I’m a writer and I work in tech for the creative industry, so naturally, I’ve gotten asked lately if I’m worried that artificial intelligence is going to make me obsolete soon and take my job. At work, there has also been a ton of conversation, internal and external, about the impact of AI on visual creatives - artists both digital and analog. AI is an increasingly useful and surprisingly capable tool but the amount that I am worried about myself, personally, being replaced by it is, Not a whole lot, thanks.
Here’s a thing about writing. It takes time. There isn’t really a shortcut to getting better at writing. The formula, as near as I can figure out, is to spend a lot of time and practice writing, but also thinking, and reading. Some people get good at writing without the reading part, or so I’ve been told, but I don’t know how. I learned how to write by doing a lot of those things: writing — lots of school and papers but also letters and hundreds of pages of journals — and thinking and reading.
Writing takes planning, mental organization, and the application of judgment. You have to consider and make decisions about what to include, and what to leave out. I always have the hardest time deciding what to leave out, which is one way to say I am too verbose most of the time. (My friend recently told me about a show she’s watching about manners, and a rule she learned called the “20 second rule.” Basically, the rule is, if you have spoken for 20 seconds straight in a conversation, that’s probably quite enough, and you should pause and ensure your conversation partners are still interested and engaged, and give them space to speak. If you’ve spoken for 40 seconds straight or more, you are probably a big blabbermouth bore and you should seriously check yourself. I violate this rule all the time and I’m really trying to get better. But I digress.)
The more I think about creative work, the more I think it’s almost all like that. You use the tools you have (rock and chisel; paint and canvas; laptop and tablet and photo editing software; whatever). You apply time, practice, experience, and judgment. You decide: what to include and what to leave out. You arrange and rearrange, and then, at some moment you decide you’re done. It — the work — is done.
AI is good at speeding up repetitive tasks and at synthesizing basic information. It has a lot of people fooled right now because it’s so good at providing a simulacrum of understanding and meaning. Yet, it is just as adept at spitting out incorrect gibberish as it is at producing a reasonable-sounding high school essay in 5 seconds. ChatGPT doesn’t have ideas. It doesn’t take a stance. It has no opinions. It merely regurgitates whatever it’s given as source material.
This is the beauty and danger and curse of AI writing, right now. The current popular obsession with the idea that AI chatbots might put marketing writers (for instance) out of business illuminates one sad thing, at least. So much writing on the internet is just god awful. It’s boring, insipid, rote, it takes no stance, it has nothing to say. It exists mostly for search engine optimization. It just takes up space. It tries not to offend anyone while vomiting back as many keywords as possible all over the screen.
That kind of writing, I think AI has already made obsolete. Any writer who trafficks in this stuff has plenty of reason to be worried about their livelihood now, if they weren’t already. I see the writing on that digital wall, and Google does, too, because the thing is, no one ever really appreciated this kind of writing even if it’s humans writing it, because it’s never even been for us. It is an entire genre of writing created by humans writing like bots for the sake of other bots. Some of my LinkedIn connections wring their hands and ask: Will the entire internet soon be awash in low quality (AI-generated) content? And I just kind of shrug because, well, it already is. And it has been for years.
There are so many hours of repetitive, boring, tedious tasks that writers and visual artists are forced to do, and I’d so much rather see creative people (which means, all people) doing something else. Let those be automated away. And let us all get real about the existence of tools to do that for us, and not get upset those tools exist. Instead, let’s learn to use them for our own ends, and not feel used by them. Put another way: I’m extremely grateful if I never have to spend another godforsaken hour of my brief and precious life grinding out email subject lines or headline variations. Just like I happily rely on the squiggly little red lines that let me know I’ve spelled a word wrong before I send an important email.
If anything, and I say this with the utmost rosy optimism because I am still at heart a techno-optimist, if anything this moment could be a tipping point that demolishes this sort of empty SEO writing because the mainstream has caught on, and more people will demand this type of crap be filtered out, and it will become harder to make a living generating meaningless pablum, and we’ll enter a new renaissance of web writing.
Just kidding, that will totally never happen. But I do know that there is room — so, so very much room — for writers with something to say and a flair for saying it. More than ever in my life, I see that the real differentiator for any of us working with digital tools is creativity. In a tsunami of “content”, authenticity and original thought stand out and I find that people cling to it gratefully, even without realizing it. There is a magnetic appeal of honesty, and of quality.
The real dystopian scenario is a world where language and visual arts education has been so devalued and lost that no one can tell the difference or articulate what “authenticity” or “quality” means or feels like anymore. We might already live in a version of that world. But still, I think there remains a certain something that we feel, when there is an actual idea present: when things are real, and when they are right.
Side quests
AI reveals the most human parts of writing. Use cases for generative AI writing. Optimizing language models for dialog. The age-old question ‘But is it art?’ takes on an air of menace with the advent of Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and other AI programs. Here are 41 tools to generate AI art. Greg Rutkowski is a more popular AI prompt than Picasso — and he is pissed. The creatives behind the AI art boom. Lots of artists are really not stoked to be training AI. “Have I Been Trained” is a search engine that can comb through the LAION-5B dataset to let artists know if their work is included.
Creative juice
This week I am obsessed with an emphatically analog photographer, floral designer, and artist I discovered after falling down a floral rabbit hole online. Her name is Kreetta Järvenpää and she’s based in Helsinki, Finland. Her images of flowers, leaves, brambles, and branches in various states of freshness and decay are ravishingly beautiful and mysterious. They transport me to another world and time. While they evoke the elaborately symbolic Dutch and Flemish still life paintings of the 17th century, they also feel crisply, coolly modern to me in their hyperrealist details. Lucky for us, she ships art worldwide from her website and posts @kreettakreetta on Instagram.