{"id":4991,"date":"2025-04-29T17:28:41","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T22:28:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/?p=4991"},"modified":"2025-05-06T16:32:43","modified_gmt":"2025-05-06T21:32:43","slug":"lets-talk-about-ai-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/lets-talk-about-ai-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Talk About AI, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ice<\/a>
Ice Monster created with Artbreeder<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last time I talked about some common reasons people give for pretending that we can keep AI from becoming a thing. Most of those involved legal or technical issues and tend to be the talking points of people who actually do creative work and are scared, but not scared enough to actually do research. I decided to save the \u201cAI will destroy art\u201d argument for separate article in part to keep the last one from being too long, but also because this argument tends to come from a different crowd. If anyone who actually does creative work is using it, they\u2019re either doing it cynically or seriously overstating their creative credentials.<\/p>\n

The \u201cAI will destroy art\u201d argument is one of many variations of the idea that boils down to \u201cart is magic.\u201d These people believe that creativity is a superpower that only certain special people can use when the stars are in alignment and the Muse is open for office hours. I strongly suspect that this argument comes mainly from people who would like to do creative work, but tend to give up at the point when it stops being fun. You know, the kind of people who use babytalk words like \u201cmakers\u201d or \u201ccreatives\u201d to refer to themselves even though they don\u2019t seem to make or create anything. Why do I believe this? There are a few reasons:<\/p>\n

Their \u201cArt\u201d Is Oddly Elusive (or just bad)<\/h1>\n
\"Cyberpunk<\/a>
Cyberpunk Scene created with ComfyUI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

First off, a lot of the magical thinkers seem to be on the young side. Unless they have large trust funds to protect them, they\u2019ll get hit by reality in a few years. Some of them will realize that creative work actually requires work and start putting in the time and effort to actually create things. The rest will learn to code or something once they decide that if they have to do something unpleasant, they might as well get paid. If you went to college, you probably know some of these people. If you went to a liberal arts college, you definitely know hundreds of them.<\/p>\n

A lot of people in this category won\u2019t show anyone what they\u2019ve done because they\u2019re afraid someone will steal their ideas. The only ones who ever seem to put their work out for public consumption are visual artists, and in most cases it looks like the stuff drawn by the metalhead in your middle school math class. Good for a kid in middle school, but a far cry from professional work. Many of these people have been so blinded by people telling them how talented they are that I don\u2019t think they can honestly see the quality gap through the haze of their own exquisite farts. That\u2019s unfortunate, because if they weren\u2019t so positive they can coast on talent alone, they might actually develop their skills and become successful.<\/p>\n

They Believe Their Ideas Are Worth Something<\/h1>\n
\"Silhouette\"<\/a>
Created with ComfyUI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One reason these people don\u2019t show their work (other than the fact that it doesn\u2019t exist) is that they think \u201cideas\u201d are a commodity that other people want to steal. In addition to falling for the naive belief that there\u2019s such a think as a new idea, this idea fetishization sets them apart from creative people by revealing that they don\u2019t have a lot of ideas. People who actually work in creative fields know that ideas are fucking worthless. We have more than we can use, and most of them show up at the most frustrating time possible. We don\u2019t need to steal your idea for a story about short people throwing rings into volcanoes because we have two dozen other ideas in our \u201cif only I can get some time to work on this\u201d file. I\u2019m in my 50s now, and for the last few years one of the questions I ask myself when choosing a new project is \u201cwhich of these ideas do I want to get out into the world before I die?\u201d because I know some of them will never get done. If you think ideas are valuable, you probably haven\u2019t done a lot of creative work, and you\u2019re probably not very well suited for it.<\/p>\n

On a related note, these folks also routinely worry that if AI allows for the cheap creation of art, artists will stop making art. This also reveals a deep disconnect with how the creative impulse actually works. We\u2019re not doing this to make money, we\u2019re doing it because we don\u2019t have a choice. We have a need to bring those ideas into the world even though we\u2019d probably have a healthier, happier life if we didn\u2019t. If you don\u2019t believe me, look at the sheer number of articles on this site, which hasn\u2019t turned a cent of profit in over 25 years because we\u2019re not doing it for the money. Then remember that there\u2019s a lot of articles I have yet to repost from the old editions (not to mention the 500 or so Patreon posts that I didn\u2019t republish here). Even if AI reaches the point where it\u2019s the \u201cpush of a button\u201d operations that its detractors claim it already is, some of us are still going to do it the old-fashioned way, because it\u2019s not our decision to make.<\/p>\n

Most Creators Say They\u2019re Wrong<\/h1>\n
\"Apocalypse<\/a>
Apocalypse Girl created with Easy Diffusion<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the nice things about pretending that art is some kind of magical process is that it absolves all guilt form failure to create. It\u2019s not your fault because you\u2019re lazy, it\u2019s the Muse\u2019s fault for not dropping by. If you want to paint yourself as a creative person without all the hassle of actually creating things, the elusive Muse is your best friend, always there to provide a good reason to procrastinate.<\/p>\n

Most people who are actually successful in creative fields disagree. Nearly every panel, book, article, and personal conversation with someone who\u2019s making a living doing creative work includes one piece of advice that\u2019s routinely presented as the most important<\/em> piece of advice: It\u2019s a job, and if you want to be successful, you need to treat it like a job. If you sit around waiting for a mythical entity or the right fame of mind to come around, you\u2019re never going to finish anything. You\u2019ve got to sit your ass down and actually do the work, even when it\u2019s not fun.<\/p>\n

This is a powerful myth, one that even those of us who know it\u2019s bullshit often fall victim to. I don\u2019t believe there\u2019s a magical Greek lady waiting around to give me ideas, but I\u2019m absolutely guilty of blowing off writing because I\u2019m not in the right headspace for it. I know that if I actually open the file and start writing, I\u2019ll write. Even if I write compete crap that gets deleted the next day, it gets me farther than not writing at all would have. But opening that file is the hardest part, and there are days when I lie to myself and pretend I\u2019m only procrastinating because my creativity superpower is on the fritz.<\/p>\n

Break!<\/h1>\n

Well shit. I was planning on going into why perfectly rational people insist on pretending something that conforms in all ways to our understanding of \u201ca skill\u201d is treated like a magical power.<\/em> But since I\u2019m already up to over 1,000 words and I suspect this will be at least 500 more, I\u2019m going to call it a day and stretch this out to a 3-parter.<\/p>\n

\"Hail<\/a>
Hail to the King created with Easy Diffusion<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last time I talked about some common reasons people give for pretending that we can keep AI from becoming a thing. Most of those involved legal or technical issues and tend to be the talking points of people who actually do creative work and are scared, but not scared enough to actually do research. I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4036,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2000,2007,3569],"tags":[1041,1791,2107,3615,3773],"class_list":["post-4991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-design-ramblings","category-steve-patreon","category-potpourri","tag-art","tag-creativity","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-the-muse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4991"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4999,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991\/revisions\/4999"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}