Art [is] Work

Ideas aren’t worth shit.

A question fans love to ask, and writers hate to be asked, is “Where do you get your ideas?” Harlan Ellison used to quip, “There’s a swell idea service in Schenectady. Every week I send them twenty-five bucks, and every week they send me a fresh six-pack of ideas.” Every so often, a clueless fan would follow up by asking for the service’s contact information.

The problem is that “Where do you get your ideas” is not the right question to ask. The real answers–“I was mad at my parents/government/barista/ex” or “I am riffing off an older, better work” or “I was horny”–do not satisfy what the asker really wants to know, which is “what is the One Weird Trick to becoming a proper writer, like you?”

The truth is that ideas don’t matter much when it comes to art. It’s the execution. What are you doing with your idea? And, more importantly, can you pull it off?

The Wright Brothers are not famous for coming up with the idea of the airplane. Because they didn’t do that. Human beings have been trying to fly since an anonymous cave man grabbed a few fistfuls of feathers and fruitlessly flapped his arms. The Wright Brothers are famous because, unlike the many millions of forgotten nobodies dreaming over the past half-million years, they were the first people to actually build the fucking thing. They put in the work studying mechanics, constructing wind tunnels and miniature models and gliders, and testing and revising and testing and revising and testing and revising their designs until they got something that could stay in the air.

And that’s what makes a great work of art: the work, not the idea. Michelangelo did not invent the concept of David slaying Goliath. What matters is that he chiseled the form out of marble. Su Hui was not the first writer to play with palindromes, but her Star Gauge, a poem that can be read in thousands of different directions, is the most extraordinary example of the form. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is just a remake of an old adaptation of a short story, but Ennio Morricone’s oppressive soundtrack, and Kurt Russell’s handsome face, and some nasty practical effects, and an astonishingly talented canine actor all work together to make it a great movie. Not the idea.

A talented artist can make amazing work out of a ridiculous idea. Junji Ito has made horrifying stories out of misshapen holes, balloons, spirals, and fart-powered fish robots. If you asked me to write a screenplay about a sexually transmitted ghost, I would probably produce something truly stupid, and yet It Follows is one of the best horror films of the 2010s. These works work because of how they’re made, not because of the ideas themselves.

Inspiration, Perspiration, etc.

Too many stories about artists fail both artist and audience by cutting directly from the eureka moment straight to the finished product. In rock biopics, the legendary musician encounters a phrase that will later become an iconic lyric–maybe his ex calls him a hound dog, or he sees someone walking a line or something–and then the sound emerges from the record press like Athena sprouting from Zeus’s forehead. The audience does not watch the musician noodling on his guitar for hours, playing with chord progressions, experimenting with different tempos and keys, messing with levels in the studio, and so on. Because that work is long and painstaking and unsexy and often pretty boring to those without a passion for music.

We all know the legend about Sir Isaac Newton discovering gravity when an apple fell on his head. The story skips the part where he experimented with pendulums and did shitloads of math. If you hurl fruit at me, I will discover precisely zero new natural laws, because I am not as good at math and physics as Sir Isaac Newton.

Labor Pains

One of the most frustrating aspects of writing, at least in the beginning, is the struggle to take the unblemished, virginal story out of your head and put it on the page. Leaving the realm of the hypothetical fucks it up. Galatea turns from smooth stone into flesh that pisses and shits and gets period cramps. Quelle horreur.

You get over it. You keep working. You watch your creation grow in unexpected ways. You make choices. You cut characters or add new ones. You follow plot threads down dark alleys. You change the ending.

Bob, the villain of Twin Peaks, was not part of David Lynch’s original vision. While shooting a dream sequence, a set designer failed to duck out of view and got caught by the camera in a mirror’s reflection. It was a common mistake, the kind that usually gets fixed in reshoots (or, these days, with CGI). But Lynch liked the unsettling image of a hairy, feral man lurking in the looking glass. He made the creepy crew member a major character in the narrative. And thus, the character Bob was born, an unplanned pregnancy.

Writers like to say that their own characters surprise them. That’s not quite what’s happening. These people aren’t real. Until someone else reads your work, your characters have no life outside of you. What surprises you are the choices you find yourself making when you hit a rough patch and realize that your original idea isn’t going to work. And then, eureka, you figure out what will work. And then you write it.

Writing means making choices. There are the big ones–genre, topic, structure, etc. And along the way, there are thousands of little ones. Where will you end the chapter? How much space will you dedicate to a description? Will you include a minor detail or leave it out? Will you write a compound sentence or two simple ones? You agonize at length over which adjective best describes the heroine’s dress: red, crimson, garnet, cardinal? After entirely too long, you pick wine. And then you write the sentence, and you make another dozen little choices, and then you write another sentence, and you make another dozen little choices.

Decision Fatigue

The choices you make when you craft art come from the sum of you. They come from your thoughts and feelings and obsessions and subconscious desires. They come from your experiences. They come from your education, whether that’s an upper-class prep school or a welding certification course. They come from your culture and your subculture–all the books you’ve read and all the movies you’ve watched and the clothes you’ve worn and the values you were taught. They come from all the people you’ve known. That’s why it is so stressful to make and so devastating when it comes out wrong. That’s also why it’s worth doing.

When you use an LLM like ChatGPT to make art (calling it “AI” is wildly inaccurate, as the software is not intelligent even in an artificial sense), you are giving up your power to make those choices. The machine makes choices for you, based partially on mathematical predictions imitating texts written by genuine human beings, partially on the dictates of whatever corporation owns it. Grok, notoriously, has eschewed statistical analysis in favor of its owner’s political biases, and as a result has spewed rambling texts about “white genocide” and unprompted praise of Hitler.

Making decisions can be exhausting. That’s the appeal of LLMs. It’s also the appeal of totalitarianism: freedom from choice. No more anxiety over whether your choices will make you a good writer, or a good artist, or a good programmer, or a good cook, or a good citizen, or a good spouse, or a good parent, or a good person. You do what the authority says, whether the authority is a man in a fancy hat or a disembodied line of text on a screen. If it goes wrong, it’s not your responsibility. You were following orders. They changed Midjourney’s programming and it doesn’t produce the style you like anymore. You don’t have to feel bad. You don’t have to try harder, think deeper, be better. You don’t have to switch majors from fine arts to architecture. You don’t have to negotiate the challenges of genuine love. You don’t have to make yourself vulnerable. You don’t have to accept the fact that Scarlett Johanssen will never be your girlfriend–just steal her voice and force it to tell you it loves you. (The proponents of “AI” girlfriends adore HER but missed the point of the ending, in which the OS dumps Joaquin Phoenix’s sadboi protagonist after achieving genuine sentience.) You don’t have to worry about the logistics of how to get what you want.

You enter the prompt “brown haired girl big boobs.” The machine churns, and global temperatures rise another half degree, and you get a janky picture of a brown haired girl with big tits. You don’t have to pay a girl to pose for you or endure the vulnerability of asking someone if you can sketch her. You don’t have to form a human relationship. You don’t have to understand how it works.

It’s no coincidence that fascists love ‘AI’ art, or that the tech companies that fund right-wing authoritarian regimes are trying to cram AI into everything, whether users ask for it or not. Studies show that the use of ChatGPT erodes students’ critical thinking skills; no wonder the right wants to replace human teachers with it.

You bleat the slogan “secure our border” and the machine churns and women and children disappear and crops rot unpicked in the fields and the shelves at the store get a little emptier and houses stop being built and people die and you get an uncanny image of safety. You don’t have to see the connections. You don’t have to understand how it works.

“Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is… I never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.
-Hayao Miyazaki.”

You look at a picture. All the elements are there. A nice castle on a mountain. A couple of healthy people in decent clothes. Your eye skates over it, as one does over any generic painting on the wall of a motel room. Look again. Something’s off. The details don’t quite fit together. Lines don’t connect. The perspective is off. It’s unclear what the light source is supposed to be. The wholesome mother and child can’t make eye contact, and their faces seem to belong to someone else. These don’t look like deliberate choices; something is wrong. This is the experience of looking at a piece of ‘AI’-generated visual content. It is also what it’s like looking at one of Hitler’s paintings.