPT to turn it into text, which it did. It made two errors, both of which I fixed. I’ve also rewritten much of that early draft, and deleted other parts (because, of course, I did!). Every word of this came from my head to this page.
As I’ve promised before, I’m being open with my use of the tool. I do not intend to use AI to write my text, but if I do, I will tell you.