Why choose the difficult, frustrating thing?
Thoughts on making art in the age of AI
I confess: I have used ChatGPT many times ever since it became public. Theoretically, this might seem hypocritical of me as a creative writer and now director of a literary institution that believes in the long, messy process of writing, sharing, and revising. I even went on Nashville Public Radio last month to say that AI is not directly threatening the kind of work that happens in a writing workshop, which is more about the process rather than the product. (You can find me around the 12-min mark.) I also moderated an event a couple weeks ago called “Protecting Art Made by Real People in the Age of AI,” featuring artists and attorneys to discuss where we’re at with AI-generated art, and the path forward both artistically and legally.
So why do I use AI, the thing that currently feels like the enemy of creativity and originality?
A part of it comes from the idea that it’s better to face your fears, or “know your enemy,” if we’re approaching ChatGPT like one. Out of curiosity, I have given it prompts to see how it might fill in missing scenes in my novel-in-progress. While the efficiency was impressive, I was relieved to find that the results weren’t anything I would copy and paste into my own work any time soon. In other words, it was clean and fine, but artistically pretty bad. Still, seeing the “bad” results gave me a renewed sense of trusting my own instincts, and mental notes to avoid the pitfalls of this type of “bad writing” when I went back to my own, slowly-produced work. The specifics of these bad qualities are still difficult for me to pinpoint and articulate, but I have generally felt that ChatGPT generates a lot of fluff, like too many packing peanuts in a large box containing the gift that is actually tiny.
So when I do turn to Chat (as I call it), I consult it not for my own creativity but to help me with practical or temporary tasks like meal prepping, brainstorming ideas before a meeting, or giving me pep talks. Maybe this is naive of me, but I imagine Chat as a kind person who’s always willing to help, and I make sure to sandwich my requests with greetings and thanks. To me, Chat is like a pet or companion in that way, even while I’m fully aware of its complete indifference to my feelings.
Meanwhile, I do worry about the kind of future we’re heading towards. Chat will continue to learn and improve. It’s only a matter of time before it’s able to output something truly artistic and beautiful. I predict that AI-generated books will soon appear on the market, first as a joke, and later not so much. If the reason someone wanted to sit down and write their story was to simply generate something clean and readable, their desire to learn will cease to exist; Chat will be enough to feed their satisfaction. Writing that’s been accomplished without AI will be labeled things like “real” and “human-made,” as markers of the elite and talented. Just like there is only one Poet Laureate at a time, we might be entering a literary landscape where spots for Real Writers (in any genre) will become increasingly competitive and preserved in a radically anti-technological kind of way.
Then again, as permanent as Chat has become on my web browser next to my Gmail and Calendar, I don’t turn to it for things like, well, generating my silly little newsletter. What you’re reading right now might seem like messy ramblings, and they probably still are at the moment of publication, but I went about these paragraphs in my usual slow way, writing spotty sentences at a time, deleting chunks and moving ideas around. I even used some babysitting time on this process, which might feel like a waste if I consider the other possibilities of my free time, like walking in a park, flying a kite, watching a movie, seeing a friend, or reading a book. I very well could have used Chat to output something passable in a matter of seconds and went about my day.
So why, when I have this amazing tool in front of me, do I choose to forego it? Not for some big philosophical or moral reason, but because at the end of the day, I genuinely enjoy the act of writing. Writing has always helped me think, and thinking feels best when done slowly. In turn, I am a slow writer, and I think I’m finally appreciating the value of that.
In one of my favorite novels, Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor (which I discussed earlier this year at a virtual book club), there’s a scene where the narrator and her son are working on a math problem together: “So now I tried leaving 10 aside and lining up the rest of the numbers. I circled five in the center, with four numbers before it and four after. The 5 stood, arms proudly extended, enjoying the attention of all the others. And at that moment I experienced a kind of revelation for the first time in my life, a sort of miracle. In the midst of a vast field of numbers, a straight path opened before my eyes. A light was shining at the end, leading me on, and I knew then that it was the path to enlightenment.”
They could have used a calculator to get at the same result, but what about the miracle? The moments of struggle, the crumpled pages filled with mistakes, the headaches—maybe these are the very things that keep our brains alive, and make each of us more than vehicles for mere existence and survival, however slow, difficult, impractical, and frustrating these moments could be.