creativity

Make My Pain Original

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’ve been contemplating Artificial Intelligence producing art once again. Many of my friends are creatives, so it’s a subject of near constant discussion and we wish it wasn’t. Honestly, there are moments I wonder how people like tech critic Ed Zitron keep their sanity.

To level set what is called “AI” these days has existed for decades, collections of math and data that allow computers to perform certain complex behaviors. It’s been in medicine, in graphics programs, and so on, we just didn’t call it “AI” until recently. What we’ve got now is a bunch of language-and-drawing aping tools that burn huge amounts of power and water and are marketed by companies that aren’t profitable or fear there’s no more “big new thing.”

With that out of the way (and it will be doubtlessly be repeated in my works), let me focus on the idea of AI being a substitute for artists and writers. To get more specific, let me note that AI isn’t going to make me feel, and one thing they can’t do right is make me feel unpleasant.

Some of art and writing involves discomfort. It is a new idea that sits in your mind, warping it around conclusions you’re afraid to make. It’s a realization of disturbing truths in your past, revealed by fictional characters acting out something unpleasantly close to your own life. This discomfort can be horrific or a pleasantly painful sense of walls shattering, but art can make you uncomfortable in a good way even if it’s bad.

To give an example, I was watching the anime Headhunted in Another World, something in the sent-to-another-world isekai genre – but with a businessman so you can guess why I watched it. One element involved a species with poor reproductive capacity who were really more crossbreeds because those were more viable. That led to all sorts of disturbing elements of family, ability, and even personality affected by genes. For a “fantasy office comedy” with romcom bits, that little revelation was thought-provoking and disturbing.

Not an original show in many ways, but the creator clearly had ideas. Imagine having siblings that are ALL half-siblings, imagine having a relative who is alien to you. As is a common trend for the unkillable Isekai genre, there are some very good ideas embedded in the tropes – hough to be fair Headhunted does a lot more with the subject than some, but I am biased.

I am not for gratuitous disgust or horror or unsettling weirdness of course. However sometimes unpleasantness is a key part of creativity. You need to feel horror or you have a strange insight or something is off in a mystery or in art. Sometimes you need to look over the edge of the canyon to realize how deep it’s going and know it is deep.

I’m not saying that AI or AI-aided work can create discomfort, and when it appears to it won’t be original. AI is simply about recycling the past ideas it’s accumulated, it has no experiences or life to draw up, nothing to create new insights. That vital need for art to unsettle will, at best, be recycled disturbing ideas from the past and at worse be unsettling because AI sort of is terrible. I’m not sure we can have the proper level of disruptive insight and experience.

It’s like horror movies, which oft seem to recycle the same ideas in huge repetitive bursts. In some ways we’re still remaking Friday the 13th (though I’d argue really that’s remaking Black Christmas). One reason I tend to avoid horror films is the endless fall into sadism, jumpscares, and the same tropes. It’s why work like Radius and The Ritual really hit me, those do it right.

In short, one of the problems of AI is that, as it repeats things and has only the past, it’s not going to have that proper razor-edge feel that requires me to feel or is a sign of an unpleasantly fascinating realization. If there’s no person there there’s no one to connect with me in ways that’ll knock me off my perch and make me think and feel.

And that is just if AI has anything that might make me think or ponder disturbing truths. How easy would it be for automated scripts and novel to sheer off anything disturbing or offensive. It mighty cosplay as something original, but tweaked algorithms and careful queries can slice away anything that may anger an audience.

So, ironically, as much as AI is a pain to deal with, I feel it’s not going to unsettle me in the right way. It’s not going to make me think, confront, ponder darkly. It’ll be the same insights and weirdness and horrors and sadness of before. There’s nothing new there.

AI hype is painful to deal with, but it doesn’t seem AI can hurt in the right way.

Steven Savage

I Will Not Give Up My Mistakes For Robots

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I often discuss the impact of AI on creativity with Serdar. We’re both authors and in technical areas, so it’s something both personal and intimate for us. You can probably guess neither of us is happy about it – and being authors we like to discuss that often at length.

Serdar recently did a blog post on LLMs and intelligence, and it is quite worth reading like all of his work. But one thing he discusses in the post, and in our own discussions, is how LLMs use treats writing as a product. That fascinates me, because there are people who want to do creative work but don’t want to be creative – they want to push a button and get a product.

I could go on about the psychology of this – and indeed I probably will in time – but these are people who want results without making mistakes of their own. You can’t decouple creativity from mistakes, false starts, false ends, and sometimes just producing utter crap. Those aren’t problems, that’s part of creativity.

Creativity is not a linear, mechanical process, as much as we sometimes want it to be. Creativity snags on edges, creativity takes strange detours that somehow get you to the destination more effectively. I’m sure you’ve seen human made creative works that were created just a bit too mechanically, and there’s something wrong when you partake of them, a kind of metallic mental taste in your mind.

Part of this creative work is screwing up sometimes in epic ways. Actually, I’m sure if you’re any kind of creative, you’ve made some awful stuff, and trust me so have I.

Anyone who writes, draws, cosplays, and acts has a mental list of things they regret. They went out there, did the thing, published the book, went to the audition and completely and utterly whiffed it. Creativity in its unpredictable glory gives us infinite things to make and infinite ways to humiliate ourselves.

Creativity requires mistakes, and sometimes you don’t know if you’re making one until you’re done with a work. To complete a work even if it turns out to be lousy is to fully explore your ideas. So often we have to get something out if only, upon completion, to finally understand why it was a stupid idea. That’s fine, that’s what creativity is all about.

Even the journey is necessary. To wrestle with a concept. To implement it. To get it out. Every terrible novel or lousy cosplay or mediocre piece of art is a testimony that someone could get it done and learned on the way. They might not be thrilled with the result of the journey, but at least they made it.

I think this is why some trashy works and B or Z grade films fascinate me. The flawed nature reveals the author’s dreams, ambitions, and efforts. Bad as they are, there’s also a drive there you feel and relate to.

The creativity-as-product takes away all these passionate, painful, wonderful mistakes. It takes away the informative disasters and the joy of hardheaded persistence against your own good senses. It is just pushing a button and at best you become a better button-pusher, but you don’t become more creative.

To make creative work, even if you make something awful, you need to create. You need to be that author or artist. You need to grow from the experience, even if it’s painful. It is to be, i na way, a better person for what you did – even if the better person might be the one who admits “my writing is crap” and move on to something else.

Just pushing a button and pummeling the resulting writing product into a marketing-shaped form isn’t creative. No matter how well the work sells, you run the terrible chance you won’t screw up as much as you need to.

Steven Savage

Channeling Innovation

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I came across this fascinating paper that suggests innovation is the result of collective interaction (shared knowledge, exchange of ideas, etc.). Think of it this way – we’ve got all this stored knowledge, cultural interactions, kind of a shared brain, that leads to innovation. People may carry it out, but it doesn’t come from them – a bit like channeling or “being ridden” in spiritual terminology.

Having worked in everything from medical research to tech to writing, I find the paper compelling not just for its citations, but how it fits my own experiences. I’ve watched creatives – including myself – “come up” with ideas that are the results of inputs and experiences, evolving into something. I’ve seen tech changed over the years, watching interaction across time and space result in great – and stupid – things that can’t be really traced to a single “cause.” The ideas may appear in people, but it doesn’t arise from anyone, but the time itself.

I’ve often been skeptical of people who think they’re some kind of linchpin of history. I know what goes on in my own head when I get inspired, and so much “isn’t me.” I know many people get where they are due to wealth, luck, the time, and so on. I know where my own luck and privilege has benefited me.

We may be the carriers of innovation, or where it finally manifests, but we’re not its owners – nor its masters as many a person possessed by an idea knows.

With this idea in mind (ha!), I’d like to take a look at something I’ve oft complained about – the lack of innovation and anything interesting in the tech industry in, well, the last ten or fifteen years.

Consider what happens if we believe that some Great Innovators are the source or all good things. We will seek these Great Innovators, pay attention to them, and then rely on them even if they aren’t producing good ideas. Because we seek them, anyone who fits the idea in their head is someone we listen to and assume they know what they’re doing. This of course leaves room for plenty of liars and grifters – maybe most of them.

Do that long enough and you not only lack innovation, you have a kind of anti-innovation. People with fame and money are not innovating, but now have the fame, money, and regard to propagate non-innovative ideas. The non-innovators can buy technology and access and even crush places where innovation originates.

Meanwhile, we’re not working on a culture and a world that increases innovation. We’re too busy looking for the Big Heroic Idea Person as opposed to a society where innovation can be realized. Everything becomes about finding heroes – which don’t exist – and things get less innovative and interesting.

It seems awful familiar, doesn’t it?

Steven Savage