Love and struggle

On generative AI versus human creativity

“There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.” – Audre Lorde From the Inter-Narratives Substack

Automaton monkey, Paris, ca. 1850.

Among the many bookmarks on my laptop is a link to Nick Cave’s magnificent letter in response to two of his fans writing to his Red Hand Files; one raising the issue of using AI for creative work because it’s faster and the other asking for general advice for a novice songwriter.

Cave’s reply is practically biblical in scope, tone, and poetry (God, he writes beautifully!).

You should read the letter yourself and / or listen to Stephen Fry’s mellifluous tones in this delightful reading:

Nick is dead against the use of AI in creative work, writing that “It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary.”

“ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.”

Just before writing this, I read an article that looked at the use of generative AI to write crappy e-books to sell on Amazon. Interestingly, the author of that article had this to say:

“If, as they used to say, everyone has a book in them, AI has created a world where tech utopianists dream openly about excising the human part of writing a book — any amount of artistry or craft or even just sheer effort — and replacing it with machine-generated streams of text; as though putting in the labor of writing is a sucker’s game; as though caring whether or not what you’re reading is nonsense is only for elitists. The future is now, and it is filled with trash books that no one bothered to really write and that certainly no one wants to read.” – Constance Grady from ‘Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made.’

Both of these quotations, in using words like “animate,” “nurture,” and “caring,” valorise creative struggle. In his letter, Cave expands on this, explaining why creative struggle – the act of caring passionately enough to undertake the slog of making work – is so vital:

“When the God of the Bible looked upon what He had created, He did so with a sense of accomplishment and saw that ‘it was good‘. ‘It was good ‘because it required something of His own self, and His struggle imbued creation with a moral imperative, in short love. Charlie, even though the creative act requires considerable effort, in the end you will be contributing to the vast network of love that supports human existence.”

And it is this notion of love as an animating force behind efforts to be creative that is important to me.

Another thing I came across just before I wrote this was a video of Ian McKellen reading a letter by Kurt Vonnegut in which he talks about the necessity of making art (in any artform) in order to tap into a sense of “becoming” and to my mind this is an alternative way of framing that nurturing of the human spirit that Cave feels drawn to defend in his letter.

“As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides.” – Nick Cave

Honestly, I don’t think I care whether or not people use generative AI in their creative work but I have been disquieted, for the reasons that the writers quoted above have so beautifully articulated, about the emergence of a narrative that quickness and ease are all that counts when it comes to making art. I have heard, read, and spoken to artists and writers who enthusiastically use generative AI in their creative process but none of them did so in order to make their process faster or easier. Rather they turn to generative AI for other reasons – perhaps they are digital artists who were already in the business of creating with technology and are using AI to make the type of work that cannot be created by humans alone. These people stress that coaching AI through the many iterations it takes to make good work is not particularly fast. Or perhaps they are using generative AI for discrete tasks that do not really impact on the more creative aspects of their work, such as proofreading a manuscript. I actually use AI to transcribe recorded interviews because, as a two-fingered typist, it would take me years to type out a one-hour interview. But after I get that first crude raw transcript I take over because my human judgement is needed to massage the interview excerpts into a finished piece of writing. And because, even though crafting prose from a piece of transcription is painfully slow, I want to do it because I care. Because I love it.

I’m getting sick and tired of hearing that AI can generate eleventy-billion new ideas in the space of time it takes a human to think up one. I’m quite sure that AI can do this but my instinctual response has always been ‘so what?’ Who has time to sort through eleventy-billion ideas and do any of them? Who has time to do that and still care? What the people who claim that AI’s speed makes it more creative than humans miss – what they don’t understand about creativity – is that it is not about the quantity of ideas you can generate but the nature of your relationship to that one idea which hooks you in, that one flash of inspiration that you fall hopelessly in love with and which you work with devotedly for as long as it takes to bring it into tangible form.

My friend Rebecca Stewart, who has illustrated all of the covers of my books and pamphlets (without the aid of AI), recently released her first graphic novel. Infernal Regions garnered a slew of great reviews and was shortlisted for one award and longlisted for another. It’s a stunning piece of work and, for Rebecca, a true labour of love. Watch this short video she made about the process of crafting Infernal Regions and notice both the effort and care that Rebecca took but also how enriching and fascinating that same process looked to be:

If someone came to one of my mentoring appointments and asked me whether or not they should use generative AI for their creative work I wouldn’t try to talk them into or out of it or proselytize about AI being good or bad. Instead, I would ask them to unpack why they think they should use it. And then I would ask them whether or not the presence of AI in their creative practice would crowd out the space for care and becoming and love or expand it.

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