In a world where every single service wants to push AI and use your material as fodder, the humble typewriter, in all it’s weighty, finicky glory, seems a shining beacon of days long past. The typewriter may be heavy. It may require ink. It may occasionally jam. But at least it cannot steal your idea and suggest it to someone else as though it thought it up itself.
The watercolor and paper can’t upload itself into a database without your permission. That watercolor can’t simply push a popup, expect you to agree without reading it, and then use that agreement to use your art for free elsewhere. Your physical tubes of paint may expire or fade in the light, but they can never decide ‘oops, this color is not actually on your subscription plan’ and screw up your work after the fact.
Physical mediums are a joy and a pain. To sell prints of something made in the real, physical plain, instead of on your computer, you have to scan them in somewhere. That inherently opens up the risk of some bad actor taking them from wherever you’ve posted them for sale and feeding them into the ever-hungry machines of plagiarism, stolen work, pirated work, and anything an LLM may do with anything it’s given. But, at least in that case, it’s not your tools turning against you, it’s another person.
The attitude around creating art has to change. Digital artists are coming up against a wall. Writers are struggling. TV shows are getting more extreme, sloppy, lazy with visual effects because a CG team across the world will clean it up, so why bother having actual chainmail or decent wigs on the actors? Heck, even the most complicated superhero suit in the world can be greenscreened in. Creatives were a source of relief in the unending stress and pain of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which much of the world was forced to isolate. TV shows, video games, music, art, provided some respite, some promise we were all alone together. Without active human input, LLMs start chewing on their own tail, getting worse and worse, rehashing and rehashing into forever. It’s not that they’re not creative – nobody has ever had an original idea since the idea OF an “idea” came to the first person to realize fire was a tool tens of thousands of years ago, it’s that they’re not better than people. They are made up of the ideas of people fed into the machine. They are not inherently better at creating anything, but they’re sold that way, disappointing everyone.
There’s no creative reference, no ingenious twists or turns, no way to verify that the content doesn’t actually already exist somewhere, already in the target language – the machine does not have the pattern-seeking brain we do when it comes to identifying common threads in media. It would not pass a high-school level English class. In essence, when it’s good, it’s because it stole an idea, whole, from someone else; when it sucks, it’s because the ideas didn’t get mashed together like the prompter wanted, leaving the whole prompt half-realized for the prompter to fix. When the art is good, it’s because the prompter was good; when it’s bad, it’s because the machine can’t do details or remember there’s no Twin Towers in the New York skyline. Even if it spits out a ‘good idea’, it’s often up to the person seeing it to interpret it in some way that works. It’s the ultimate talking dog. It’s the result of crowdsourcing with decades of online content. It comes out minus style, because Tim Burton and Ghibli plus every other movie in existence all cancel out to vaguely oily-looking realism. And for what?
People are essential for the magic trick of these “awesome” machines to actually function. Why not go to people directly? Because sometimes people make artistic choices that make the fans mad? Because the art is cheaper that way, even if it shows that?