Fear, or maybe I'll finally say something about AI
Creativity, labor, laziness, and the bridge between mediocrity and talent
✨ Welcome to obscure arts, the section of my newsletter where I write in-depth explorations of creativity, capitalism, and making art in uncertain times. If you’re only here for book stuff, feel free to unsubscribe from all sections except lexical gaps here.
I bought a coloring book simply because I wanted an excuse to try out my new art marker set.
To be honest, I actually bought this coloring book ages ago because I wanted to scan the images and practice my coloring digitally. But I’m not much of a digital artist, even as I keep thinking it would be easier to be one. There’s something incredibly tempting about being able to Ctrl+Z undo all my artistic mistakes in coloring, to change the warmth and temperature with a simple click, to add glow and highlights and all sorts of cool lighting effects with layer blending modes instead of having to do that all manually.
But I’m not much of a digital artist.
My preferred media has always been pencil and paper. I can’t really explain why; it’s not as though I’m much better with paper and pencil, but there’s a sort of…tactile vivacity to my work in natural media that I can’t seem to translate to digital. Despite my quest for perfection (such as it is) I do find something charming about the small errata, the little mistakes, that come from an imperfect hand. There is a decisiveness in my non-digital work, choices that I’ve made that I have to stick with, and there’s a kind of thrill in the permanence of it. Maybe that’s what I see when I think my natural media work has more movement or life.
Or maybe that’s just cope.
A lot of creativity is just cope, I think.
I am currently in the middle of drafting GUARDIANS 3 and I’m at the point where imposter syndrome is setting in really hard. I don’t know what imposter syndrome looks like for other people, but for me, I always think I’m simply not hard-working enough to be a true artist. It’s the ADHD; I hate tedium, I hate boredom, and I hate, hate, hate work. I’m inherently a lazy person, and I have somehow found myself in a job where I must constantly be working.
It’s at times like these I think I understand AI enthusiasts. My god, if I could just get something else to do the labor of turning my ideas into words so I wouldn’t have to bother, I would.
Talk about cope.
But that’s just the capitalist exploitation mindset talking. On my best days, I don’t think about AI much, if at all. Occasionally I will joke that I will get ChatGPT to spit out some silly little marketing caption for an Instagram post, but I never follow through. Probably because I’ve never signed up for OpenAI and I don’t want to bother. (Laziness sometimes has its uses.)
On my worst days, I don’t really think about AI either. On my worst days, I mostly think about quitting, about setting aside the hard thing and doing something else that seems easier at the time. Photography. Drawing. Underwater basket-weaving. It never crosses my mind to use AI to do creative work for me, not only because I know just how terrible the quality of work AI produces actually is, but because if AI does something for me, then the resulting product isn’t mine.
A few days ago (as of this writing), one of the internet video essayists I follow, Harris Brewis, aka hbomberguy, put out a long exposé on James Somerton, a queer YouTuber known for analysis of media through a queer lens. Somerton was revealed to have stolen the vast majority of his content from other sources—a plagiarist, in other words—and had somehow managed to leverage his position as Thee Gay YouTuber to carry out a pretty lucrative grift on the backs of other people’s hard work. Although the vast majority of Brewis’s exposé focused Somerton, he also shed light on a few other case studies of plagiarism on YouTube.
The crux of the matter when it comes to plagiarism is insecurity. Insecurity in one’s original thoughts, skills, talents, etc. What struck me most about the examples in Brewis’s video was the mentality of those who stole other people’s labor: that ideas are free.
Ideas may be cheap, but they’re not free.
Creative people often have trouble recognizing their skills as skills because eventually they feel like second nature, and they don't feel real and practical like building a house . . . . But it turns [out] that this stuff actually is valuable. If it wasn't, people wouldn't be stealing it.
—Harris Brewis, “Plagiarism and You(Tube)”
Until Brewis’s video, I had not thought of creativity as a skill. If anything, I’ve always thought of creativity as a gift, something that appears unasked for but for which I am grateful whenever it shows up. But perhaps I was mistaking inspiration for creativity. Perhaps creativity is the ability to turn inspiration into something tangible. Like an idea. Like art. Because if creativity is an ability, it can also be practiced.
I haven’t been practicing my creativity very much lately.
I feel trapped these days.
I’m not sure when this started, but I’ve been in the throes of it for a while now. Feeling creatively stifled, unable to find inspiration when inspiration used to come so easily. Perhaps it’s the fault of the algorithm, for serving me the same boring ingredients reconstituted over and over and over again. I’m eating, but I’m not being fed. Everything feels mid. Before I would have thought this part of the depression part of my bipolar cycle, but since changing medications, I no longer feel this way.
Everything is predictable.
On this, I do blame AI and the algorithm. In the piece, AI and the Rise of Mediocrity written for Time, Nayler asserts “everything that predictive language and image models will produce will be a sequel to what came before: not an original idea, but a mash-up of our old tropes, repackaged for our consumption.” AI can only predict what comes next based on what has come before, which is why nothing feels new and everything seems stale. Where I used to find inspiration used to be places of discovery, but now I no longer know where to discover and explore anymore.
Simply put: AI thrives when our need for originality is low and our demand for mediocrity is high.
—Ray Nayler, “AI and the Rise of Mediocrity”
Am I asking too much? Is my demand for mediocrity too low and my need for originality too high? It isn’t as though new, creatively original work isn’t being produced; this past weekend I watched May December, which is the first piece of media I’ve consumed in over a year that has felt different, compelling, and exciting. But May December was something of an anomaly for me; I saw people discussing it on the Site Formerly Known as Twitter, a place where recommendations usually go to die. In the past, I would have been aware of the film beforehand, as Todd Haynes directed one of my favorite movies ever—Velvet Goldmine—but the places where I would have been made aware before have now been turned into algorithm cesspools. Everything is an algorithm-driven cesspool, and I hate it.
I hate it because I’m afraid it’s affecting my art.
I have this weird fixation with the Nostalgia Critic.
Back in the late 2000s, back before video essays and reaction videos splintered into their own distinct creative forms, there was a singular period of time when any regular person with a camera could film themselves reviewing a piece of media and call themselves a “critic.” Often these reviews were short — short on analysis and short on time, mostly to avoid copyright strikes.
Doug fascinates me because he is a man of great ambition and very little talent, and the tragedy of Doug Walker is that he has just enough self-awareness to know that his original output isn’t good, but not enough self-awareness to quit while he’s still ahead.
In short, Doug Walker is my dark mirror, the reflection I fear to face.
There’s something of the Tommy Wiseau or Ed Wood about him — a sort of inverted genius where everything is so terrible it comes right back around to being good again, only Walker’s work is not nearly as enjoyable as the other two. Doug has glimmers of creativity in his oeuvre, only he always takes the easy way out—not through labor, but through ideas. His work nowadays feels incredibly overproduced in the same way a less experienced content creator might try out a fancy transition or a new filter to make something seem interesting instead of actually being interesting.
I fear this is what is happening to my own writing.
Again, on my best days, I know (hope) this not to be true. But on my worst, I feel like a hamster in a wheel, churning out increasingly fancy prose with no substance to say. I’m not someone who takes The Market™ into consideration when I write, but everyday I feel the pressure to produce in order to keep up, to keep from being devoured by the constant churn of content.
In the end, mechanization’s real innovation is in manipulating consumer demand: creating a complacent buyer with reduced expectations of quality. Once you’ve done that, you can sell them a “good enough” widget. You have to create a person willing to accept “good enough.” You have to create a person willing to spend a pain-inducing amount of money on upgrading to an only marginally better phone. What is really being manufactured is us—our perceived needs, our attitudes toward what is good, our willingness to settle for “good enough.”
—Ray Nayler, “AI and the Rise of Mediocrity”
I am afraid of Good Enough.
Perhaps there is a perfectionist streak in me I’ve always ignored or overlooked due to my tendency to drop things like a hot potato the instant they no longer interest me. My therapist keeps telling me that “60% is good enough,” and I believe her. But putting that into practice is so much harder than it seems; I keep rewriting the first four chapters of GUARDIANS 3 even though I keep telling myself to move on, to keep going because it’s good enough and I can fix it later. But every day I am faced with the mediocrity of my own work, and I cannot seem to push past that, to push past the fear of Doug Walker into yet another state of burnout.
But I don’t feel burnt out. In many ways, I feel more energized than I have ever in my life. But it’s the fear of mediocrity that holds me hostage, the fear that looms large ahead of me, an insurmountable obstacle.
I know what will overcome that fear. It’s the bridge between mediocrity and talent, the thing my laziness hates to cross most of all. The thing AI always promises to relieve me of, and the one thing I cannot let go.
Work.
Goodbye, Father. I'll speak for you. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint. On their behalf I deny Him, your God of no mercy. Your God who tortures men with longings they can never fulfill. He may forgive me: I shall never forgive Him.
—Antonio Salieri, Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
Yours in mediocrity,
A great essay that I can fully resonate with. Just to show you how much I resonate, when I read "60% is good enough" I thought, that's low. Should be at least 80%. And you're right, the only antidote is just doing the work and putting it out there. Even though I deeply wish everything I put out would be highly original, most of it isn't. But sometimes, some of it will be, and that's only possible by doing the work.