Please allow me to say something I read this week. It wasn’t just about politics. new york times Colson Whitehead’s column on AI.
Specifically, why artists shouldn’t use it. If you have time, here’s a free link.
This column is both witty and annoying. A bunch of straw man arguments like “If you use AI for art, you’re a goddamn hack” and some fun octane metaphorical jiu-jitsu, including a look at the dire environmental hazards of data centers.
“…a midnight chat with a lovebot becomes bittersweet in a way when you learn that orgasms are measured in metric tons of melted glaciers.”
Chef Kiss, Colson, and ChatGPT will respond.
The crux of his argument is at the end of the piece, where he argues that he is not defending humanity because, as he rightly points out, humanity is the worst.
Rather, he simply extols the virtues of working. (He says it’s a “terrible job,” but it’s… new york timessince he’s not Substack, he doesn’t have the freedom to be his legitimate self).
But let him speak for himself.
“Read the book, not the summary.
Write sentences, not prompts.
Suffer like the artist you are. It’s not easy, but if it were, it wouldn’t be worth it. ”
I think this is the theory of the case that I expected from Whitehead. Unlike many of my writing friends, I’m not a bomb-throwing anti-AI crusader.
My guess is that, like gunpowder and the internal combustion engine, AI has a mix of blessings and subtle curses. As someone who has gone under the knife six times to remove melanoma, I get a little frustrated every time I see a new article about how AI is better than humans at detecting abnormalities in medical scans.
As a writer who had my entire backlist stolen by tech robber barons to train plagiarism bots, I’m going to sue all of those motherfuckers until the day I die. In other words, it’s nuance.
I’m not sure I can share this with Mr. Whitehead, but those last few lines are what really found me where I live now. Because Colson Whitehead is a pretty genius artist who won two Pulitzer Prizes, and I just write books that get better at higher elevations or closer to the beach, and we’re both lovers of a good zombie story. Mr. Whitehead’s zone 1This ambitious blend of genre and literary fiction, set in an America ravaged by the undead, was shortlisted for the prestigious Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
And what about me? Well, this week I cranked out my third contribution to John Ringo’s best-selling Zombie and Apocalypse Storyworld. black tide risingand it was the best in all the shooting and biting. And while my stories had undead monkeys biting like mad, that wasn’t the case with Whitehead. So the Pulitzer Prize doesn’t mean everything.
Colson and I are not that different.
That’s why his throwaway line about suffering for your art got to me. I understand the meme of struggling artists, but I don’t know if most people, most people who aren’t practicing artists, do that. More often than not, if you ask a customer to think of an artist who suffers for his or her art, be it writing, painting, sculpting, or whatever, they’ll Rorschach a vague image of a miserable hippie in the attic eating spoonfuls of off-brand dog food and sleeping on scavenged bubble wrap.
Everyone knows that the world does not recognize artistic genius, so the suffering is material. Look at the two Pulitzer Prizes I didn’t win.
But that’s not what Colson means. The suffering he praises is simply the suffering of creation and improvement. I know that well, and I’m here to tell you: it’s shit.
For my latest apple creation, this took half a day…
First things first though. She fired six shots into the two stranded biters, reloaded, and began running, with Bachelard easily keeping up with her pace. They entered from the south, guarding the shadow lines of scattered buildings, protecting the flanks from ambushes, and staying out of sight of the zombie herders ahead. The streets were not empty. In the first 200 meters, they passed four bodies, all infected, two of them “transformed” like the stabbers they had dismembered on the way back to Orly Airport in Paris.
They were badly deformed. Beneath ropes of bright red scar tissue, new shoots sprouted in grotesque profusion, strangely articulated arms protruding from nested ribs, and masses of legs jutting out from hips at impossible angles, as if the plague had transformed them into crude mockeries of gigantic humanoid insects. It was scary, Caitlin noted, acknowledging the evidence of heavy weapons damage. Therefore, the villagers fought back effectively.
Yes, I know. This isn’t a Nobel Prize joke, but maybe it’s a Pulitzer from a quiet year? i dunno. Many people are saying.
Anyway, the reason I’m reproducing it here is to prove that I’m no novice at explaining zombie hordes. The previous two zombie stories in Ringo’s anthology both featured quite a few zombies. I’ve also written about time-traveling First Fleet zombies.
And in my mind, Space Marines vs. Space Zombies Cruel Stars novel.
They moved carefully through piles of torn carrion, but each step of the giant armored suits released new chunks, or severed limbs, or clouds of turbulent, drifting carrion. Lucinda arched. Ignoring the hideous and macabre evidence of war crimes committed here. Blood splattered the walls like a pennant emblazoned with the emblem of a demonic army. The armored suit was abnormal. Its clean lines and functional movements are perverted. Now the vicious dead have taken control. Both she and the living were intruders.
The tremors that ran up and down her limbs threatened to turn into deep body spasms of disgust. She blocked the faceplate to block her view of the passageway, relying instead on lidar sweeps from the suit’s external sensor nodes to render the long arc of the concourse in its simplest form, a ray-traced outline, a dense mass of organic matter rendered by purely figurative geometry, empty of malice or meaning.
In short, this wasn’t my first undead rodeo. And as I stared at the screen, knowing I had to come up with a new and exciting way to explain something I’ve explained so many times before, I just wasn’t feeling it.
I didn’t feel it as strongly and over time I experienced some kind of discomfort. I was suffering because of this shit.
That’s what Colson Whitehead meant. And I think that’s the real threat and scourge of AI, at least for writers and artists. Whether it’s plagiarism, a raging torrent, or even a glacier melted by the solitary act of a sexbot in the middle of the night. It is the end of suffering.
I can only speak for writers, other arts have to make their own claims, but when it comes to writers, we hate writing, but we love writing. Since I wrote To steal from Dorothy Parker. We especially miss the things we wrote when times were tough. I don’t know why that passage this week was so hard to get off, but it was.
I ended up having to write a draft by hand, but once I did that (not just throwing the problem at the AI, which would probably solve it for me or at least unblock it), I realized after about 30 minutes of writing notes that I was falling into the flow.
You’ve probably heard of it, or even experienced it yourself: flow state, that weird, abstracted place we go to when we’re doing something at the limit of our abilities.that Even if you don’t win a Pulitzer Prize, get a big book deal, or pay a huge amount of royalties, it’s a reward.
That’s the reward the AI receives from you. Sure, it makes things easier, it really does. But easier doesn’t necessarily mean better.
Writing is more than just a skill. I think that is a very human power. (So is reading, if it’s worth it.)
And, like physical fitness, you need to constantly train. Even if you’ve done it many times before, you need to do it again. Because when you stop resisting the weight and difficulty of writing, painting, or anything else, those muscles atrophy and weaken.
I worry that there will be baby writers coming after me, such as students and aspiring writers. Having grown up with AI, I worry that they didn’t have to push the bar really hard to take an inch off their chest. They haven’t built those muscles yet, so they won’t get the chance to do so if the AI is all-consuming.
On the other hand, I was a technology writer for years, and trust me in my professional opinion that AI writing sucks. and probably always will be. That’s good!
That’s why I don’t get upset like many of my friends and colleagues. However, I don’t think this is as much of a threat to the writers as they imagine. Sure, Amazon is full of slop, but Amazon is always full of slop.
No, AI is a threat in other ways.
By removing all the difficulty from the act of creating, we remove the effort it takes for young writers to learn how to create in the first place.
