I upset people by writing about AI….

I wrote a short post on Linkedin about AI last week.

I’m generally - deeply - sceptical about AI. As a technology it may have value, but I think we’re ignoring the price it’s asking us to pay. I think we’re being sold junk experiences which diminish us, their essential toxicity hidden behind either ‘isn’t this exciting, it’s new!’ or ‘here’s a way for you to make more money’.

I see much of what we’re offered as ‘AI’ as a scam, designed primarily to enrich hucksters and frauds.

My original post however was not a generalised attack on AI. It was very specific.

I suggested that the use of AI to spew out ‘creative product’ - music, ‘content’, books, visual art etc - with minimal engagement from a human ‘creator’, is dangerously toxic. It endangers the very essence of being human.

Again, I was specific.

Some of what gets turned out may be good, though most will not be. That’s true of human-created art too. That’s not the problem. All of what’s turned out is plagiarised from the work of living and dead artists, work taken and abused without the slightest attempt to get permission, make payment or even give acknowledgement. That’s unforgivable, but is not what I was writing about. The environmental costs of turning out endless junk are catastrophic and unsustainable - but that’s also not what I was writing about.

I was discussing something very particular.

We grow, as humans, by creative engagement with our world. We invent our experience through creative interaction with what we discover, outside and inside of ourselves.

When I draw a picture, compose some music, or create a performance, I bring myself, full of not-knowing, fuelled by intuition and curiosity, into relationship with the world.

From that encounter I make something.

The making process is detailed. It is one note after another, one mark on paper after another, one movement or word after another. I pay attention to the detail of what is emerging. When I alter a detail, I alter the totality. I have agency. My actions, and the discipline with which I perform those actions, have consequences.

In a creative process, I learn about the world and myself-in-the-world. I grow in knowledge and potential. If I choose to make public what I have created, I learn more about others - how they share or do not share my ways of seeing our world. I learn how I am similar or different to others.

This is the wellspring of humanity: imagination, curiosity, discipline, repetition, relationship, communication, connectedness.

When we outsource the challenges intrinsic to a creative process to rented software, we lose the most essential aspects of that creative process - the development of awareness of self and agency in relationship to the world.

Someone who writes a prompt and has a book returned to them by their computer, has not written a book. They have had the idea for a book and then the immediate gratification of that idea being delivered, without them having to do any of the work of making it. From idea to product without any of the process in between. It’s the work in-between that matters. It is the work in-between through which we learn and grow.

As one thoughtful responder wrote in a comment on my original post: ‘It's not just the artist that creates the art, it is also the art, that creates the artist.’

Someone who has an ‘idea’ for a picture, and who can immediately see that picture realised, has not learned or grown through the embodied discipline of shaping their world.

Creativity is joyous, but also requires discipline, curiosity, practice, patience, attention and time.

AI ‘creation’ teaches us that none of those things are necessary. It teaches us, like spoilt infants, to get things NOW!

AI companies tell is that these tools are ‘democratising’. This is just marketing - and deeply cynical. No-one can really believe Zuckerberg et al have the slightest interest in democracy. Their concern is with money and power - and what better market is there than an enfeebled, unthinking, addicted populace unable to do anything for themselves without using their softwares?

My primary concern is not that AI ‘creativity’ results in crap spewing out into the world - though it does. Nor that it makes it harder for actual physical, skilled artists to survive - though it does. My concern is that it deprives its users of an - perhaps THE - essential experience of being human. They will not experience the deep and lasting satisfaction of having made something by their own efforts. They will not learn through solving the inevitable problems that emerge during any creative process. They will not experience the deep immersion of creative flow state - one of the richest of all mental states (which is called ‘optimal experience’ for good reason.)

AI as a ‘creative product generator’ deprives us of our very humanity. We who are alive at its introduction, will retain the capacity, if we’re disciplined enough, to continue to work through actual creative processes. Emerging and future generations, for whom AI is a default tool for making images, composing music, writing essays - for realising every passing whim instantaneously - will have no cause to develop the very mental and physical disciplines which will make them more fully realised humans, and will make their lives more fulfilling as a result.

A few individuals will continue to be ‘real artists’. The majority will not. And their lives - the lives of our communities - will be impoverished because of it.

Of course, as art is increasingly turned into product, and most of us struggle more and more with the daily imperative to earn enough to survive in this oligarchy, actual human creativity will come to be seen as a luxury. Already, for defending the discipline of creative practice, I’m accused of ‘elitism’ and ‘privilege’. My argument is not ‘elitist’ for it is not concerned with elite individuals. My concern is with the experience of us all.

It’s ironic that, among the numerous, often quite violent and angry responses to my post on AI, I was also accused of lack of humanity, laziness and stupidity. People are violent in defence of the very products that are doing violence to them - a sort of Stockholm syndrome based in software and an addiction to convenience.

And what are we are supposed to do with all the time we save using rented software to circumvent the need to dedicate ourselves to learning real creative skills? Probably we rent other softwares to enable is to earn enough money to pay for the first set of softwares, or, exhausted by hustle, watch rented, increasingly AI-generated programmes on our depreciating computers.

The wealthy of course will be surrounded by symbols of their affluence, desperately trying to hold at bay the bitter acknowledgement that all that they have accumulated is worth very little: baubles, toys, distractions.

When we dissuade people from engaging, in embodied detail, with their innate creativity, we remove from them the vehicle through which, across time, we have accessed our humanity, our growth, our essential self-hood.

This is what we are now doing to ourselves and future generations. We are destroying the deepest joys of being human to enrich tech-bros and venture capitalists. This is not progress.