the one about ai.

get in girls. we're shaming the mimics.

i do not think that two states of being are more naturally connected than love and anger. often, they look the same; a migrant parent who does not have time to tell you they love you [they are too busy trying to survive] will grouse and complain if they see you leaving the house without a coat on, or skipping a meal as you study. to them, neither rain nor hunger should trespass upon their child. look at the way either emotion manifests: racing heartbeats, sweaty palms, heated torsos, flared nostrils. even our bodies cannot tell the difference between them. to love something enough to be moved to fire and upset in your defense of it is proof of that love.

i love many things, so i am often angry. i love art; you can probably see where this is going.

i have made no secret of my view on ai, nor have i been subtle in my championing of our work as a means to bring about continued progress and joy and clarity; this sort of compulsive love is born when the first gift you remember receiving in life is a pen embossed with your initials on it.

i think a sign of a good artist is flexibility, an open-mindedness that acknowledges the grey most of life falls into. i think the sign of a brilliant one is recognizing that some truths are quite simply unavoidable. you cannot read toni morrsion novel and come away confused about her view of human relationships and the invisible power struggles they contain; her novels trap all of america in their pages.

what makes a writer? i don’t think a creative writing degree makes you one, neither does acclaim or fiscal success. i think a writer is quite simply someone who does not know how to navigate this world without putting pen to paper, someone who is preoccupied with words and sentences and story.

as a writer, even as a child, long before what i wrote began to be published i developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs - joan didion

those who are against the democratization of the form will cite bylines and journal publications and book deals to try to keep everyone who has something real and cutting to say away. the truth they do not want you to recognize- because to acknowledge it is to give away power- is that all you need to do to be a writer is to write sincerely about yourself and all you see. to run around naked, stripped of all that is pretty and polished and put on display your heart for us passersby to examine. all you need is a pen, and yourself.

do you see, then, why it is impossible for me to bestow this title upon those who won’t even offer their own minds up to the craft? the requirements needed are so bare, and yet you want me to look at an essay filled with shallow limerences about creative freedom and – God help me- productivity written in part by a computer and engage with it earnestly?

i would rather chew chalk. i would rather re-read the bell jar. i would rather sit though another week of twitter discourse courtesy of celine song.

you think you’re above us, the ai warriors accuse.

yes, i do.

you are moralising the issue.

yes, i am.

you’re too scared to let people see you, too lazy to dream up anything of true worth [something honest, something new, something moving, something cathartic to even just yourself], that you would rather betray us all. i will not call an orange an apple because it might hurt the former’s feelings. i will not bend reality to coddle you and your insecurities. you are not an artist if you are so adverse to risk and self-examination you are dependent on stolen work to form the basis of your writing. my anger may look ugly to you, but atleast that anger belongs to me. a pro-AI essay went viral on this platform recently. it was meant to come off as rebellious and fiery: i don’t care what you think about me; i am self-assured in my work, never mind that i doubt my own artistic power so much i had a computer dream this up for me.

the entire thing is a stumbling, vacant mess like a child playing dress up in their mother’s closet, waddling about in her heels. it fills me with a delicious sense of schadenfreude reading their pieces; it feels like even the prose is rebelling against them. intruder, the words shout with every out of tune sentence. leave us be.

the ‘writer’ of this specific piece i’m referencing later published a different essay decrying my note [in which i called her as ‘intellectually flaccid’ as she was ‘morally bankrupt’] , saying that the pushback she was receiving was just ‘a case study in how the internet confuses shared revulsion for moral clarity’- as though revulsion and morality are divorced from one another. most of history’s greatest advancements were made because good people were revolted at the cruelty of the existing systems they saw, at slavery and colonialism and gender inequity.

revulsion drove my people to take up arms and saved us from the greedy, trespassing hands of the british, the french, the italians. it will be revulsion that saves us again.

people seem to take issue with my tone; my refusal to play nice with those who have given up on themselves intellectually seems to have ruffled some feathers. i think having standards is important. so is holding a grudge. who cares about politeness when the world is on fire, and i can see the people helping fan the flames clear as day in front of me?

ai is the one issue in our modern politics that feels representative of all that is bankrupt and ugly in the world. it’s an environmental issue [the substantial energy consumption for training and using these machines averages the energy consumption of what multiple american households would over the course of a year, emitting tens of thousands of kilograms of CO2 emissions. there are estimates that ai-related infrastructure may soon consume six times more water than denmark, a country of 6 million, accelerating the loss of our scarcest natural resource while also poisoning what is left for us to use. it is, in short, devastating our planet. she gives us all these resources to live off and we repay her by burning it all to the ground because we want to see what we’d look like as studio ghibli characters]. ai has been used to dehumanize already othered communities, the white house publishing revolting piece after revolting piece depicting migrant arrests like the nazi propaganda cartoons, providing studios and the like with a shortcut to ‘diversify’ productions without ever having to pay or hire a black or brown creative.

ai also raises questions about our relationship to art, and the view of the ruling class on our work’s value. most of the pro-ai lot cite convenience as a chief reason for their dependence on it. it helps us be productive; it’s just a tool.

my question is why you think productivity and artistic practise should be viewed as anything other than the conflicting, oxymoronic ideals they are. the purpose of writing or creating isn’t to tout a finished product; the value of what we do isn’t in having a sellable thing to make us a profit. it is to fuel our curiosity and reflect who we are in the moment we were creating said thing. we are our process; our work let’s us greet old versions of ourselves like old friends or lovers.

when the tech companies and billionaires who have spent their lives looking down their noses at anything that does not make them money [because when your interior world is cold and hollow, the only value system you can reach for revolves around capital] suddenly start endorsing a supposed ‘tool’ that would make our lives easier, your first feeling should have been one of suspicion, not eager acceptance. watching you all wag your tail and bow down to the very people who have made our work impossible is frankly nauseating. alarm bells should have gone off the moment they started calling our work ‘content’, grouping influencers with painters and musicians, as if they are the same thing. as if their societal value is similar. that is, of course, if you were ever really an artist to begin with.

making art is hard. there is no cheat code that would make it easy. excavating the soul should be hard; it would be alarming if it wasn’t. the satisfaction you feel, however, when you see the words trooping along the page exactly as you dreamed them up, melodic and honest; it is heaven made real.

willfully engaging with a system that steals from those who go though that lonely, jarring process makes you a coward. depriving yourself of the joy honest creation could gift you marks you as incredibly silly. it’s why you ai ‘artists’ will never get the thing you covet above all else- credibility. it’s why you write hundreds of words, scrambling and panicked trying to excuse your betrayal.

there is something within you that is drawn to this work [you wouldn’t be posting and calling yourself a writer if you weren’t]. the next step is growing a spine and deciding if you want this enough to confront your own mediocrity and battle it. i invite you to start respecting yourself more. even as they get more sophisticated, it is still easy enough to spot when a machine has been involved in the process because we can detect its soullessness. [also, how saddening is it that the measure of creative success for ai is whether or not it is ‘passable’ for a person? not whether the work it spits out is good, or moving. just whether its imitation passes].

i don’t think that we artists are capable of conjuring up work that is wholly original. we are a mirage of references. our work, especially as young writers, is often a mimicry of those who came before. the difference here though is when we consume work, we digest it until it mixes with everything else we’ve eaten, all of our own memories and fears and observations fermenting together until what we spit out tastes and looks different. you cannot computer generate sincerity. these machines know nothing of pain or history or lust or anger. they cannot digest.

that essay i referenced earlier ended with the lines:

ai won’t replace writers. but writers who use ai will replace writers who don’t.

the difference between us is that if my connection to the internet is cut off, i can still produce an original thought unaided; my brilliance is not dependent on a machine built by a bunch of men who wouldn’t know good writing if it bit them in the balls. when- and it is only a question of when- they start cutting off your access to their platforms and reserving it for their rich friends who seek to purchase the title of artist, just as they purchase gold chains a la zuckerberg in a bid to buy their way into being cool- you’ll be left behind, scrambling to put sentences together because you never took the time to learn.

you’ll be filled with worry then. you won’t have anything to cloak your middling existence. and we will keep creating.