The negativity around generative AI is weird.

As it states on the front page of this very website, I love and support art and artists of all kinds. I believe that human creativity is one of the most beautiful and powerful forces in the universe. It should be celebrated and nurtured in all its forms. I tend to surround myself with artists — most of my closest friends are artists — because I have always found artists to be the best kind of people. I consider myself an artist, too. I code, I write stories, I design sounds, I sing, and I compose music.

Computers have unlocked my creative potential and allowed me to express myself in ways that would have not been possible otherwise, or too difficult to continue trying. My computer is an art accessibility tool for me because I have always had a tremor and a problem with fatigue in my hands. There was an event in my childhood that make it very difficult for me to even write legibly with a pen or paper. I can play a guitar but the same issue keeps me from doing it for long.

The negativity swirling around artists using generative AI has me kind of shook because I have been on the Internet for over three decades, and I’ve never seen a giant technological leap be treated with anything other than excitement and optimism. It’s weird to see an amazing technology in its infancy be met with such vitriol. Especially a technology that is going to make art more a lot more accessible.

I am a hobbyist screenwriter and I have watched literally hundreds of hours of videos of filmmakers discussing the craft. There isn’t one second of love for the business side of it. In fact, the first piece of advice for an aspiring screenwriter is to not quit their day job, because there is near-zero percent chance they will ever make anything, and an even lower chance that they will get more chances after that. The second piece of advice is to make as much shit as you can because it’s impossible to know what will hit. These two pieces of advice seem to be at odds with one another.

The reason that art is typically expensive, especially film, is because it’s inaccessible. The jobs in film are there because it’s ridiculously hard to make a movie. The pipeline of big idea to Oscar is littered with insanely expensive gear and several layers of gatekeepers, middlemen, and nearly insurmountable mountains of bullshit.

There are around 50,000 screenplays registered annually with the Writers Guild of America. Around 150 of those actually get made into feature films and the ones that do get made are largely considered to be safe, because film studios are not fond of taking chances with their money. Every screenwriter knows this. If you want to sell a script, attach it to some pre-existing IP and attach it to a well known actor, because otherwise you’re probably not going to be successful.

That’s why we get to see a lot of iterations of The Emoji Movie every year, and a trickle of new and original ideas. Script readers seem to approach spec scripts — scripts that are written on speculation without a contract - with a great big sigh of indignation. Your entire future as a screenwriter rides on whether or not a script reader feels like doing something more than skimming through the last year of your life that day.

Every once in a while, an indie darling will make its way through the festival circuit and find a distributor, but that is becoming more and more rare. The festivals themselves are very expensive. Every time a film does make it through that first gauntlet of gatekeepers, the filmmakers usually have an accompanying story about how they had to lay their financial life on the line, forgoing food and sleep to chase their dream. There always seems to be a lot of reverence for that struggle, like, “Oh wow, that dude was really dedicated. He stopped eating and he really wanted to kill himself the whole time, but he didn’t, and now he can almost afford a house once he repays the back-breaking debt he put himself into. I wish I could suffer like that!”

What are we doing here? I feel like I’m going insane. I’ve been alive for 44 years now and I have heard two things about art for my entire life. One, art is theft. Two, to be an artist is to starve. Why are we now suddenly pretending that art is an amazing career that is now been thrust into unprecibtable peril? It’s a terrible career with an extremely limited number of seats available. It always has been. People by and large do not typically want to pay a lot of money for original art.

It’s a career that is full of rejection, heartbreak, and poverty for 99% of the people who attempt it. If you don’t have a generational talent, a corporate gig, or a knack for gaming social media algorithms — holding your art up next to an attractive face or a charming personality — you are probably going to have to find another job in order to live.

When I visit BlueSky’s Artists: Trending feed — even before generative AI became a thing — I do see some original styles, but it’s because I have taken a lot of time to block an absolute wall of deriviative anime and furry art. Like, it’s an incredible amount, but those styles seem to generate the most indignation when AI rips them off. I would argue that AI is not ripping them off any more than thousands of other artists have been doing for decades.

We do know how generative AI works, right? If it can create a 1:1 copy of your style, then your style is deriviative, is it not? It is your style, something you are good at reproducing, but it is someone ele’s style that you, and thousands of other artists, have yourselves learned to copy. When you see the perfectly executed Studio Ghibli recreations, it isn’t because the LLM is training off of original Studio Ghibli material alone. These LLM companies didn’t just pop a few blu-rays in. It’s using an aggregate of millions and millions of fan art submissions from people who have learned to mimic the style first. They have committed the exact same crime that they accuse the AI of committing. LLMs can produce very convincing copies of Disney’s art for the same reason.

For example, there was recently a big kerfuffle around a piece of art that was added to the popular game Fortnite. It was a spray-painted image of Marty McFly from Back to the Future, but in the style of Studio Ghibli. People were losing their minds over it, assuming it had been created by generative AI, but it turns out that the artist had simply studied Studio Ghibli’s style and painstakingly recreated it themselves. The tone around the conversation immediately changed and the pitchforks got put away. They didn’t care that the artist was ripping off Studio Ghibli’s style. That’s fine. They cared about how painful it was for the artist to rip off Studio Ghibli’s style.

I do not understand why the artists’ vision is only valid if they had to spend a lot of time to create it and document their painful and long process. The idea is the pearl. Marty McFly as a Studio Ghibli character is a cool idea. I find no value in the struggle of bringing it to life. In fact, I think the struggle is a bummer and it robs us of a lot of cool art over time. I don’t need to know that an artist spent their entire life learning how to mimic a style so that they could then take an entire week of their free time to bring their idea to life. If that same artist used generative AI to bring their idea to life in a much shorter period of time, and it looks as good or better than what they could create otherwise, I’d feel happy for the artist because they got their idea out into the world and they can move on to another idea.

It could just be my personality, I guess. When I hear stories of Bob Dylan being booed off stage for going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, I have always thought, “Wow. Those people were morons.”

Just let the artists cook, man. Let them use whatever tools they want to bring their ideas to life and then celebrate the output, or make fun of it if it sucks — or whatever. The artist is a conduit — a channeler of ideas — and not everybody can do it. We get a limited number of artists in each generation of humanity, each with their own little chunk of time to make their ideas into something real, and each technology that comes along allows them to use their limited time to produce more art, more efficiently, is a great thing. There are a lot of artists who never produce art because they need to pay rent or pay for someone’s healthcare.

And none of this is to say that I don’t appreciate the drive it takes to become a talented artist. I’ve always been jealous of people who can draw or paint well, because I have never been able to do it myself. I can’t even use generative AI to do it well, for what it’s worth, because I have trouble with prompting to create the compositions I want to see. I suspect artists who have put in the time to learn already will be the best at using generative AI tools, just like programming, because I use LLMs to great effect in my career as a software engineer. I already knew what I was doing when LLMs came along, so I can tell a LLM exactly what I want, and I have the knowledge to critique what it spits out, so now I just make the same stuff I would have before, but faster. And I can make stuff that I couldn’t have made before because I don’t have the patience, or time because I have a job, to write all of the boilerplate code myself.

I think we would be much better off if we didn’t attack artists for expirimenting with a new tool because they are going to be the ones to unlock what it can become, and none of us knows what that is yet. It kind of reminds me of graffiti from the 1980s. If the art that was showing up on the subways then was as good as the art that’s being commissioned for building murals now, we would have probably been much less pissed off about it back then. The kids drawing the shitty stussy S’s just needed time to grow and learn. We’re at the ground floor of generative AI, so we’re seeing a lot of art that looks the same — like hot deriviative garbage — but I bet in ten years, after a generation of kids with the agency to fuck around with it in their bedrooms has had the time to pioneer, we’re going to start seeing some really amazing stuff that pushes the boundaries of what we thought art could be.

It’s not like we haven’t seen this play out before, either. I highly recommend watching the documentary ”Jurassic Punk” about the early days of computer generated art in Hollywood. The young artists who were using computers to create visual effects in the 80s and 90s were treated like pariahs by the traditional artists, the old guard, who had been working in practical effects for decades. They were accused of “not being real artists” and “ruining the craft.”

In closing, I will say that I do actually hate most of the companies — and the CEOs — that are building and pushing these tools, and I think that the criticisms of their power and water over-consumption are warranted. They are certainly bribing local officials to push thorugh new data center projects in small towns that cannot defend themselves, as corporations have always done when they smell money, and that is scary — and it sucks. I wish we had a functioning representative democracy to put a stop to that. Maybe this issue will drive us to correct some of our systems of governance, which have been hobbling along for decades? I’m just not willing to throw out the baby with the bath water — to toss away decades of machine learning research that was completed in good faith because it is also powerful enough to create images and video.

This stuff is going to change our lives for the better. AI is in the Radium phase of its world-changing discovery life cycle. It’s fun and novel, so every corporate grifter in the world is cramming it into every product that they can, regardless of it making sense. The companies being the most reckless will soon develop a cough, if they haven’t already. I suspect that we eventually get to watch a lot of them thrash around and rot in the wake of their own hubris. We all have fun watching a car crash from a distance, right?

That said, I do believe those power pitfalls to be short term problems, and that the demand generated by their greed is going to usher in a revolution of clean nuclear energy solutions that will make our lives better in the end. I also hope that they are right about AGI — if its even possible — and the first thing our new tech God does is immediately invalidate all human created cryptographic protocols, which will destroy the crypto markets all of these people are using to get around financial regulation, because I believe in karma, and that would be very cathartic.

P.S. I use em dashes a lot — like, a lot a lot — and I always have. I didn’t write any of this post with a LLM because, like visual art, I find it laborious to try and sculpt my ideas into words with a LLM, rather than just vomiting out my thoughts naturally in whatever-point-fonts. I’ve been chatting on the Internet for over three decades, like I said before, so it’s second nature to just type my thoughts out as I have them. For some people, it’s going to be faster to use a LLM, and I say good for you. Don’t let these weirdos on the Internet shame you out of using tools that help you to express yourself better than you could without them.