Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently experienced an enormous growth, since many avant-garde industries and companies are investing in its perfection and refinement. It’s undeniable that AI is useful for many things, but since it became trendy, there has been a debate on whether it should be used or not, and in what disciplines is there a room for AI.
One of the most remarkable differences of opinion is between artists and AI apologists, and one of the aspects I find most interesting is the growing presence of writers that use AI in their work. To approach this questionable issue, we have to analyze it from the beginning, I mean, to ask ourselves what we think of when we think of art, what or who makes art art, and what’s the relationship between art and humans.
For me, art is the materialization of perseverance. It is the idea of loving something so much, regardless of its nature, that we have to put it into words, into a canvas, or a sculpture, or notes on a pentagram.
It is the concept of spending time and effort doing something inherently futile just to keep our sanity and our happiness, because it’s something that lets us live more than life itself. Writing, specifically, allows us to display our fears and deepest wishes, clear our heads, go places we can’t go otherwise. It’s a way of not letting dreams die when we turn fifteen.
Then, what is art? Art is human, it’s born from pain and peace; it’s full of sweat, and years of keyboard smashes and erased strokes. But AI is the polar opposite of this. It’s empty, automatic, and cold. It focuses on the result, and the creative process is expendable because it’s less profitable than the automatic product. It takes away all the emotion human art conveys, and it’s ultimately an insult to artists, because it equates years of dedication to some combination of prompts and a database. This implies there is an established way of doing art, or an universal one, and invalidates or ignores experiences. It erases individuality because, for AI, writing beautifully doesn’t require great knowledge or many books to read, only the words of (usually stolen) works by previous artists. This virtual puzzle tries hard to imitate human art, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t represent any of us. And it may not be illegal plagiarism, but it is plagiarism at its core, a mimicking as an avoidance of the lack of creativity.
Obviously, this has had an impact on writers, because it creates the illusion that wherever our art is, there is also a machine which does the same work. Scenes and dialogues can now be generated by AI, as well as story prompts, and when we actually sit before a blank page, we can’t help but think that the machine could do it better, and we’re worthless, and maybe not needed anymore. This has happened to artists now, who had already written pieces before the appearance of AI, so I cannot imagine what will happen when kids start typing their ideas into a purple prose generator instead of keeping awful diaries with the worst metaphors ever.
Although my take on AI is skeptical and I am mainly against it, I do recognise the fact that it is a useful tool, at least in writing. But in my opinion, its use should be limited to consulting, rewording and generating prompts for our stories, like we would use a thesaurus or ask our friend about a certain phrase. The problem is when it starts looking more like a ghost-writing device, in which case I believe the author's credit isn't well deserved. It's fine to need a source of inspiration, but there must be some talent in our pieces, there has to be something that is ours because otherwise, not only will the machine be the protagonist, but our identity will also fade and disappear. It erases the growth, the process of finding the right words and creating your own rabbit hole with little bricks made of sentences you hear and experiences you live.
It separates the art from the artist to the point where there’s no artist, and no receptor who needs it, it’s from nobody to nobody.
That is a very curious thing, because art is, and has always been about non-conformism and rebelliousness; it has always been about jumping out of the norm just because the norm bothered us. There is just something that doesn’t feel right about the fact that those who make art now are also the corporations that control our wages, when it always used to be the other way around.
After all, we need those corny metaphors, those handwritten letters and the diaries wherein we created our first stories. We need the Wattpad drafts, unfinished poemaries and crumpled up papers, because art is not linear, it’s a giant palimpsest. What writers are now is not new, it is what has evolved from all the previous plot holes, what we have worked on perfecting for so long. And we cannot let Artificial Intelligence take that away from us. We can’t unbind ourselves from our effort so easily. We have to fight back, and the only way we can do it is by being the best artists we can be. Yes, by continuing to work hard on our creations by not letting it hurt us, and being stronger than whatever is coming.
Because no matter what, no one is going to write your story better than you can. Why? Because it’s yours. So don’t give up, because every mistake of yours is worth more than a million automatically generated successes.
Follow us @rewritethestarsreview for more blog posts like these!
Σχόλια