Arse Grating Art

Seeing AI-generated images over human words chaps my ass

I don’t use AI to generate stories for Medium. I’ve written about one reason for that in Machines Write Monsters, and I don’t need to repeat myself here as the title summarizes my argument: AI writes soulless characters in soulless stories, because it understands the structure of language without understanding humanity.

But there are other reasons I don’t let AI write for me, reasons which have nothing to do with quality.

Morality

AI language models scrape the web for the written word, and regurgitate it in new forms. In some ways, that’s what all writers do: we read, we remember, and we rearrange. But our arrangements — with skill and good fortune — create compelling stories; AI arrangements create… crap. Sadly, people will still read crap, as Dan Brown can attest. AI can churn out stories which people will consume, like literary fast food. There’s a limit to how much food anyone can consume — even Americans — and there are only so many mouths.

So, AI steals the work of human writers to produce stories which steal reads from human writers. AI is a thief, and I would be a thief if I used it.

Selfishness

I enjoy writing, and I like writers.

Or more accurately, writing can be a chore so I usually enjoy having written, and I don’t like most people, including most writers, but the few people I do like are writers.

I love being a writer — the process gives me purpose. But I love being read more — views give me validation. From there, the maths is simple: purpose plus validation equals satisfaction.

But purpose minus validation equals discouragement: if I write and no one reads, my mood suffers. So does my bank account, which damages my purpose and compounds the damage done to my mood. And finally my writing suffers, affected by my mood and my lack of purpose. It’s a doom loop which ends in the end of my writing.

A lack of validation crushes all but the most dedicated writers, so we can add that to AI’s thefts: it steals people’s words and uses them to steal words from people.

Art, on the other hand…

AI art generators scrape art from the web and churn it out in new forms. But what they produce — assuming their subject doesn’t have limbs and digits — is typically and technically excellent. It has similar problems modelling humanity as AI writing does, but when it avoids humans and our complicated hands, it can produce wonderful, compelling art.

And while human writers can write anything they can imagine, they can’t always illustrate it, or find someone else who has already illustrated it. There are stories which stock photo sites simply cannot cater for.

Sometimes, my search for an appropriate picture to sit atop my story takes longer than it took me to write the story. More often than I care to admit, I can’t find a suitable image and so I’ve changed the story to better fit the image I could find. But AI art generators can ‘draw’ anything I can imagine. They can create the perfect picture for my story.

So, without any artistic ability, I could create a picture — which AI assembled by coping pieces it stole from those who do have ability — and use it to increase my chance of views and validation. I don’t need to use a photo or image created by a human artist… which reduces their views and validation. The more often I use an AI image, the less validation human artists receive, and eventually, the fewer human artists there are.

It’s another doom loop.

Or more accurately, it’s the same doom loop applied to a different medium.

As writers, we worry about AI stealing our jobs. Large language models aren’t quite good enough to do that to fiction writers yet… not yet, not as I’m writing this sentence, but maybe by the time I’ve written the next, because progress is frighteningly fast. Chat GPT is already good enough to churn out non-fiction content, taking jobs from journalists and copy writers.

AI art is already stealing work from artists, and writers are helping it.

You see, there is no ‘other hand’ for art. There’s only one hand, AI is holding it, and sometime in the last year or two, it drew a full house (it was full of people with three legs and nineteen fingers, but the faces were photo-realistic)

So, I don’t use AI art to illustrate my stories. I understand why other writers do, and I don’t judge them, but I wish they wouldn’t.

I used NightCafe, an AI art generator, to create the image which illustrates this story. It’s the first time I’ve done that, and I won’t do it again. I didn’t need a mountainous metal dragon holding a city in its paws, but if I had, I wouldn’t have found it on a stock photo site, so I asked NightCafe to create the image for me. My prompt was one word: hypocrisy.