Robots Become Artists, Artists Become Robots

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash and edited by me

Currently Reading: Storm: Dawn of a Goddess by Tiffany D. Jackson

Remember when joking about robots stealing jobs was funny and not depressing? Remember when CAPCHAs were the only entities wondering if we were real or not? Remember when we cried PhotoShop when something didn’t look quite real?

I think I’d be saying the obvious if I mentioned having a fearful disdain for AI, or what we pretend is AI. I think what might be more accurate is “generated media”. That doesn’t really roll off the tongue, though, so AI it is. Buzzword. Buzz-acronym. 

I know that when I’m folding shirts and blinking at rude customers, all I’m wishing is that a robot would come and steal my job so I had more time to do art. 

Meanwhile, the robots are doing my art for me. 

I don’t think AI can replace real art. I don’t think people will really enjoy reading generated novels. What I worry about is the money being made. AI is lucrative, even if it’s empty. Like lottery tickets, it rakes it in while not often paying anything back in return. That thing you want to generate could be done by hand by a talented human being, and it wouldn’t have six fingers and blurry text. 

Nothing I have to say on the subject is new. My experiences are shared by millions of artists and people in all fields. The fact that I know this makes it feel really weird to write about it. I have nothing new to contribute.

But it’s haunting every one of us. If you’re reading this, odds are you’re like me, a writer who just wants to put something out there and experience life through the lens of beautiful language. And it’s hard to do that when half of the art out there isn’t real, when inspiration has to be found through a haze of ones and zeros designed to make us drool instead of feel something real. 

Because my overall goal, besides having a novel published, is to be a professor, I’ve also seen how AI impacts the teaching world. While tutoring high schoolers online, I saw many essays that were written in part or entirely by ChatGPT or something similar. A lot of jobs out there for people who want to join the world of academia but have yet to gain their credentials/degrees find themselves “tutoring” programs that might, one day, steal their job. Training their replacements in the sickest way possible. 

I’m more nervous about how AI will impact young people learning how to enjoy and create art than I am worried about it replacing artists. A lot of children and teens will learn what good art looks like from a computer—not the Internet, like we did, but an actual program—and that frightens me. 

If a few clicks can generate something that may otherwise have taken hours and days, not counting

the time it took to learn the skills, why bother with the latter?

That’s what freaks me out. Art can take a lot of effort, and that’s a huge part of what makes it beautiful. Also annoying, but being irritated at art is part of the gig. 

I hear a lot of people say that AI can help with streamlining. I personally believe that there is little to no use for AI in writing spaces. 

Before you get mad at me, there are people out there willing to do a human check of your grammar and syntax. It is more costly, but it avoids issues that may arise from a computer thinking it knows best. A simple spellchecker in any word processor ought to be enough. Editors, proofreaders, revisers—these are all people who deserve jobs, who deserve to use their skills. 

Cover artists and illustrators also deserve to make art for your beautiful book. 

I understand that taking the easy route feels like it means getting your book out there faster, letting the world see your art sooner. But people will notice. They will see where you skipped steps, where you decided not to take the effort. 

And they will put your book back on the shelf because of it. 

On another note, having AI write an essay for a class is also a massive issue, as I mentioned. I can comprehend and even empathize with overworked students who just want to get to the word count and throw that essay in. 

But AI will teach you absolutely nothing about your voice. It will put every sentence in the same order it has been trained to do a million times over. It will replace your words with ones you’ve never heard before, ruining your personal touch. 

Essays are annoying to be forced to write. Making it go any quicker seems worth it. 

It will destroy your integrity, firstly. But it will also strip you of the chance to learn what your own academic and creative voice sounds like. Your opinion will fade, replaced by the broad voice of a single entity, amalgamated from a billion voices that aren’t yours.

Odds are, I don’t really need to be convincing you of this. Public opinion reflects this same opinion in most, if not all, circles of artists, of which you are likely one. 

So I will leave you with this, just so you don’t hate me:

Your art will break through. It is better than every single piece of “art” that AI has ever produced, simply because it is human. Your art is worth doing and worth experiencing. Please, do not let it go to waste because an algorithm tells you to. Put it out there. We need it more than you could ever know. 

Do it for us, your fellow artists. 

You can do this. Beat the machine.

-Rachel, who refuses to become a robot