Happy 2026 everyone! 🥳

If you spend enough time in certain circles (*cough* LinkedIn *cough*), you’ll no doubt come across a rather peculiar line of argumentation extolling the world-changing virtues of the slop machines. We are told that these services aren’t to be lauded merely on the merits of what they can do for us in the course of performing creative work, but also for this reason: armed with access to these services, you can Take Down The Man.

And by "The Man", they mean…artists.

Yes. Artists are the new gatekeepers. People who dedicated their lives to the pursuit of craft and of bettering themselves, collaborating with other creators and adding their unique voices to the human continuum of artistic traditions, are apparently attempting to block the next generation of artists who use Generative AI as their “brush and canvas” !!

Indeed, you can find this sort of rhetoric in the air everywhere now. An article I quickly found via an Internet search says the following:

The current backlash against AI isn’t about artistic merit. It’s about ego, identity, and economic fear. It’s the gasp of creators who haven’t evolved in decades, watching others do in seconds what used to take them months. And instead of adapting, they clutch old accomplishments and weaponize nostalgia, hoping to shame others into stalling innovation.

But history has never paused for the comfort of the past.

AI isn’t here to replace you. It’s here to empower the next generation of artists—traumatized, overlooked, or under-skilled—who finally have a tool that lets them create what they’ve always dreamed of.

And that, more than anything, is what threatens the old guard: the idea that art is no longer gated by mastery of a single medium, but opened by mastery of vision.

I’m willing to bet good money this was actually written using an LLM, which is one of the more funny things about this category of takes.

But let’s for the sake of argument take these treatises at face value. Is Hollywood really cooked? Are the mighty lords of art & software about to be taken down by the masses wielding genAI prompts? Is this the next Internet content revolution, bigger even than the original Internet?

As an “AI filmmaker” on LinkedIn posits:

I think it’s worth being honest about what’s actually making people uncomfortable about AI in filmmaking.

It’s not that AI will make bad movies.
Bad movies have always existed.

The real fear is that AI removes excuses.

For decades, filmmakers were filtered by access—money, crews, permission, infrastructure. If a project didn’t happen, there was always something external to blame. The gate was visible, and it was heavy.

Now the gate is lighter.

Is the gate really lighter now? Are we who shy away from genAI afraid because we don't have excuses any more? What does that even mean?

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Defining the Gate

I think it’s important we define what the gate even is before we try to identify who is keeping it and why. In all creative endeavors, there is usually a division of access to labor & resources in the sense of production and distribution.

There are also different types of art forms which historically have inherently different qualities of either or both informing how they developed and what they represent. For example, a folk musician several hundred years ago would have relatively easy access to both the production of their music (with fiddle in hand, or a flute, etc.) and the distribution of their music (performing among family/friends or in front of a small local crowd). However, an aspiring classical composer—while needing only paper & pen to write sheet music—would need to clear a much higher bar to gain access to the "distribution" of their work in the form of an orchestra.

Another example: in an earlier time, the production of elaborate illustrated books was mostly under the purview of ecclesiastical bodies. We all know the tale of how the printing press made both the production & distribution of books far easier and more accessible to the people, and some members of the clergy weren’t too keen on the idea. (Later on, the opposite viewpoint was taken. Printing press + religion = evangelism like never before!)

Alright, now that that we have these concepts to work with, let us ponder some of the “gates” of today and who are keeping them. Setting aside production for the moment, what are the gates of distribution today?

Virtually nonexistent!

Long preceding the rise of generative AI, we have witnessed the Internet essentially dismantle the former gatekeepers of most forms of media distribution. With few exceptions, there is nothing stopping any artist from sharing their art online. Anyone can easily create a website with their own domain name and post anything they want. Post images, audio, and video with ease. Heck, stick an .mp4 file on Dropbox and share a link! Compared with the hoops you’d have to jump through on the Web even 15 years ago around bandwidth and file formats and such, sharing digital media today is fundamentally trivial! The same is true of software as well. Deploying sophisticated web apps is shockingly straightforward compared to a decade ago. And for many sorts of “static sites”, hosting is essentially free. Free!

Since the distribution of creative works is simple and low-cost today (which has nothing whatsoever to do with AI), how can people say that this nascent technology revolution will take down the gatekeepers? Do they mean specific services like Netflix? Movie theaters? Spotify? AWS? How does that even make sense? If you (along with millions of other people) were somehow to turn a series of slop output videos into a movie-length master file, are the movies theaters even going to show any of that? If not, wouldn’t that mean they remain the same gatekeepers as before?

Right, so as was established there’s the gate of distribution but before that comes into play there’s the gate of production. Perhaps that is what the AI boosters mean?

Producing Slop is Fundamentally Not the Same as Producing the Art It Copies

A lot of these gatekeeping-related arguments tend to revolve around the types of projects which typically take a long time and involve many people. Movies. Games. Software.

So let’s consider that. If you have a cool idea and you want to turn it into a movie, is Generative AI the answer? After all, you’d need to turn to a "gatekeeper" in order to work with actors, set dressers, a cinematographer, perhaps a director and/or a writer, scout locations, get permits, rent equipment, etc., etc. It’s hard to make a good-quality movie or a TV show! Surely now that we have AI, that can all be bypassed! 😃

Except there’s a gaping logic hole the size of the Grand Canyon in that line of thinking. If you engage in a few thrilling sessions of prompt-fondling and save a series of slop videos onto your big SSD, that process did not actually solve any of those dilemmas.

You still didn’t work with any actors!

You still didn’t work with a cinematographer! You also failed to scout locations, rent equipment, shoot practical effects, collaborate with a sound designer, or anything else which goes into the process of creating a movie.

In short, you did not create a movie at all, because you didn’t do the things people do when they create movies. And if you think the process of creating a work of art is somehow separate from and untethered to the end result of the art itself, you are ignorant and know nothing about art. (More on that in a moment!)

”But what about CG-animated movies!” you may cry. Well that’s a different art form than a live-action movie, isn’t it? And still, the underlying principle is the same. If your slop video “looks” like an animated film, no it isn’t—because it didn’t go through any of the process the creation of an animated film goes through.

Remembering Gene Wilder

I recently watched a heart-warming documentary about beloved actor Gene Wilder. I was astonished to realize during the course of watching this that I had yet to watch nearly any of his movies. Of course I’ve seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, as many have, but there are so many wonderful films he starred in (or directed!) which I haven’t seen. It made me want to queue up a bunch of them.

Then I got to thinking about all the “AI filmmakers” who will never get the chance to work with the Gene Wilder of their generation because they are too busy engaged in prompt-fondling instead of working with real actors on real movie sets on real movie productions. And that makes me sad. Yes, there are gatekeepers to making movies. (Although with today’s access to inexpensive digital videography equipment and LED lighting and other affordable tools, it’s much easier than ever to start indie.) And we can have a legitimate and sensible conversation about those gatekeepers; we can certainly question if they’re doing a good-enough job of keeping that gate of production.

But that does NOT mean if you “bypass” the gate via AI, you’ll end up in the very city you set out to visit. Instead you’ll end up in a barren wasteland. A wasteland devoid of all of the experience and all of the talent and all of the tradition and all of the community which comes from making art using the production techniques of making art.

If that sounds a bit circular, that’s because it is! After all, a violinist is a person who plays the violin. A graphics designer is a person who designs graphics. Such simple truths are so obvious to me, I struggle to articulate arguments to convince folks to care about creative production skills & processes because the alternative (not caring about creative production skills & processes) seems so utterly nonsensical to me. And yet…

”Nobody Cares How It Was Made” …Really?

I recently watched another awesome documentary called Wick Is Pain, all about the genesis of and making of the smash hit John Wick franchise.

One of the most fascinating elements of the first film is it was essentially constructed as a showcase of the stunt techniques of the talented crew headed up by Chad Stahelski & David Leitch. They had been developing their own “house style” of action filmmaking & martial arts (and developing a particular vibe of gun-fu) and were having trouble fitting in with traditional Hollywood blockbusters attempting to integrate the style.

So while it is true that every artwork is (of course!) a result of the process used to create it, John Wick is fairly unique in that it wasn't a vehicle for a certain star, or IP, or director or writer or any of the typical motivations for engaging in a new film production. It was made to showcase a new production style invented by stunt performers and their companion camera operators—a very different style it was too compared to the past era of rapid-fire editing and shaky cam.

Compare this story to an “AI action movie”. There could NEVER be a Wick Is Pain style documentary made about it because there was no pain involved in those stunts, no pain involved in that fight choreography. Nobody got kicked, nobody got wet, nobody got tired and upset and repeatedly shouted the F word as Keanu Reeves did to blow off steam. And again, comparisons to animation ring hollow because even though it’s the case that when you're watching an animated movie you’re not seeing ”real people” perform stunts in a real space, it’s still true that real people spent many many hours of blood, sweat, and tears designing characters and rendering test shots and tweaking movements and improving hair techniques—and it’s undeniable you still often have actors in mo-cap suits translating real-world action into what gets rendered, and you have real actors recording their voiceovers to give characters distinct, human personalities.

I realize I'm talking a lot about movies here and not about painting or music or software or [fill in the blank art form], but it’s all the same thing. No matter what kind of creative work we are talking about, there is simply no substitute for the process of making the art because the process of how the art was made is the art. The two are inseparable. You cannot experience one without the other. “Art-shaped output” minus the process to create the art is a form of digital zombism. It is “dead art” masquerading as alive and meaningful. And thus we must to turn our quizzical attention away from the slop itself and to the people who are trying to con us into believing the slop has something to say. All it has to say is that the people generating the slop forgot what art is. (Or possibly they never understood it to begin with.)

As the saying goes, if you didn’t take the time to write it, I simply won’t bother to take the time to read it. Same goes for every other art form. Because not only is the process of creating art part of the inherent value and worth of the art, the process of experiencing the result of that creative process is part of the inherent value and worth of the art.

When I watch John Wick, I’m not merely ingesting audiovisual sensory data into my gray matter via my eye and ear holes. I am experiencing the pain. I am somehow mysteriously participating in the years of blood, sweat, and tears which the artists themselves went through.

When Keanu Reeves yelled the F word, I was there.

When the directors were at their wits’ end thinking their funding wouldn’t come through and the project was canceled, I was there.

The audience isn’t there merely at the end of the process. They’re there right from the beginning.

You were there when Leonardo da Vinci was painting his Mona Lisa. I was there in that cave in Argentina thousands of years ago when hands were placed on rock and paint was sprayed over them. We were there together in that room where Beethoven first conceived of what would become his Ninth Symphony.

Art is magic like that. It is an extraordinary non-corporeal device which compresses spacetime and allows all members of the human race to connect with one another across vast distances of age and place. Generative AI however doesn’t further this magic. It annihilates it, like a particle of antimatter coming into contact with matter. It is a black hole, out of which no art can escape.

Save the Cheerleader, Save the World

The TV show Heroes was always a bit of a mixed bag, and even while its explosive first season (see what I did there?) didn’t quite hold up on repeated viewings much to my chagrin, I still think it is full of some really clever ideas. One of those ideas is the character of Sylar (spoiler alert!) whose superpower isn’t that he has any useful superpower of his own but that he can “cannibalize” other powered people’s brains and steal their powers for himself.

Generative AI is Sylar. It has no genuine power of its own, no creative force, no artistic process, no explanatory ability to reflect on its own skills & abilities. (Even if you “ask an LLM” to describe what it “feels like” to be an LLM producing content, every word which is provided to you is the same digital zombism pretending to be real communication. Slop “describing” slop—sound and fury, signifying nothing.)

But remember, AI is not a person at all, therefore we musn’t blame the AI. That would be silly. It would like be blaming a gun for killing a person. Yet just as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a cynical & reductive take on the scourge of gun violence, “Generative AI doesn’t harm artists” is similarly reductive. No, AI does not—rather the people providing these dangerous commercial services and those who champion this technology are the ones causing the harm. And we must continue to speak out against these harms, over and over again without ever letting up, because the other side in this ideological war certainly shows no sign of waving the white flag.

So let’s band together and save the cheerleaders of authentic creative processes (to keep the metaphor going). Artists who care deeply about craft, who work hard on their skills & abilities and who are more than happy to share their knowledge & expertise with other up-and-coming artists, are not gatekeepers! And the long-standing gatekeepers of certain forms of media production (such as movies) will continue to be gatekeepers whether we like it or not, so let us focus our "ire" there when we feel like important voices are not being adequately heard (particularly from marginalized communities such as LGBTQ+ & BIPOC).

In an era when the dignity and worth of artists is under fire like never before, it’s extremely necessary to listen with respect to the artists who are actively being harmed by bad usage of questionable technologies. Ask yourselves: what is the agenda of the people who are taking a massive dump on these very same artists? What do they stand to gain if the slop machines win (and what will they lose if they don’t)? More importantly, what do they stand to gain right now with an escalation of hype-fueled rhetoric directly prior to the bursting of the bubble?

That, my friends, is the trillion-dollar question.

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Jared ✌️

🤔🌩️ Things that make you think:

There no longer is a choice to opt out. There are no terms of service, there is no consent. We are but fleshy data crops and they are the plantation owners.

These toolmen are like sexual predators, preying on our data, our lack of power and agency. They lust after space travel, transhumanism and technocratic rule and they lust after our autonomy and freedom.

They give us “tools” that deskill us, erode our agency and make us dependent on them. They encourage us to find more ways to increase our dependence, and many do this work with glee.

In an Age of No Consent, the only answer is dissent. so raise your voice, and use it to resist. Ignore the cult of personality, magic and grift and fight for a future worth living.

–Bart Fish