Note: I drafted this early on Bandcamp Friday. By mid-afternoon, before publishing, I was up $44 in sales from posts on social media. If I could do this every day I could afford to start making changes in-person that make dealing with the problems I mention here possible. If you want to support art and have the means, regular support via Ko-fi or Patreon is the best way to do that. If you can't commit to monthly, buying albums on Bandcamp helps too.
A single good day doesn't undo the decade of issues described below. Anyway, back to the title.
You'll skim it at best. If you're kind, you might offer sympathy. If you're an asshole, you'll look for a comment form to go off on a rant devoid of any connection to the thing you're responding to. There isn't one.
This is me giving up on trying to reach anyone. Now I'm going to just talk into the void with intent and full knowledge no one will really hear it, rather than with hope.
As rabid, often profoundly ignorant anti-AI rhetoric took over every space I was in, I withdrew. The combination of stress, isolation, and despair crushed any will to create. That's where I've been for the last year or so, after a slow progressive burnout over the last decade.
I got good at making things with generative AI. We're past the point where you can tell and have been for a while. You can tell when someone's lazy with it. But the work was empty: I could produce writing, music, and art on a level with anything I made the hard way. It depended entirely on my real skills and experience, so it wasn't empty for lack of merit.
There was just no one to share it with or talk to about it. Boring.
In a parallel universe, I would use this space to talk about process. Aesthetic choices. Style influences. I would show you some examples, maybe even have a coy little A/B test to see if you can spot the AI generated one even though both are.
But we're in the universe where you've already dismissed this because the tool is a neural network instead of Blender or a pencil and the input is thousands of words and hundreds of revisions instead of an equal amount of effort making thoughtful marks on paper or manipulating nodes.
I've done 3D art. Illustration and design. Music. Game design. Photography. Writing.
But I hit that same wall: I'm a social animal. When all the places I might socialize and share in are dominated by people who spend all day posting about how much they hate a technology and anyone who uses it, it's not really a place I want to be. Why would I want to be around people who are relentlessly and confidently wrong about things I've taken the time to understand?
I'm tired and this is the one place I have any room to really communicate even if no one's listening, so I'm not investing in another back and forth. I'm declaring bullshit bankruptcy. Take the house, here's the keys, good luck. If you're actually willing to be persuaded, you can hear a good treatment of water use and find out how much electricity we could have if we replaced all the worthless ethanol corn with solar panels if you're still under the illusion datacenters are worse than any other sort of industry. And if you care about actually persuading people instead of being mindlessly angry, watch this.
It's hard to motivate myself in isolation, and few people looked at what I posted before the timelines were packed to the brim with rants and negativity starting around 2016 when every social media thing turned on their algorithmic feeds.
So I've essentially been without community for the last 10 years. This is what leads people to obsessive and excessive use of AI chatbots. I never got that deep because I understand how they work, what their limits are, and what they're good for. But there are so many people out there in the same situation, isolated and in despair, who have no one to talk to, and don't understand ChatGPT isn't really there talking to them like another person.
I've seen people describe the last few years as a boycott, like I'm crossing some picket line by experimenting with LLMs. There's no real boycott. Just people yelling past each other.
I would have joined a real boycott on the merits even if I think many of the anti- arguments are misinformed. Give me a specific target, achievable demands, and a strategy informed by the actual history of labor movements, and I'm there.
My own early attempt at starting a career was cut off by automation, so I get it. No one was organizing aspiring IT professionals against the move away from on-premises hosting to the cloud. You don't see me yelling at you for using Gmail or a VPS instead of self-hosting. There's a lot to like about the cloud, as there is with generative AI. Jobs were moving in to computers in datacenters long before Google published the transformer paper in 2017.
What we have now is fear directed like an energy weapon at people who have nuanced views on technology. Your fear doesn't become activism just because it's loud and angry. Aimless fear with no end in sight that ignores its own ineffectiveness. Useless. This is matrices and manifolds, not Target or Harry Potter. It's not going anywhere, but we could still change its course as it winds its way into our lives.
Every creative community I used to be part of now resembles old splinter forums where the only thing anyone talked about is what they hate about the place they left.
No, I'm not going all-in on generative AI. I don't really want to use it to make stuff. It's fun, maybe even useful for visualizing something real quick. But the making of art is part of where the fulfillment comes from for me. Generative AI is a tool with limited use, and those uses are supportive, not a replacement for anything.
My wish is to take inspiration from what I've done with AI image generators and learn to draw and paint like that manually. But who would I share it with? You're all too busy ranting about AI killing art to see artists suffocating in silence. AI isn't what's killing art. The noise is.