When I was about eight years old, I became irrationally upset by the fact that I had all these fantastic stories and ideas swirling around in my head that required real work to become, well, real. Why was I gifted with such a fabulous imagination in a world that completely ignored my thoughts? I even wrote an essay about it, titled something like, “On the Extreme Frustration of Not Being Able to Manipulate Reality with my Mind.” As painful as this realization was, I persevered and eventually either learned to do the work or accepted the fact there are some things I simply cannot do. Today, though, it feels like we’re all at the mercy of that 8-year old’s irrational feelings in the form of GenAI. In the minds of many, GenAI represents a kind of magical power that bypasses the messy and difficult process of craft and simply creates the wildest dreams out of thin air. It’s an undeniably alluring idea, which is one reason the whole world is shoveling money into it like a stoker shoveling coal into a runaway train’s boiler. But for many of us creative types, the craft is the fun part. We enjoy tediously picking away at prose to make it tighter, more understandable, more relatable. We love pushing pixels to make our digital art perfect on a level no one else will ever notice. The craft is cathartic and human and the reason we all got into this in the first place. It brings us joy and peace, distracts us from our overactive and hypercritical minds. So our hearts fall and our souls whither when they tell us, “just put that paragraph in ChatGPT and ask it to streamline the text.” Because for us, pouring over every word and space in a paragraph is the good part of the job. GenAI is made to optimize outcomes and maximize profits. Both of these are of course necessary in a world driven by profits, but creative professionals try to at least shoehorn some humanity into the work, to create some kind of connection. And making those human connections requires human effort, not just probabilistic guesses from a machine. It requires careful thinking and arduous tinkering. This toiling and tinkering also creates a sort of insulation between us (the artists) and the ultimate purpose of our corporate/commercial work. If we can focus on these tiny turns of phrases or minute adjustments to kerning, we can create distance between us and the cold machinery of capitalism. This is the creative process and it’s why we do what we do. This desire to eliminate creativity in the name of production is why I loathe GenAI. I also hate how it has stolen the work of countless humans, dumped it into a mathematical meat grinder, and excreted unimaginable amounts of inedible creative sausage. I am also keenly aware that this process consumes gigawatts of energy and millions of gallons of water (even if it isn’t strictly drinking water). GenAI is not only anti creativity, it’s horrifically inefficient. According to the International Energy Agency, a typical AI-focused hyperscaler data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households. In comparison, a single human brain, which is capable of everything from scoring 100 points in a basketball game to coming up with General Relativity, consumes about 20 watts. It can also navigate the real world, remember things, and have experiences. The human brain is a miracle and to offload so much of its creativity to an inefficient machine in the name of production and progress is heartbreaking and criminal. Don’t get me wrong, I believe there are real uses for machine learning and GenAI. Both technologies can be used to model and improve systems and can be invaluable in doing many things in science, like identifying new galaxies in old telescope data or finding cancer cells hidden in medical scans. It can be a tremendous boon for any task that requires sifting through unimaginable amounts of data, or for helping humans comprehend huge, complex systems. It can help in ways I can’t even begin to fathom because I’m not a scientist or engineer. (But even then, scientists tell me, it needs to be thoroughly checked to make sure it isn’t lying, hallucinating, or is just plain incorrect.) In my realm of writing and storytelling, however, GenAI is wrong. Tedious research, real-world experience, and the nitty gritty of the craft are critical to writing anything anyone would want to read. Ultimately, though, GenAI is not truly the problem and the way it’s being used isn’t a surprise. If you prioritize growth, extraction, and profit, you’ll end up with GenAI that vomits countless iterations of Marvel movies into the hungry maws of a hollowed-out populous. It’s an almost inevitable outcome, just one of the beast’s many fierce weapons. So banning GenAI in creative professions is like trimming one claw on a tiger’s paw. If the cat’s hungry, it’s still gonna tear you open and eat your guts. The real problem is we’ve let striving, ravenous, insatiable urges take over everything. Worse, we’ve built our entire civilization around them. They are our core pillars. They are the primary elements of our societal chemistry. Everything must be done now, we must grab all we can before someone else does, we must rush rush rush and grow grow grow. Greed is good. Grabbing hands grab all they can, etc. etc. Greed corrupts and encourages corner cutting, rushing, rashness, and cut-throat behaviour of all kinds. Yes, this is a tremendously oversimplified, kindergarten/Sunday school observation, but it’s true. And even more frustrating, it’s a truth we’ve known for at least 10,000 years, a story that’s been told since we figured out how to scratch little symbols into stone tablets and probably even before then. Yet here we are, our entire civilization running on greed. So until we in the very least attempt to control greed, we will get things like GenAI that will turn creativity into commodity. We will get the grinding, soulless, thoughtless process of business. We need to move beyond it, to start seriously recognizing what we want as humans, what will best fill the void that we all have in our souls (hint, it’s community, art, music, spirituality). We need to consider how we can create a stable, long-lasting civilization that’s in harmony with our planet. We need to slow down, share, and be kind. When we start doing that, fewer people will want to use GenAI to make art. They will have the time for deeper thought, longer practice, and for experiencing the satisfaction of mastering a craft. Or they will find something else that fills that hole—caring for someone, doing heavy physical labor, playing a sport, learning how to play the accordion, I don’t know. Anything that requires repetition and commitment. So I’m in a sticky situation. I realize that GenAI is abhorrent. I also know it can make the people who pay me very happy. I can use it to make these people happy, to ultimately feed my family and my pride of cats while my soul rots. Or I can try to find somewhere that refuses to use GenAI for writing, some weird business or organization that’s okay with not making money or getting more shit done. I can switch careers entirely, start at the bottom of the ladder doing something seemingly beyond the reach of GenAI like carpentry or plumbing or electrical work. (Some of those professions even have unions!) But I’m old, and frail, and my eyesight is going, and I am becoming increasingly fat and sore all over. No, right now the best solution is to smile and diligently do my job, focusing on what makes me special and more valuable than GenAI (A sickening sentence to write as humans should always be more valuable than machines, but so it goes). I will also create, even if it does feel futile. My creative human work can create the connections I need to survive and even defeat GenAI. And who knows, one day it may even help us move away from greed and progress for progress’ sake and toward a calmer, more measured, and more humane society.
