I don't want to paint or write

I don’t want to paint or write

I don’t want to paint or write long-form fiction in the age of
AI.

This isn’t me going on strike or anything. It’s just a report from my
soul-crushed inner landscape of not feeling like making art and not
having felt like making art for the past few years.

Doing everything by hand feels pointless and tedious like writing a
desktop app in all assembly without macros would be in the age of
compilers. “Kind of like construction work with a toothpick for a
tool.” as the lyric goes.

While combining AI and my own penstrokes into one image is taboo in
this age of anti-AI sentiment. Using AI for flatting or backgrounds or
art assistance is just as frowned upon as full-on prompt-jockeying and
slop-pushing.

I can’t bring myself to paint or write longform. It’s like how stairs
become that much more tedious to climb once an elevator is installed
next to them. The hacker mindset, right? We want to do things for the
first time and solve problems generally and recursively, solve a whole
class of problems in one go.

As a painter I embraced G’MIC and brush-editing and scripting and path
effects. 3D-modelling some blocks to help me with perspective lines
that I then painted over. The digital equivalent of stippling with a
toothbrush instead of placing dot by dot with a finetip. That was core
to my whole art ethos: I make tools in order to make my art. I’ve made
auto-masking scripts, Emacs comic lettering modes, auto-hatching
brushes, stamp sprays, feathering path effects. For writing it’s been
working on outliners and text metadata and timeline sorting tools.

I always try to look for the general solution.

Please don’t get the wrong idea that I’m trying to blame this bleak
ennui on the anti-AI crowd. I think some of their arguments are
great and I don’t look at AI art either. This isn’t a manifesto,
I haven’t figured out an answer yet.

I’m not trying to push a context where I could combine AI art and my
own art into one work, where I could make a comic mixing my own
drawings and AI, where I could figure out some way to have AI
assistance when writing that’s still primarily my own voice, without
it getting hate and without me getting bans.

I understand full well the reasons why it can’t be like that. People
in my bubble hate everything that AI has touched and they hate it not
out of irrationality but for good reason and I do to.

It’s just me feeling hopeless since everything I used to do—write,
paint, make music, write programs—that’s all gone. I don’t have any
other skills. I can’t do anything else and everything feels so
meaningless and tedious.

So that’s the main soulcrush: I wish I could use the tools in
conjuction with my own hand, like how a camera was both a blessing and
a curse to realistic painters. When the camera was invented it ate
that them but they could also use it as a tool for reference. But
mixing in AI with art production is rightly condemned since this time
around the camera is evil. It’s more like horse&buggy vs a
gas-guzzling, earth-wrecking automobile than it is like canvas vs
lens.

Competing with the machine

The secondary soulcrush is that even if I make art, publishing that
art into this AI world doesn’t feel fun either. Not that I worry that
AI would learn from it (I have consented to that. This web site has 1300 text posts and
300 images all made by me and most of them CC-BY-SA and I have not
minded if AI wanted to learn from them. That’s been OK by me. I
haven’t fought scraping), but trying to upload music into in a
world where 40% of the hit list is fully AI made just isn’t something
I want to do. I don’t want to be put on the same plate as an AI dish.

I know I harp on the Monet/​Turner/​Twombly exhibition all the time but
putting Twombly up with Monet and Turner felt so wrong. I don’t want
to slag Cy Twombly because I do like his art too. It’s just that it
felt like such a staring-at-finger-and-missing-the-moon moment. “Oh
these three artists all look blurry so they belong together” where
Monet and Turner are impressionists, the ultimate
right-side-of-the-brain sublime-what-you-see conduits, Twombly is a
lexical symbolist. That is the opposite.

If I were any one of the three them I’d feel slightly offended to be
equivocated is what I’m saying. All three of them are good but it’s
like “If you think we are the same you don’t understand what we were
trying to do”.

I pour my heart and soul into this stuff—I’m “painting my nightmares”
as a friend said when I was painting with him around—and I don’t want
it served up on the same menu as a bunch of machine talk.

Or for another version of the same metaphor: ever been to a party and
as you’re in a productive but exhausting conversation with some
privitive screwhead that you’re giving the 101 to, up comes a
even more wrongheaded schmoe and starts “agreeing” with you and now
you’ve got two problems because you’re stuck in the middle of the
original argument and the “whoah what did you just say?!” Completely
hecked-up new argument.

Yeah, yeah, when I hate AI the least I can think of it as sort of a
rhyzomatic L-space, an organism that grew through roots of a
million voices. It’s not a machine talking, it’s us—it’s just been
filtered and composted and regrown into new meaning by this
organic-like ginormous ANN. But any such appreciation for AI I could
possibly twist and turn and force my mind into feeling, I’m gonna put
on permanent hold until the two biggest problems—first is is the
extremely externalized and un-accounted-for costs to the planet and
to other humans, and second is the increased centralization of
means-of-production ownership—are solved, and it’s looking right now
like they’ll never be.

I’m right there with y’all: When I find out that a song I’m listening
to is AI, I turn it off. That’s happened twice now. I believe I can
tell right away when a text or image is AI made but I know for sure I
can not tell when it’s music. So it’s not out of repulsion I turn it
off. I don’t know why. I just do.

I fear that a misread of the main text and of this appendix is as some
sort of passive-aggressive slag agaist the AI-hating crowd. That I’m
trying to be all sly and smug and friends-romans-countrymen about it.
But that’s not it. I do understand where the hate against AI is
coming from. I think some of the arguments are really bad and I don’t
agree with those parts of it (as a copyright hater I’m
especially sickened by those arguments
relying on a proprietarization of visual expression) but I’m trying to
be super frank and transparent about that. I’m not trying to be swifty
or satirical here. We’re all stuck in this wrongheaded world during
this utterly misguided era and navigating it best we can. To the exent
that people feel threatened by AI, I do too and that’s the whole
point of this essay.

My entire reason for living has suddenly been swept away and with it
my footing. I don’t know what to do for a job and I don’t know what to
do for leisure. It all feels so meaningless. Don’t worry, I’m not
about to [end it][ei]—my
mental health toolbox is jam packed and I get by with a li’l help from
my friends. For now. But on an
existential and philosophical level (and on an income level because
what’s my job gonna be?), I’m like what the heck? Where do
I even go from here? I don’t know how to do anything other that this.
I thought I was renaissance and multi-field with my writing and music
and art and programming and game-design but it’s all been fell-swooped
by this slop singularity. I’m too dyspraxic for woodcarving or sewing.
All I could do was this stuff.

The glimmers of hope and why they’re unbearably faint

I’m not saying never. Maybe I’ll just pick up the pen or the guitar
one day when I for some dumb reason feel like it. The most recent
batch of art I made was all pen & paper. Scribbling every mermaid
scale by hand. Gillian Welch has a song lyric “We’re gonna do it
anyway even if it doesn’t pay” (originally a pro-copyright screed
and that part does not sit well with a copyright abolitionist like
me, but that’s okay since it’s
such a great song). Yeah, maybe we are. I just don’t feel like
it and I haven’t felt like it in a long time.

Last time the world faced this problem, just over a hundred years ago,
what happened was modernism. When the machine (the camera, in that
case), mastered the means more than we could, what was left to us
was pure ends, pure expression. Maybe this time around the machine
has encroached a little bit too much on the expression part of
things—for sure it has on the slop algo side of things, but that
particular variety of suffering is optional—but maybe it can still
become a vehicle, a communication tool for what we want to tell each other.

AI colophon