Art seems difficult because you've been lied to about what art is

In Frank Herbert's Dune, Kylie Jenner's boyfriend the Kwisatz Haderach points out that "whoever can destroy a thing, controls the thing." And in fact in the book's later stages (there's a movie version don't worry), Herbert's protagonist pulls a reverse-Christ and turns the spice melange (the galaxy's superdrug and seemingly only intoxicant) into water through the power of generational mommy issues and phallic imagery, thus demonstrating his power over the spice by destroying it. Sort of a trick you can only pull once, but OK. Maybe there's a Connecticut Yankee angle I missed in the sequels... Anyway,

AI! Not just a buzzword to get you past the first paragraph, but in fact a Chalamet Haderach of our very own — a messianic figure for the 21st century, brought about by the power of generational mommy issues and phallic imagery. Some of us have seen it firsthand; its Voice is miraculous, its Works a marvel. All for a low, low price. Oh, did I mention the price? Never fear: AI embraces tradition with the return of Indulgences, invisible tokens to be purchased with Real American Dollars (TM) and converted directly into answered prayers. So load up, lock in, and feel your need for things slide away, into the murky depths of the beforetime. Have a question? You've got an answer. Writing an email? Already sent. Oh, you need Art? Movies? Video games? No sweat, fam. Feed me those sweet tokens, watch me gulp 'em down, and out pops whatever you goddamn please. Would you like a Cadillac car? Or a guest spot on Jack Paar? How about a date with Hedy Lamarr?

My intense, painful crush on Hedy Lamarr notwithstanding (god-damn!), the instant satisfaction of an AI "anything app" is the ultimate siren call of capitalism. Its proponents, the sailors who swung hard into the shoals of ChatGPT and Claude and Copilot, return to dry land with tales of gaining new abilities without need for practice or training. A fleet of self-proclaimed artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers coming home to bewildered families, who are mostly "just happy he found something he enjoys."

And a lot of them, truly, do enjoy it. They talk endlessly about the things they can do that were previously kept from them, like how they never used to draw because it was too difficult, or write because it took too long. These tools they've found present a world in which they can simply jump to the result they dreamt about, without the roadblocks of study or critique. So many who had been held back by an unkind word in their childhood are rediscovering a love of artistic creation. And not just creation, but creation of something that looks professional! In some cases they're even getting jobs with it, becoming professionals themselves! Say what you will about the average, middle-class white men and their terrible moustaches (you know they are), but there is something about this turn at the Artificial Intelligence genre that presents a marked difference. Like when Sleep Token released their third studio album Take Me Back To Eden in 2023 — it wasn't the first time that a couple guys put on masks and played prog metal with pop and R&B influences, but people were really starting to take notice.

Here's the thing about those guys, the AI guys: no matter their intentions, their altruistic goals, their "ethical usage" of the water-chugging leviathan of machinery powering their new passion, they have to pay to play. Now that they're locked into a system that grants them their wildest desires, missing a payment or running out of tokens would cut Samson's hair, and maybe... worse? As someone who's avoided getting deep into AI tools I can't properly imagine this, but there must be some kind of phantom limb feeling of not having AI access, after getting used to it for a year or more. That feeling like... you can picture what you want, but you can't make it happen. Like a hand you forgot was amputated until you reach for your favorite mug.

There's some of you reading this now — I have an undying reply-guy voice in the back of my head — reading this and thinking, "Oh come on, it's not that serious." But I don't think it's fair to brush aside people who feel like they've come to rely on something in order to live a fulfilling life. It's easy to brush it aside as a phase or a misguided attempt at finding purpose, but at some point we have to start taking people seriously when they tell us that they've found something to believe in. Especially when that something comes with a monthly bill. Because, while yes that does mean they could miss a payment, it also means that the company which takes those monthly payments can decide (or get decided at) to close the tap. Forcefully removing artistic creation ex nihilo and replacing it in nihilum with a difficult to describe, but noticeable void.

Now, looping back around, we understand that this means they also control the thing. And the "thing" in this case is what their users understand to be art and its many forms — your drawings, paintings, writings, songs, movies, so on, so forths. They control the end product of these arts for their users, as that is all they produce. You cannot ask an AI to help you experience four years of theatre school, for example, but it can write a three-act play about your father as though you did. For the people I've heard from and spoken to about AI, they know that the artforms they're pursuing with Claude or Suno are often exercised by people who have spent years on training and practice and repeated failure — all things they, the geniuses, can circumvent with their new tools. They — maybe even you — believe that the end product is the art.

I'm hopeful that my tone here is clear enough that you can hear that this belief is an incorrect and dangerous one. But I also want to make clear that if you believe this, or know anyone who does, it is not your fault. When we celebrate great artists, when we go to the cinema to watch great works, when we stream Dune 2 on our big-screen TVs, we do it because the end product of the art is so breathtaking. We see the final edits and we are astounded by their beauty. We are told by our friends, our family, our newspapers and social feeds, "Wow — now that's art."

My friend, I have excellent news for you: that is not art. What you see on the silver screen or hear in your Bose QC2s is content. And there's an important difference.

Content, by its nature, can be bought and sold. That's how you're seeing it! Someone bought it, and believes they can make a profit by showing it to you. Sometimes that looks like Netflix temporarily leasing the rights for a film, and serving it to you in exchange for a monthly fee. Sometimes that looks like Instagram "allowing" you to post a video of your dog, in exchange for all of your friends watching a 5-second ad right after liking it. I mean, fuck, I'm sure someone's profiting off of you reading this exact blog post, but it sure as shit ain't me. AI models are trained on this stuff that's bought and sold, so they produce things that can (if we ignore ethics for a second) be bought and sold in turn. The people who have grasped AI tools the tightest seem to do so because when they tried to make art previously (if they tried at all), they failed to make content. They failed to make something commercially viable, something which was not bought and sold, which did not receive critical acclaim, which will not be written about in the history books, and they confused that for failing at art.

I hate to be a "the dictionary defines 'art' as" person, but truly if you look up any definition of the word, you'll always see the words "activity" and "work". Action and process are intertwined with artistic creation. My other favorite word to use here is "pursuit", because sometimes you have to chase your art, and sometimes you never catch it.

"Wait," I can hear you typing in the replies again, "what do you mean 'you never catch it'? How is not making art an acceptable end point of making art?"

This is another confusion between art and content, and one that I struggle with all the fucking time (it's why I don't post much anymore, for example). The words "work" and "activity" and "process" and "pursuit" are so often used in the definition of "art" because those are the art. Art is not always meant to produce a spectacle — sometimes it does and that's OK — but it always evokes a change, and that change is the point. That change happens whether you like what you made or not, whether other people like it or not, no matter what materials you used or how much time you spent on it.

I... this is getting a little woo-woo, I feel like I need an example to ground us. Is that OK? I think we should make an art together. Go ahead and edit this spreadsheet. Yeah go on, whatever you like: change a column width, color in a cell, write a curse word, whatever floats your boat in the moment. This won't feel like art at first, but consider:

If you answered "yes" to one or both of those questions, you've successfully done art! You are an artist! Now... do it again!

To keep being an artist, to keep succeeding at art, you must drop the notion that art is something that is only valid when it's finished. Arguably, art is the least valid when it's finished – it is the process, the try-it-and-see, the experimentation. When you engage in it, you may not be able to sell whatever you made, but you grow every time. You learn what you like and don't like. You learn what your friends like and don't like. That learning lends purpose to the next thing you try, and the next, and it's the trying that makes us human.

And if your friends never like the art you make that way, guess what? They're telling you that they would rather pay some company for a quick hit of content than be absolutely fucking stoked for their friend engaging in the art of being human. What kind of friend does that sound like?

So... I don't know, this has gone places, I should wrap it up. When I talk to you about why I won't willingly use AI tools, and why I'm concerned about what AI's doing to us as people, please know that that's why: you are already an artist. You're doing fucking great. All AI does when it comes to art is try to convince you that art is something it's not, so they can make you reliant on them, and take your money. It's not complicated.

If you're worried about what you can accomplish without AI tools, do yourself a favor and watch at least the first ten minutes of Fast & Furious 8: The Fate of the Furious. Yeah, it's content by my own definition, it's truly not art, and it's not about AI, and it's only loosely applicable here, but it fucking slaps and you're my friend and I care about you so I think you should watch it. It doesn't matter what's under the hood; the only thing that matters is who's behind the wheel. Are you behind the wheel?