Excellent piece that deserved to be written. The gatekeeping continues though. It'll take time to overcome, for the stigma to be erased. Part of the reason is the rash of utter crap that, AI-generated, has hit the market. It's given a bad name to AI-assisted writing. The writer may be AI but the author remains the human. If the author is incompetent, no amount of writing will save them. Oh, it'll be good enough as you say - technically competent - but it won't ever be literature in the sense we associate with outstanding writing. Thanks.
I think you’re absolutely right that the system has been rigged for a long time, promoting the commodification of art and artist, as we’ve commodified the rest of the living world. But I think you’re absolutely wrong to have such a utopian view of AI, and many of your arguments in favor of it can easily be flipped upside down. These are not sentient beings — they are machines built, managed, and trained by tech-oligarchs who are more than happy to use these “tools” to further commodify humanity and the living world. These technologies are profoundly anti-human in their incentive structures and all of the benefits people are currently seeing are merely a smoke screen for the dependency these corporations are encouraging all of us to have with their products. You say creative people are worried about theft? What about the theft of the joy of actually creating? That’s what AI steals from people — it bypasses the truly beautiful parts of creation to get to the product: which is the only thing our culture actually cares about, which you are rightly saying is a problem. AI atrophies our ability to think, our ability to attend to synchronicity, and it allows for the further commodification of art as content. It exacerbates all that you lament here.
I'll further add to this after seeing a re-share of this article that there are further legitimate critiques of AI insofar as enshittification goes when it feeds from its own content (which is an especially pernicious problem when the majority of internet traffic is AI slop); the lack of creativity in AI works through the sheer monotonous use of it; how it disincentivises learning as opposed to advancing the collective episteme of humanity; how the neoliberal tech-oligarchs that @Jake also references here have no interest in managing the adverse affects of automation in a capitalist system (zero neo-corporatist elements whereby the state 'pulls in' automated industries to make them publicly-owned to generate revenue); how its mechanisms as LLMs only creates more work for consumers who need to authenticate the accuracy of the information AI provides (I have consistently experienced it perpetuating falsehoods); its minimal utility to automate tasks despite its high energy demands and it being forced into mainstream firmware, and its privacy and IP violations (sure, humans will always take inspiration from each other's works, but there's a major difference when the biographies of artists themselves can point to periods of history through which their work was inspired, to which almost all art movements themselves are a development of, or reaction to, periods of art before; now, it impossible to tell what facets of art are subsumed into AI, because its algorithms do not work that way).
As for the whole elitist gatekeeping argument, I think it's an ironically insulting thing to say that uneducated/stupid people need AI because they possibly can't access knowledge which is only a web browser search away. This is a lamentable sentiment, which if anything, only emboldens the naysayer's argument that this is unhealthy for them. To that end, it's self-evident that people who lack any creativity are the kinds of people to pump out utter drivel with these tools. It clogs up our feeds, blots out high-value content with misinformation and unentertaining garbage, and ruins everyone's experience. Before anyone says 'art is subjective', let me ask reflexively: would you rather the majority of your content stream consist of AI slop, or original productions where much effort went into it?
Now, I'm no Luddite or technophobe, nor do I believe that we should ban AI because of its potentiality to do harm—quite the opposite, in-fact. As many people have said, much of the antagonism comes back to humans misusing/abusing AI tools for nefarious purposes, just as people have always abused all kinds of tools. Instead, people on both sides of this debate seriously need to do some introspection on themselves, because as much as suffering can be overly romanticised for the darlings of aesthetics, harm reductionism is leading to weak-willed generations where more people lack any esteem through a mortality salience to self-develop through hardy experience. Struggle and sacrifice is a necessary part of life, and it's the only way we can expect to develop confidence, bravery, discipline, and other good virtues beyond auguring for them as principles. Puritannical harm reductionism is also the post-modern paradigm shift causing many to rightly feel complete contempt over judicial systems and other institutions, which are increasingly protecting offenders by virtue of outlawing self-defence, propagandising anti-retributionism, while placating to emotions over the analytic. For when every social construct is deconstructed and replaced by the erroneous traps of relativism, the obvious dovetail for the post-modern intellectuals were to debase everything by what 'feels' harmful to the individual. AI is that teleological result where its tools are increasingly exploited by the worst kinds of troglodytes to produce and widely spread useless sophistry (which in itself is harmful to intelligence), which in turn dumbs-down the general population.
I’m assuming you used AI to write chunks of this? Whatever the case it’s good to have this side of the discussion put forward. I will keep banging on about Roland Barthes’ ‘death of the author’ (1967) concept. He too pointed at capitalism as the driver for ownership of creativity, and how every text is a “tissue of citations” (love that quote!)
Anyway, hoorah. Well said.
What next? Nobody knows. Maybe back to embodied communally shared experiences of art, words, music…oh wait…that would be theatre 🎭 😊
Excellent piece that deserved to be written. The gatekeeping continues though. It'll take time to overcome, for the stigma to be erased. Part of the reason is the rash of utter crap that, AI-generated, has hit the market. It's given a bad name to AI-assisted writing. The writer may be AI but the author remains the human. If the author is incompetent, no amount of writing will save them. Oh, it'll be good enough as you say - technically competent - but it won't ever be literature in the sense we associate with outstanding writing. Thanks.
I think you’re absolutely right that the system has been rigged for a long time, promoting the commodification of art and artist, as we’ve commodified the rest of the living world. But I think you’re absolutely wrong to have such a utopian view of AI, and many of your arguments in favor of it can easily be flipped upside down. These are not sentient beings — they are machines built, managed, and trained by tech-oligarchs who are more than happy to use these “tools” to further commodify humanity and the living world. These technologies are profoundly anti-human in their incentive structures and all of the benefits people are currently seeing are merely a smoke screen for the dependency these corporations are encouraging all of us to have with their products. You say creative people are worried about theft? What about the theft of the joy of actually creating? That’s what AI steals from people — it bypasses the truly beautiful parts of creation to get to the product: which is the only thing our culture actually cares about, which you are rightly saying is a problem. AI atrophies our ability to think, our ability to attend to synchronicity, and it allows for the further commodification of art as content. It exacerbates all that you lament here.
You're preaching to the choir.
I'll further add to this after seeing a re-share of this article that there are further legitimate critiques of AI insofar as enshittification goes when it feeds from its own content (which is an especially pernicious problem when the majority of internet traffic is AI slop); the lack of creativity in AI works through the sheer monotonous use of it; how it disincentivises learning as opposed to advancing the collective episteme of humanity; how the neoliberal tech-oligarchs that @Jake also references here have no interest in managing the adverse affects of automation in a capitalist system (zero neo-corporatist elements whereby the state 'pulls in' automated industries to make them publicly-owned to generate revenue); how its mechanisms as LLMs only creates more work for consumers who need to authenticate the accuracy of the information AI provides (I have consistently experienced it perpetuating falsehoods); its minimal utility to automate tasks despite its high energy demands and it being forced into mainstream firmware, and its privacy and IP violations (sure, humans will always take inspiration from each other's works, but there's a major difference when the biographies of artists themselves can point to periods of history through which their work was inspired, to which almost all art movements themselves are a development of, or reaction to, periods of art before; now, it impossible to tell what facets of art are subsumed into AI, because its algorithms do not work that way).
As for the whole elitist gatekeeping argument, I think it's an ironically insulting thing to say that uneducated/stupid people need AI because they possibly can't access knowledge which is only a web browser search away. This is a lamentable sentiment, which if anything, only emboldens the naysayer's argument that this is unhealthy for them. To that end, it's self-evident that people who lack any creativity are the kinds of people to pump out utter drivel with these tools. It clogs up our feeds, blots out high-value content with misinformation and unentertaining garbage, and ruins everyone's experience. Before anyone says 'art is subjective', let me ask reflexively: would you rather the majority of your content stream consist of AI slop, or original productions where much effort went into it?
Now, I'm no Luddite or technophobe, nor do I believe that we should ban AI because of its potentiality to do harm—quite the opposite, in-fact. As many people have said, much of the antagonism comes back to humans misusing/abusing AI tools for nefarious purposes, just as people have always abused all kinds of tools. Instead, people on both sides of this debate seriously need to do some introspection on themselves, because as much as suffering can be overly romanticised for the darlings of aesthetics, harm reductionism is leading to weak-willed generations where more people lack any esteem through a mortality salience to self-develop through hardy experience. Struggle and sacrifice is a necessary part of life, and it's the only way we can expect to develop confidence, bravery, discipline, and other good virtues beyond auguring for them as principles. Puritannical harm reductionism is also the post-modern paradigm shift causing many to rightly feel complete contempt over judicial systems and other institutions, which are increasingly protecting offenders by virtue of outlawing self-defence, propagandising anti-retributionism, while placating to emotions over the analytic. For when every social construct is deconstructed and replaced by the erroneous traps of relativism, the obvious dovetail for the post-modern intellectuals were to debase everything by what 'feels' harmful to the individual. AI is that teleological result where its tools are increasingly exploited by the worst kinds of troglodytes to produce and widely spread useless sophistry (which in itself is harmful to intelligence), which in turn dumbs-down the general population.
https://open.substack.com/pub/enemiesofart/p/where-we-are-and-where-we-are-going?r=58fdpf&utm_medium=ios
I’m assuming you used AI to write chunks of this? Whatever the case it’s good to have this side of the discussion put forward. I will keep banging on about Roland Barthes’ ‘death of the author’ (1967) concept. He too pointed at capitalism as the driver for ownership of creativity, and how every text is a “tissue of citations” (love that quote!)
Anyway, hoorah. Well said.
What next? Nobody knows. Maybe back to embodied communally shared experiences of art, words, music…oh wait…that would be theatre 🎭 😊