It’s weird to be an artist and a tech worker. I never use AI tools in my private life (beyond the simple extensions of technology we already had that are retroactively being branded as AI—spellcheck, for example, or autocorrect on my phone). I have never used AI to generate text for a story, or outline an idea that I had, or to “workshop” ideas for me. I have no interest in doing that, no interest in the people who have interest in doing that. 

I want to say “I can’t imagine why someone would use AI for art” here… but of course I can. The people who were ‘bad’ at art when they were kids but still wants to feel like they’ve made something, the people who want a speedy visual representation of what they’re thinking (the purest expression of AI generated content is the throwaway meme), the pure capitalist who wants to use emerging technology to avoid the legal requirements to pay artists or voice actors or musicians or authors. The pro-AI crowd will hold up people with disabilities as the ideal virtuous use of AI content generation, reframing the tools as accessibility devices. In a world where we have Deaf musicians and blind painters, I have a hard time taking this seriously, especially since in the context of a pro/anti-AI argument, these posited artists are almost always imaginary. (Also, as a person with various neurodiversities who also writes books, I just don’t have a lot of sympathy for that hypothetical necessity.)

The simplest and most self-congratulatory version of the imagined AI artist is the person tossing a prompt into chatGPT and self-publishing a novel-length generated text onto the internet, trying to garner fame and profit with the least effort and time spent as possible. This is not an innovative fantasy; it’s not hard to imagine what the combination of laziness and greed looks like. And let’s be honest, it’s relatable. In my most primitive brain, I too would love to be a monkey laying under a tree, catching mangoes in my mouth, chewing and swallowing mechanically until I died of indegestion. I just don’t think that would be a very interesting life to live, and whatever rewards I might accrue in such a life would be boring, predictable, dull. I’m not just here to eat mangoes.

I used to say AI art wasn’t art. And I maintain that AI art has nothing to do with what I want to get out of art. It does not participate meaningfully in the conversation humanity has with itself. It does not inquire. It does not disrupt. It does not comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable. If anything, it comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted.

But it feels a bit unfair to include only the creations I value and find meaningful in my definition of art and keep everything else outside it. And I’m a bit conscious of my place in history here—I’m certain that when the first print presses churned out leaflets, priests and scribes decried them as tawdry, low-effort, scandalous, disrespectful to the real work of calligraphy and illumination. What I turn my nose up at now may be the norm in a generation. So instead of saying “AI art isn’t art,” I’ll say this instead:

AI art is art the same way small children’s finger paintings are art; lightweight experiments that loving parents might put on the fridge, valuable for their sentimentality, or perhaps for the implicit suggestion that the human who made them may someday have interesting ideas. You put a smiley face in Mister Sun, little buddy! Great job.

They’re art in the way that a second-grader makes art, coming home with a project created by following the teacher’s demonstration, one nearly identical to the thing every other child in their class has made. A cup made from rolling clay thin and looping it on top of itself so the final product looks like a bit like a coiled snake, or a turd. There is no originality in the rolled clay cup. There is barely intention. And ain’t none of that shit gonna go up in the MOMA.

So yeah, as an artist and an author, I will never use AI tools to soften the labor of writing. I won’t use it for fiction, non-fiction, journaling, or essays. Ever. Because my job as an author is to explore and articulate, not to regurgitate.

And I just got back from a professional conference where we spent the majority of the time talking about AI tooling in the tech industry, how to use or support it, how to measure its outcomes, how to make our existing craft ready for the demands of the moment. The cognitive dissonance is intense.

But more on that later.