A 300 billion step guide to destroying human creativity

I recently read this great blog post about gen ai by miriam suzanne. It pretty much sums up my stance on the ethical considerations of the actual creation of these tools and the people that fund them.

That’s not what I’m here to talk about, though.

Because as i recently discovered, there’s another reason why ai sucks.

You see, I had a conversation with a friend the other day that made me realize something.

AI not only fucks over artists by taking their stuff and using it to replace them.

It fucks over everyone by stifling creative expression.
The stuff ai makes sucks, from an artistic perspective. It’s meaningless slop. It’s quite literally the most average thing possible given the input. That’s how these models work.

Thing is.
Making art is hard.
It requires work, and it requires patience.
While over there is a button you can press to instantly get something mediocre. And it feels like you did that.
You feel like you made that thing, you pressed the button.
You get a similiar sense of accomplishment.
Yes, if you’re used to making stuff you’ll know that that’s not all there is to it. That that’s not creative expression, that you didn’t make that thing. That you could have made something so much more if you sat down and used your time to actually create something. Even if it sucks, it would still be infinitely more fulfilling.

But sadly.
A lot of people don’t make stuff.
So they don’t realize it.

And now all of these “ai artists” on twitter suddenly start to make sense.

They pressed the button, felt that sense of accomplishment. And then they kept going.

Normal art is hard, why should they bother? ‘I’m actually better than those guys, you see. This is democratizing art! I no longer need to pay the greedy artists.’

And just like that, they’re fucked.
Because once they start thinking of ai art as something they made, it gets really difficult to stop them.

Obviously, you’d get pissed if someone told you to stop making art. If you’ve had the crutch of an ai generator long enough, it feels like the only way to express yourself.

‘how could i make that without an ai? You just want to silence me.’

And at some point you start rationalizing it, seeing creative expression where there is none.

‘you see, I’m a real artist! I made this picture of a dog playing baseball and i told the bot to make it ‘high definition’. That improves the output! I’m making creative decisions here, im expressing myself! None of you idiots could prompt this well!’

And now, it’s basically impossible to convince them otherwise. They’ve tied their self confidence to how often they’ve pushed that button. In their mind, telling them not to push it is you telling them that they suck.

Effectively, what ai has done here is stop another person from ever making anything.

Someone has voluntarily resigned their right to self expression.

Every time someone makes something, the thing they end up creating will reflect them, as a person.

You could know nothing about me, but by reading this blog post, you would get an impression of who i am. An incomplete picture of the person named ‘Kami’ will form for you. That’s what’s beautiful about art, what’s great about making things. You get to share who you are with the world, you get to make a lasting impact, a message to the universe that yes, you were here at one point and you did something.

Maybe that something is a badly written fan fiction about batman making out with the joker.

Maybe it’s a just a drawing of a stickman.

Maybe it’s a song you’d really wish you hadn’t uploaded to YouTube three years ago because it’s incredibly embarrassing in retrospect.

But it’s something you made, and through those human imperfections you get to share a piece of who you are with the world. And that’s something more genuine, more quintessentially ‘you’ than you could produce any other way.

And that’s what ai takes away.
All that’s left over is a picture of a dog.
Presumably, someone asked an ai to make it at some point.
That’s all you can tell.
And just like that, the author died.