You have to remember that the sole principle of capitalism is that nothing matters but the money, and anything which does not lead to a rich person putting more money in their own personal pocket is ultimately a waste of money. Sure, you can spend money sometimes; as an investment to enable you to make even more money. But everything else is an irrelevance. Any cost that does not bring an eventual fiscal return is money that should not have been spent.
Quality of life? The capitalist fat cats don't care, not just because they're monsters who have been thoroughly corrupted by their pursuit of cash, but because they don't really have lives, so why should anyone else? Your average tycoon does not truly enjoy anything in life but the pursuit of cash. This is the mindset that's required to be a tycoon. They tend to spend their lives entirely at work, not because they are masochistic, but because they don't know how to live any other way. They don't love their wives, they don't know their children, they don't have hobbies, etc. If they do things like golf it's for their value as schmoozing (these days we call it 'networking') opportunities. The closest they get to a hedonistic pleasure is enjoying a meal or a drink every now and then. They live for money. They truly do not understand why anyone would want to devote any part of their lives to anything but the endless grind for cash.
You may not think that paragraph has much to do with art, which is what this essay's supposed to be about, but the thing is, art is one of the things that makes quality of life.
There are some, even some artists, who dispute this. Tristan Tzara, the closest thing Dada ever had to a mouthpiece, had these words put into his mouth by Tom Stoppard (in "Travesties"), and though Stoppard surely took liberties, based on what I've read about Tzara I think they're probably accurate enough in mindset:
My God, you bloody English philistine -- you ignorant smart-arse bogus bourgeois Anglo-Saxon prick! When the strongest began to fight for the tribe, and the fastest to hunt, it was the artist who became the priest-guardian of the magic that conjured the intelligence out of the appetites. Without him, man would be a coffee-mill. Eat -- grind -- shit. Hunt -- eat -- fight -- grind -- saw the logs -- shit.
The difference between being a man and being a coffee-mill is art. But that difference has become smaller and smaller and smaller. Art created patrons and was corrupted. It began to celebrate the ambitions and acquisitions of the paymaster. The artist has negated himself: paint -- eat -- sculpt -- grind -- write -- shit.
Without art man was a coffee-mill: but with art, man -- is a coffee-mill! That is the message of Dada.
But Dada was, like all other absurdist movements, at heart a cynical response to something horrible -- a comedy, a mask, to try to cover a wound, in this case the psychological damage that World War I did to an entire young generation in Europe (at an earlier point in the play, which is set in 1917 or 1918, Tzara says "It may be nonsense, but at least it's not clever nonsense. Cleverness has been exploded, like so much else, by the war"). So I think we can excuse Tzara for being overly cynical here.
There is a truth buried in Tzara's rant, though. Patronage does corrupt art. Moreover, patronage inevitably corrupts art, because what every artist runs afoul of, usually sooner rather than later, is that they need to eat. They need to pay their rent. They need to attend to the coffee-mill portions of life. And the money -- which has no appreciation for anything but the coffee-mill portions of life, and really wishes their workers didn't need food or housing or pay but were just robots prepared to grind gears endlessly and tirelessly in the engines of commerce -- is not prepared to offer art much help staying alive. Never has been.
It has always been hard to be an artist. Even the S-tier artists (e.g. Mozart) worried endlessly about patronage and getting gigs. If you're a visual artist, and you're not producing in the narrow range that the rich are willing to pay for to ornament their homes or hold as an "investment," or you're not considered notable enough for galleries and museums to want to collect you, you are screwed; you're rarely ever going to make your rent selling paintings or pots to us schlubs, not if you are selling them at a price that we can afford to pay. (Or you become a mass-produced factory of the soulless, e.g. Margaret Keane, or Thomas Kinkade.)
If you are a writer, your path is to somehow find good representation and write the kind of crap an increasingly risk-averse, gigantic multinational publishing company thinks is worth the size of a print run they consider profitable, and then add a generous dose of good luck. If you are a filmmaker, same, with the added caveat that the theatrical movie is dying rapidly and the market is fragmenting in ways that make it much, much harder to get gigs. If you are a musician, give the fuck up. The industry has climbed up its own ass and eaten itself. Streaming and the web broke its collective brain and it has never recovered. There are like five musicians left who can still make the conventional channels in the music industry work. The rest of you are going to make your money from live performances -- endless, exhausting, non-stop live performances, grinding every night just to have enough money to make it to the next club.
I know a lot of artists of various stripes, and some of them may even read this essay at some point, and I want to say to you personally: I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the previous two paragraphs. I'm sorry I have to say it. I hope you manage to keep your head above water. I will buy your stuff whenever I can, if that helps. But I'm sure you know damned well by now how hard you have to dogpaddle; you know I ain't lyin'.
And even if you do manage to stay afloat, we're stuck in a society that says "Oh, by the way, no safety net for you, fuck off." Retirement plan? Not for artists. Health insurance? Maybe, on the open market, if you get lucky and isn't priced prohibitively. So, y'know, don't get old, don't get sick, don't have kids. You can't afford any of that. Capitalism has said so. Because capitalism doesn't care whether there's any art in the world. The only time capital cares about art is when it's a marketing decision: Would we sell more of these sneakers if they were pink? Would we get the gays to buy them if we put a Keith Haring repro on the sides, or would that be considered too much of a political statement?
Sometimes it feels like the answer is just to give up ... no, not give up making art, but give up on the notion of ever getting paid for it. Unfortunately, what this generally means is that you go find a day job to pay the bills and -- because capital wants to grind you down to the bones, wring out everything useful from you and leave you with nothing when you clock out -- you learn that you don't have the energy or brain to make art in your limited "leisure time." So you don't starve, but you also don't make much art. And this is a problem, because the world needs more art. The world needs all the art it can get.
Well, maybe not all. At the end of this long rambling mess, I'm going to talk for a while about a kind of art we probably don't need more of, using one specific location as an example. Because all of the above is just scene-setting. Old news. The rest of this essay is about two developments -- one ongoing for many years now, one quite recent -- that have made things even worse for artists, to the point that one wonders if there is some final breaking point that will change what "art" and "artists" even mean, and not for the better. Cheery, huh?
A Personal Disclaimer
As far as creative output is concerned -- I admit it now -- I am a filthy bourgeois.
I gave up on making money for my creative work years ago because I couldn't take the bullshit. In particular, I hate self-promotion and am lousy at it. As a writer, I don't feel promotion is part of the job. The only person I should have to sell myself to is an agent (and I got impatient with trying to do even that). The agent is in charge of selling me to the publisher; the publisher is in charge of selling me to the world; my job is purely to write books and mail in manuscripts and make a modest profit from them.
Actually, evidence suggests that I got out just in time. The publishing industry has gotten much, much worse in the years since I last shopped for an agent. Publishers, possibly spooked by not really knowing how to market books in the e-book and web era, are simply refusing to do promotion or set promotional budgets at all -- so you can be a very successful writer (e.g. my passing acquaintance from the web's Pleistocene, John Scalzi) and still have to tour and stump and sign books and generally do PR for yourself. I am not a gregarious person. If I have to go on a book tour I'd just as soon not have a book.
(My three novels, published through Amazon's not-really-publishing print-on-demand program, are still available if you know where to find them. The third is in my opinion quite good, the second is interesting but flawed, and the first is fun but a hot mess. I will never write a fourth novel unless my spouse can find the time to collaborate with me, at which point I will let her shop for an agent and do the legwork, because she's far more capable of it than I am and -- this statement would shock some of her friends and family -- far more extroverted. That is, she's not actually any more extroverted than I am, she's just more willing than I am to grit her teeth and pretend to be.)
None of that is why I'm a filthy bourgeois. I'm a filthy bourgeois because I can afford to make art without getting paid for it. I have a day job that pays well and rarely interferes with my creative projects. That is a road I wish I could offer to all of you, but I can't. Honestly, some days I'm not sure how I got that lucky.
This means I have the freedom to make only the art I want to make, and I have the freedom to not care whether anyone else looks at my art and enjoys it. (I do care, but it doesn't mean I starve if they don't.) I can honestly say that my art is for me first and foremost. I recognize, and am very sad to acknowledge, that other artists -- the ones who are scratching and kicking to survive every day -- can't say that.
This essay is not about me. The point of this section is to explain why I approach the rest of this essay from the perspective of an interested onlooker. I do not actually have skin in the game. (I'm much more personally invested in the situation described in the
smut essay, where it
does affect me directly.)
But being an onlooker, and not having a stake, doesn't mean I'm not appalled! In fact, my attitude is more like, "If it looks this bad to me, and I'm not even in the fight, imagine how it looks to the artists who are down in the trenches."
What Happened To Value?
Do you remember Napster?
We've reached a time when the question does need to be asked. I'm not talking about the legal, presumably-actually-pays-royalties Spotify clone operating as Napster now; I'm talking about the actual Napster, the original one, Fanning's Folly, which finally collapsed under the weight of the lawsuits in 2002. Go look it up, kids.
When I first heard about Napster, back in the day, my immediate reaction was "this is fucking piracy." The more I heard about it, the more I thought "yup, piracy." When Metallica heard about it, their reaction was "piracy." A&M and the RIAA said "piracy." And all the courts said "piracy." It's a consensus. Anyone who denied that Napster was piracy was ... well, in denial. And yet, Napster had plenty of defenders, and not just from kids who didn't want to (or, I concede, couldn't) pay for music. There were also quite a few struggling musicians who said "well, yeah, they're not paying us for use of our stuff, but on the other hand, they're distributing our stuff such that it reaches ears which might never otherwise hear it, and that's got to be good for us, right?"
You don't hear a lot of musicians taking that kind of line now. What you hear are things like "it's impossible for a small band to get past Spotify's algorithms" and "Bandcamp is great but it doesn't pay enough." It is almost impossible for the small musician to make a living through music sales now. It's a hugely fragmented market and the places that pay, pay a pittance. The musicians who have the energy regard the streaming and the YouTube clips as a loss leader and make their actual food and whiskey money via live performances -- endless, endless stumping for gigs. Not everyone has that energy. Not a one of them will defend a pirate service these days; many of them will say that the existing services come damned close to theft anyway.
But the horrible part is that when they say things like that, they do not have the sympathies of their audience. Their audience wants them to make music for free.
The Napster kids rationalized their piracy as "The record companies are filthy, heartless bloodsuckers that basically don't pay ther artists worth shit anyway; stealing from them is a mitzvah and it's not really taking any money out of the artists' pockets because the companies didn't put it in there in the first place." The part of that before the semicolon was true, but it didn't justify the part after it. More importantly for the long term, when the situation changed -- when the record companies, and the whole system, started coming apart at the seams -- the attitudes of the Napster kids did not change. They grew up, and everything around them mutated, and they still don't want to pay for music, not even to support artists they like.
In fact, the recording industry, which had a basically unchanged pipeline and methods from practically the beginnings of recorded music until the turn of the millennium, began to come apart at the seams around then because of this reluctance to pay for music, this "Oh, I'll wait until I can get it somewhere for free or stream it for a pittance" mentality. People do not much own music anymore; my CD collection, and my insistence that I haven't actually bought a piece of digital music unless I have a non-DRM copy of it on a computer I fully control, are both anomalies now.
The music industry has managed, by sheer force of lawyers, to convince people that they do need to pay to stream music, but their position is not popular with the last couple of generations, who (I am convinced) realio trulio don't understand why it can't all be free. (Unless they're artists themselves. Then they get it.)
The same thinking has infected all other areas of creative output. When you say "Pirate this computer game, it costs a ridiculous amount and the Big Game Company is horrible," I'll allow you have a glimmer of a point, but if you say that for a ten-dollar game made by a lone developer toiling in their basement, then you start to realize how damaging that mindset is. (My weird little game showed up on at least two pirate sites less than a week after it came out, which is kind of hilarious, because the game was pay-what-you-want and they could have it for free on the real site.)
They don't want to pay for creative work. At all.
These are the people who get visibly angry when they want an artist on DeviantArt to make a piece of art for them and the artist says "here are my rates." Rates? Commission? You want to charge me for your time and effort? How very dare.
These are also the people who don't see a problem with reposting someone else's art with no acknowledgement and all the identifying marks, signature, etc carefully removed, or (worse) reposting someone else's art with the implication that it is theirs and not the artist's, or (still worse) taking a piece of someone else's art, altering it in some small way, and claiming that since it is now a new work, no acknowledgement (let alone recompense) is due the original artist at all.
A friend of mine routinely watermarks his works he posts on DA to hell and gone, sometimes so heavily I have trouble making out the actual image. Other artists have left DA due to pervasive theft or lack of credit or both. I've never actually caught someone stealing my images and reusing them or reposting them without credit, but it might have happened. I don't know. (The PDFs are much harder to steal from, obviously, which is one reason I prefer them. See
About the Comics.)
I don't necessarily think some of these clowns act the way they do out of malice. I don't think most of the repost-without-acknowledgement people are trying to steal, for example (though the ones who remove signatures must have at least a vague sensation that they're doing something wrong, or why cover up?) They simply have not absorbed the idea that art has value, that art is the product of labor that demands compensation, that your artist deserves to get paid just as much as your accountant or your car repairman or at least the teenager serving up your Whopper and fries at Burger King does. They put art, all creative output, in a different mental category, one that they've been taught is valueless.
Now who do you suppose taught them that?
Capitalism defines and rules our culture, and as I've already said several times, capitalism doesn't value art worth a damn ... unless you're one of the small handful of companies where creative output is the product. Now, they guard their art like whoa, because they know damned well how ephemeral, how easily threatened their income stream is -- witness the ongoing-since-1976 battle to keep Mickey Mouse out of public domain, or Paramount's complete intolerance even of things which are arguably Fair Use. But they don't respect other people's property any more than these DA clowns do, and the lesson is not lost: don't you dare steal our stuff, but who cares if you steal somebody else's? In fact, we'll steal from them too if we get half a chance. Disney does not care whether you get paid. Disney only cares whether Disney gets paid.
Social media has not helped, because the "repost this repost of a repost of a repost" culture has an immediate tendency to sand off all the identifying marks and deprive the artist of credit, let alone pay. It's very difficult for an artist to say "Hey, please at least acknowledge that's mine" for an item that's been reposted in ten places. It's impossible for something that's been reposted in thousands.
Still, this kind of art theft -- both the thefts of omission and the thefts of commission, if you will -- would probably be something we could live with. I mean, not good, but survivable, right? Especially in places like DeviantArt, where they're so desperate to find a way to make a profit that they've been actively pushing people to premium galleries (pay once to enter) and subscription galleries (pay repeatedly) and image sales and so forth, all of which gives them a cut. I personally have a problem with subscriptions -- I despise recurring charges of any kind -- but I'm perfectly willing to buy into a bunch of premium galleries; the artists get some cash, DA stays solvent, people steal less because very few people will pay for something just so they can steal it, everybody lives more or less happily ever after, right?
Or maybe that's optimistic of me. Maybe locking stuff behind paywalls just means that the people who don't think art has value refuse to pay and all walk away, and the artists go so unrewarded in both views and cash that they all walk away too, and DA dies. Maybe somebody would pay for a pay gallery just to grab it all and repost it somewhere else (I occasionally drop by a particular kink repository which has definitely been known to grab and repost entire galleries from DA). Maybe there is no way to really fix the problem unless someone finds a way to knock some sense into an entire generation (or two) of people.
(I will say one small thing in defense of the won't-pay crowd: Many of them can't pay. We have screwed the current generation in their twenties so hard that many of them have much, much bigger things to worry about than buying art. Like what they're going to eat next week, or how to escape the work-seven-part-time-gigs-with-no-health-care economy. It's pretty dire out there, is what I'm saying.)
Anyway, none of this matters as much as it used to. Something happened not too long ago that stood everything on its head.
Who Let the Bros Out?
To understand this section, there are some things you need to understand about a particular flavor of techbro; the dominant flavor, alas, at least in the sectors of technology we're discussing here.
- They don't understand people very well, and lack basic social skills, empathy, compassion, etc;
- Their brains are full of strange and often toxic ideas (which is why you constantly hear about the Jack Dorseys of the world being on the Five-Day Vinegar Purge or some other werirdness);
- They have come into adulthood having internalized the idea that their one asset is that they are Secretly Tech Geniuses (they usually aren't) and that is their sole road to fortune and glory;
- This leads them to often invent solutions in search of a problem; tech that no one actually needs or wants, which will make life worse, but which they're hoping they can monetize.
When you combine all that with another fact about them which I'll get to in a moment, you have a development that is shaping up to be a disaster for artists and writers and musicians -- a trainwreck for all creative output. Surely you have guessed what I'm talking about by now.
It is interesting to be discussing generative art in an essay that has already invoked Tristan Tzara. (I didn't plan that.) Tzara's big schtick was cutting up someone else's story or poem into pieces -- words or phrases -- and then drawing pieces randomly out of a hat to make a "new" story or poem. This is, indeed, generative art, though whether you think he was actually creating new work via this method is a matter of opinion (and affects your position on generative art in general, so consider it carefully).
I personally do think that it counts as new work; I think Tzara's aleatoric process does count as some form of creative output (you will pardon me if I consider it a lesser form, though). But Tzara did not ever, to the best of my knowledge, try to publish a book of My Hat Poems and charge fifteen bucks for it. Tzara did not try to monetize his theft of other people's work, nor did he flood the streets and Dada pamphlets with thousands of examples of it.
Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, and their ilk are very interesting technical developments, but their technical advances are not necessarily in the places where a lot of people think they are. The two areas where they have gotten very sophisticated are 1) recognition of individual elements and even styles within a body of base images, to the extent they can say not only "this is a picture of a woman" but "this is a picture of a robot woman in the style of Hajime Sorayama," and 2) a parser for written sentences, so that they can tell the prompter is, in fact, asking for a picture of a robot woman in the style of Sorayama.
Once you dig past the image search and the parser, you find they're still basically drawing things out of a hat. Albeit in a directed way. "OK, we've identified thirty-five pictures of Sorayama robots posing sexily, let's merge and shuffle them all and create an amalgam."
Even if we temporarily put aside the discussion of whether there is sufficient point or need for such a system (spoiler: no!), there are two big problems here, one obvious, one less so.
The less obvious problem is that the computing resources needed for this are far out of proportion to the importance of the task. Not as horrible on a per-use basis as some people would have you believe, but it's a question of whether the power is well-spent. Of course everything uses power, but we live in a world where energy and water resources are scarce and valuable enough that I feel we do have some responsibility to ask "Is this trip really necessary?" Is this tool fulfilling such a useful and wonderful purpose that it justifies the power consumption and the heat generation and the perverse incentives that have led to resource shortages for computing tools for other things that are actually important?
The more obvious problem is that for these generative art engines to work at all, they need an enormous library of images to sift through, and those images are other people's work. Even allowing that the art produced is a derivative work of morally acceptable nature (and some would disagree), it ain't the kind of use where you don't have to pay for what you used. In other words, there's a hell of a lot of theft baked into this system. And the generative engines cannot afford to pay for all the material they're stealing. As it stands right now, their dirty secret is they're losing money (as I write this, a number of stories have recently broken on just how much cash OpenAI is burning through), and if they had to pay royalties on their image pool, they'd have to raise the costs of using the tools so high that nobody would pay. I'm hoping this will happen, actually, because I think that will be the point at which a lot of people finally realize what a waste the whole idea has been from the beginning.
So. A bunch of techbros decided to create this technology, which really had no value at all, because they wanted some shiny tech that would make them rich. But because the tech had no value, they had to invent some. They had to make up some bullshit they could use to sell a lot of people this useless shiny object. And they did a remarkable job, it must be said. They decided to call these tools "AI" even though they are so far from actual artificial intelligence that it is laughable (ChatGPT is ELIZA with a better parser and a much bigger text database), because that made them sound like Futuristic Magic. And they got a whole lot of corporations and universities and what-have-you to buy into this shiny bubble of uselessness, because they knew the exact way to make the tech appealing to these particular rubes:
They pitched it as a way to eliminate people.
Remember, capital hates paying for labor. As I noted above, they have wet dreams of a world where the work is done by robots who don't have to be paid and don't have to eat or sleep and don't demand things like health care and vacations. Labor frustrates capital because they see it as overhead they can't seem to manage to eliminate. Having to actually pay humans means less money going into the boss' pocket. See the very first sentence of this essay.
So when these techbro grifters came along and said, "Hey, you can use these tools to replace your customer assistance staff and your reference librarians and maybe even some of your accountants and who knows, maybe even your doctors and your lawyers, sky's the limit," the pitch fell on very receptive ears, to say the least. So much so that, even as it becomes increasingly apparent that all of that was lies and that ChatGPT isn't even capable of checking its own bullshit, the corporates are still trying to defend the idea, because they want so badly not to have to hire actual humans for anything. They don't want to let go of their wet dream.
Guess which category of human labor capital hates the most? Hint: It is also the category these techbros tend to hate the most.
That's right: they hate creatives. Publishers would love to use generative art to not have to pay artsts for book covers, and if they could get an engine to write blockbuster novels, they'd do away with writers too. Hollywood would love to not have to pay screenwriters or composers; they already felt all this stuff was their biggest waste of cash to begin with, an unavoidable obstacle on the road to Generating Product, so of course they'd cheer anything which might do away with all these useless, freeloading artists.
The techbros hate creatives for a different reason, though. They hate artists because they resent them tremendously. These are people who are, by and large, incapable of creative thought of their own, and they are jealous as hell, and would love to obliterate artists from the earth out of sheer spite.
Two disclaimers/asides.
I am a programmer in my day job. I will stipulate that writing code is often a creative activity. In fact, I generally can't write code and write fiction on the same day, because either one will exhaust my supply of that particular brain fuel. But the kind of Alleged Tech Visionaries we're talking about here don't actually write code; they have people for that. They don't actually understand technology much either; they really are just grifters and money men, whose "tech genius" consists primarily of finding ways to package and sell (and often steal) other people's work. See: Elon Musk.
Also (this is the Len Disclaimer): I believe there are some good and important uses for large language models and generative tools. I said ChatGPT was just a more sophisticated ELIZA -- well, ELIZA had some genuine value to people as a sounding board, and exploring the idea of "LLM as somewhat guided echo chamber to help me sort out my own head" has, I think, unexplored potential. There are several other things people have suggested for LLMs which strike me as worthwhile pursuits. But none of these things are uses that the techbros are trying to sell, because none of them are things they can see a path to making money from.
You may not believe me about the hate, so let's discuss one little microcosm of the generative-art mess; let's discuss what's been happening on DeviantArt over the past two years.
What I Saw At the Generative Revolution
The DeviantArt situation has a number of aspects that make it a really interesting test case. First, DA has not discouraged posting of generative art; in fact, they have indirectly encouraged it, because they have their own engine (DreamUp) which they want people to use so they can make money. (DA is desperate to find a revenue stream. This has already been discussed above, among other places. DreamUp is priced on a "the first hit's free" basis; I have not cared to look up what it costs per use once you use up your freebies.) Second, obviously there is much more of a specific focus on kink at DA than, say, in the Post Pretty Pictures of Rainbow Ponies forum.
You can block generative art. DA provides a "I don't want to see any of that" setting; this setting works as long as people have been consistent and honest about self-tagging image posts as "contains generative art," so that the filter knows what to filter. Not everyone has been completely consistent and honest. Some folks have been refusing to tag because they have become big defenders of generative art posts and are very fuck-you about it; others don't use the tag because they want people seeing their works and don't want them to get filtered out.
I haven't filtered out the generative art, but I have occasionally been tempted to. Because, folks, there has been a flood. This is the first trend I have noticed: these tools allow you to make things fast. On the whole, this is bad; it's bad that a person posting hand-drawn images is doing well to post one thing a day, whereas one of the gen users can post dozens of images an hour if they feel like it. My "show me new stuff you think is of interest to me" main page display at DA has been thoroughly dominated by generative art for at least a year now. It crowds out everything else.
If you use DA's newish "topic suggestions" navbar, and choose one of the topics it thinks you like, say, "Latex," it'll give you two choices of list order: Relevance or Most Recent. Relevance, at least for someone who's on DA as much as I am, is usually pretty accurate; it does show me things which are relevant. But it also doesn't concern itself with datestamps, so more often than not, the "most relevant" stuff -- the top several pages of the listing -- are things I've already seen. Most Recent is usually a better bet for someone like me who goes to DA every day searching for fresh material -- but Most Recent is now unusable, because it is in strict order of posting which means you will see entire pages you have to skip past because that was when a particular user posted one hundred almost identical generated images. There is so much crap being posted that it's almost impossible now to find the good stuff.
Visually, the generative art does not look bad. In fact, one of its tells (now that they've mostly got it where it's drawing the right number of fingers and so forth) is that it's too polished; it all has a very sterile, artificial look that is often a road straight to the Uncanny Valley. This is true even of the generative art that has been prompted to deliberately try for a more hand-drawn or cartoon style. You still know.
But in terms of its content ...
I note in
the smut essay that a lot of people have really boring tastes in porn. The DA regulars do
not have boring tastes, for the most part, but they tend to have
extremely specific ones. And what these people do, when they get their hands on generative art tools, is they make images that satisfy that very specific kink ... over and over. The same image, in very thin variation. If they like sexy silver female robots, you get one hundred images of sexy silver female robots that are nearly impossible to tell apart. If they like women in full latex enclosure, you get a hundred of those. And so on.
There are a few people whose work I keep an eye on, who have managed to demonstrate that they actually do have some creative expression besides just scratching their one kink over and over. Some are now trying to use sequences of generated images to tell stories. (Most of them are not very good at it yet.) Some show signs -- encouraging signs -- of getting bored with doing the same thing over and over, of repeating themselves. You can still tell immediately what their basic kink is, but at least they try to present as many variations on it as they can think of.
But by and large, I suspect that these tools are mostly being used by people who don't really have creative ideas of their own, just that one itch. For these people, the motivation for using a generative art tool is that they don't have to pay someone else for kink art or kink prose; they can be their own pornographer. Their needs are pretty simple (they don't need a scenario, they just need a picture of the robot) and they hate paying for art.
Some of these people stop. They declare "OK, I've got enough images of latex women now, I'm done." Some stop when they've done a handful; some stop when using the tools starts to cost them money; some hold out for longer. One person I've been watching for a bit, because they were one of the ones attempting to tell stories, just announced they were calling it quits after two years; they had run out of stories, they said. (I cannot imagine ever running out of stories. My concern with stories is whether I will be able to tell all the ones I have in my head before I die.)
The people who use these tools without having any real ideas of their own are the same ones who are deeply jealous of artists. If you are foolish enough to try to have a conversation with them about generative art, it quickly becomes clear that they have a deep contempt for artists, which is a protective membrane to conceal the fact that they resent that artists can do something they can't. For them, generative art serves the same purpose the publishers and producers want it for: to satisfy their needs without having to deal with those fucking artists.
But there's another group of people. These are people who do have real creative impulses, and are using these tools to fulfill those impulses, which would otherwise be impossible for them. These are, to put it bluntly and briefly, the People Who Can't Draw. And they are of special interest to me. First, because I am also a Person Who Can't Draw. Second, because they, more than anyone else, bring out a special brand of hate from the artists, a type of hatred I find personally discouraging and disappointing.
I use a rendering program to make art for my stories because I can't draw and that's the only way I'm going to be able to get art for them. I won't use the generative tools, because of the objections to them I lay out above -- the theft and the consumption; and I can't afford to commission art for my stories, not in the quantities I use (anywhere from one to two hundred images per story!), not when I'm not making any money from the stories at all. (As it is, I probably spend far too much money on rendering resources -- money I will never make back and which I have to justify to myself in terms of the joy of my art.)
I am perfectly happy with this situation, but it does pain me when I encounter an artist -- and there are many such -- who insist that the renders I make for these stories are not art at all, just as they insist that generative art is not art at all. They don't consider either one legitimate.
Now, I grant that there's more of a case to be made against generative art, at least in terms of the labor of the artist. There's a big difference between typing a paragraph of "this is what I want in my image, make it so" and the setups I have to do, where I often have to do things like dress and light a set, effectively do costume design and lighting design and so on, in addition to actually writing the story. But on this I have to stand with the generative art people, even if I think there's miles between us: where the fuck do you people get off?
I mean, what kind of inflated opinion do you have to have of yourself to say "my stuff is art and yours isn't?" Are you automatically placing any and all hand-drawn art as being of higher quality than my renders? Because, brother, it is not true. There's plenty of shit on DA that is the most hastily scribbled, talentless crap you ever saw in your life ... and yet you wouldn't dare call that "not art," and neither would I.
(In fact, as the good hand-drawn artists increasingly leave DA in a snit, the crappy work is becoming the only non-generative work that's left. Some days I feel like I'm caught between the bad fanart and the generative flood, between an off-model rendition of Sonic on one side and five thousand identical sets of latexed boobs on the other, and very few other people are left in the middle with me.)
There is another set of reactions from artists which gets me even angrier than that one. Like, on an entirely different level of anger. The "It's possible one day I will try to destroy you if the fates give me the means" level of anger. That is the "Well, you should just learn to draw" reaction.
I have only once ever come up with a satisfactory rejoinder to the "get gud" response. That was an exchange with an artist which went something like this:
THEM: You know, you should just learn to draw. It's not that hard.
ME: You know, your illustrations are wonderful, but your stories are always crap. You should just learn to write. It's not that hard.
They are no longer speaking to me, which I suppose is no great loss. And I was right, anyway.
I have been writing stories since I was a small child. After fifty-some years I've gotten reasonably good at it. I can understand why a visual artist might say "Well, the rule's the same for us; we don't start out being able to draw. We spend a lifetime getting good at it." Except: 1) I don't have a second lifetime to spare 2) you're wrong.
There is a difference. All of the talented visual artists I know are also visual thinkers. They literally do not see the world the way I do. I am one of the most purely verbal thinkers you will ever meet. Yes, I store pictures of things in my head -- so I can recognize faces and such -- but I do not make pictures when I compose, which is why having to learn things like lighting for renders has been such a challenge for me. I never had to think about lighting before. I never had to think about what something looks like. (And I'm extremely bad about visual description of my characters, which is a topic for another day.)
Just as some of these artists could practice writing for a hundred years and never actually get good at telling a verbal story, I could practice art for a hundred years and still not be able to draw a house that actually looks like a house. I can't do it. My brain does not actually know what a house looks like, and it never will.
Ever read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain? I tried it. I flunked it.
So, yeah, the "get gud" response irritates me tremendously, and if you try it on me, at the very least I will bite your head off, once I get my teeth to unclench.
The upshot of all this -- and the reason I allowed myself to rant at that length in an already far-too-long essay -- is that if you want to get rid of generative art (and I think it is probably the correct choice to want to get rid of it), you really must fight it for the theft reasons and the consumption reasons. You can't pull out the "it isn't art" bit, because the instant you deploy that, you piss off some people, like me, who would otherwise be on your side. You instantly lose any hope of reaching the people who are only using generative art because, for the first time, they have the means to show the world the pictures in their head.
And what do we do for those people? How can we help them? I hate taking away someone's tools without at least giving them a workable alternative.
[Looks around cautiously] The thing is ... once there's a little more shaking out, once the novelty's gone and the only people still using it are the people who are actually getting significant creative value from it, generative art might not be all that bad. Obviously we do have to do something about the theft problem. That probably means, eventually, that it's going to cost a lot more money to use than it does now. On the other hand, I don't think you can make art without it costing money, and I mean money above and beyond the value of your time. I've spent a fortune in Studio resources. Potters have trouble with their clay and kiln budgets. Artists are constantly going broke for supplies. The generative tool users don't get a free pass there.
Whether they can make back any of their costs is another, and much bitterer question. Frankly, I wouldn't be prepared to bet against our gradually becoming a world where no one can make money from art, simply because capital wants so very much not to have to pay us for it, and the consumers have been trained to agree with them. We have to come to grips, and I think it will be sooner rather than later, with these questions:
Who will continue to make art when no one can make any money from art?
How will those people survive?