I’m going to say right away that while I do use spell check and basic AI search engines, and I use PaintShop Pro to process my photos and create other digital art, those are tools. I do not use AI generation to write my words for me or create my art. If you do, you do – but please read on and hopefully you’ll see why I don’t.
AI generation isn’t human creation. It’s not a human being’s own thoughts shared by humans for other humans to experience. It’s a machine’s generation of data, not thoughts. It’s use of human creation scraped by a digital machine that then spews it out, reassembling data based on the query.
It’s not creativity.
Look, I don’t find elephant art or a kid’s first babblings all that interesting except for the behavioral value in a child’s efforts to communicate verbally and in an elephant’s paintings. It’s fascinating but what is the meaning? Is it art? I mean, it looks like art. But something’s missing for me.
Resonance. Something that “speaks” to me.
I don’t get the elephant’s art. Or the 1 year old’s babbling.
Okay, maybe I’ll never understand an elephant’s artistic communication – what the elephant meant – but you see what’s in that photo? A painting and the creator of the painting. It’s not human art but I know that the creation came from the brain and experience of the elephant. That gives it meaning, even if I don’t know what the meaning is.
What I’m saying is what matters is that there is communication of something that resonates with me as the creator’s authentic truth. That authentic truth is more than just the creative product alone. The value is in that it’s a shared bit of human experience. It does this by conveying a factual, aesthetic, and/or emotional factuality that came from another brain. I’m sure there’s other understandings of truth the way I’m using the word, but I don’t know right now what they all are. I don’t even know if when I say resonate it has meaning for you.
I’d rather just write the book or create the art in hopes that it will resonate with you because I put meaning into it and I hope you get meaning out. That is resonance, which is partially defined as emotional connection, and personal meaning. (I would have said grok here, but Musk ruined that word).
Anyway, this resonance of which I speak is about the creative experience, and that brings me to AI.
Copyright considerations aside, I reject AI generation because it’s so damn insulting. Someone uses AI generated words or art and puts it out into the world as if it was that person’s own work implies it doesn’t matter to them that I, the receiver of those words or images, am fine with settling for imposterism and piracy. I resent the implication that I’m stupid, so I won’t be able to tell anyway.
AI generation of “creative” work feels like cheating to me. It IS cheating. It’s not even as valuable as elephant art or a child’s first babbling, except to tell me the person isn’t the kind of person I want to spend time with, they’re imposters whose output isn’t authentically them, but part machine. It’s not human thinking. I can’t resonate with a child’s babbles or an elephant’s art because they don’t contain inherent meaning that I can comprehend and maybe resonate with – how the hell am I supposed to resonate with an AI’s output?
I’m a person who wants full credit for what I create. I worked hard to get to be the person I am today, and that means my creations come from an organic work has been grown as I have grown. It’s not meant to be perfect – I’m human, I can’t do that and why should I? All I want to do is create resonance.
So when I create I don’t use someone else’s work unless I give credit for it. I need authenticity or I am an imposter, and crediting sources allows me to proud of my own work. And that means that, as a long-ago Dayton, Nevada bartender used to say, “what’s good for the goose is good for the duck”. Just as I want my creative work to be authentically mine, that’s what I want to see in other people’s creative work.
AI generation is not creative. It’s generative, and if you don’t know the difference, it’s time you looked up the meanings of those words. One’s a tool and the other is not. Don’t try to pass as an authentically creative person if you aren’t.
That why I’m a firm NO on using AI for creative work.
This blog post was first published at https://lifstrand1.substack.com/p/to-ai-or-not-to-ai and has been published here with minor changes, as this human often does.
