Escaping the AI Wasteland

by Joshua Fagan

There are few contemporary discourses as frequently tedious as the one swirling around content produced by AI. It pretends to be new and daring while repeating the same blend of wild-eyed utopianism and histrionic terror that has defined the last several centuries of discussing the relationship between humanity and technology. The current wave of AI tools is far from irrelevant, and expressing a healthy degree of skepticism toward new technology is rarely foolish. But ChatGPT and its ilk are not the apocalypse, nor are they a watershed moment for literature. The conscious, artistic act of creation represents an organic, personal process. Exaggerated speculations about AI replacing writers says far less about AI than about a cultural malaise regarding artistic creation.

Tracing the foundation of how artists conceptualize the conflict between humanity and faceless technology requires looking at Romanticism. As a movement, Romanticism grew as a response to growing industrialization and urbanization, the somber black factories and increasing alienation that color the collective memory of the early nineteenth century. These authors prioritized emotion, nature, and the individual spirit. Think of William Wordsworth reflecting on the bygone, pristine wonder of youth, lamenting the loss of “splendor in the grass” and “glory in the flower.”

What they found inhumane about industrial society was not merely the filth and squalor of overcrowded cities, but also how the economic system of industrialism unmoored individuals from both their personal desires and from any coherent sense of community. Even skilled artisans practicing techniques derived from generations of insight and understanding found themselves displaced. The division of labor made work more efficient while also evacuating it of meaning. Instead of creating, for instance, a chair through a detailed process uniting personal creativity with historical and cultural standards, a worker would repeatedly create a single part of a chair in a factory system. Even Adam Smith, who described this process extensively in regards to a pin factory in The Wealth of Nations, viewed it as rather demoralizing to the worker even as it generated vastly more productivity. The idea of the worker as an instrument of a mechanized, coldly impersonal system thus emerged.

Though august poets and novelists suffered less from the impositions of industrialization than the average artisan, the difference was not as great as might be expected. Romanticism largely invented the concept of the artist as a heroic figure draped in mystique and wonder, summoning quasi-divine creative power lacking in a corrupt society. Before, the artist was a kind of skilled artisan, valued for adroit skill but not viewed as a wellspring of unknown, unforeseen truths. An art was originally anything not found in nature, created by deliberate skill. The word “playwright” evinces this historical link between the fine arts and other works of creation. Like wheelwright or shipwright, playwright implies creation through difficult but humble labor. Since industrialization threatened the freedom and dignity of the artisan, it thus also threatened those of the artist.

The creation of the artist as a kind of majestic, all-knowing figure functions as a response to the industrial obsession with productivity and profit. No, this ethos says, the artist is not simply an anonymous factory worker whose labor executives can easily replace. The artist creates from imagination and curiosity, expressing acute awareness of sensations and impressions beyond the humdrum grind of everyday life. This is a conception of art as immune to the techno-enthusiasts of the twenty-first century as those of the nineteenth century. For some of these enthusiasts, the utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, poetry was a trifle at best and a disturbing distraction at worst, with Bentham stating that the poet “always stands in need of something false” even while creating “for the purpose of affording what is called amusement.” If the work of art is merely a pleasing illusion, then there is indeed no reason why a machine or AI cannot produce it. The artistic process, by the dictates of this worldview, becomes mechanical, the artist being a cog in a system produced for a specific, clearly defined end.

Admittedly, the conception of authorship through a factory-like system is far from bizarre. Ghostwriters wrote and developed the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, and even currently prolific authors like James Patterson are more brand managers for fleets of ghost writers than virtuosic auteurs. Still, there is still a single name on the cover. The idea of singular authorship is in these cases a fiction, but the fiction matters. The idea of a novel branded with the names of an entire committee of writers seems absurd even now, in this skeptical age, because of the enduring relevance of the idea of artistic creation as being both the purest illumination of an individual’s spirit and the striving toward a transcendent understanding that exists outside the indifferent repetitions of everyday life.

The Romantic poet Percy Shelley views poets as serving “the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul” while also demonstrating the capacity to “measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit.” Perhaps even more moving is the account of the philosopher John Stuart Mill, the son of the rigidly utilitarian James Mill, of the effect of reading Wordsworth. James Mill ensured that his son understood the value of efficiency and social optimization, and indeed, the prodigious J.S. Mill mastered his father’s philosophy at a young age. Yet this mastery left the younger Mill miserable, and he sunk into a profound depression, only finding delight again in Wordsworth’s poetry.

Such a story is nice, of course, but what makes it more than a sentimental anecdote is his description of why, exactly, this poetry produced such an emotional revitalization. The prettiness of Wordsworth’s natural descriptions was not sufficient. Mill admits that a writer like Walter Scott creates far more vibrant descriptions, but Wordsworth expressed “not merely outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty.” This is a conception of art removed from both petty catastrophism about technology and the misguided belief that technology can somehow surpass the creative capacities of the great artist. It is also a conception that does not hold the same cultural potency as it did in the nineteenth century.

The fact that this AI discourse is so widespread testifies to an increasing inability to define the act of artistic creation. What happens to the conception of the artist as a mythic individual when the individual self suffers from such fragmentation? What happens to the conception of the artist reaching toward the universal when popular discourse unsettles the idea of universality being possible? Derek Thompson at The Atlantic argues in a pessimistic article about how “Your Creativity Won’t Save Your Job from AI,” while Francisco Toro joyfully opines in Persuasion that ChatGPT and the like will have a similar effect to Deep Blue, the supercomputer that signified that computers can play chess better than humans ever can. These two articles are both more thoughtful than the average crazed rant about AI and indicative of how constrained thinking can be about this topic.

Art is not chess. Despite the complexities of chess, it is ultimately a logic puzzle. There are precise, correct answers in a way that do not exist in a story or poem. Creativity is also not simply a fluffy, soft word, like Thompson seems to suggest. It is the active cultivation of an acute awareness, and it cannot be faked or replaced. AI creates art in the same way that a weather forecaster creates the weather. It gathers vast swaths of information and synthesizes them into a whole. There is no reason to doubt that AI, searching through a vast library of James Patterson novels, can produce one that is probably no worse than what Patterson’s team of ghostwriters create. That this is not the same as inspiring, worthwhile artistic creation should not need to be said.

Any story truly worthy of being written or read is not simply a collection of semi-intelligible words and phrases. It expresses the vast and nebulous complexities of the individual mind, nurtured by history and culture, in order to provide knowledge of the strangeness of the world. Perhaps the Romantic conception of art is too lofty and abstract for the cynicism of this century, but it at least provides a solid idea of what art is. The fact that too many cultural commentators cannot discern the qualitative difference between AI-produced mediocrity and the work of an active, fertile mind reveals only the limitations in their own views of art.

Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in New York City. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, impermanence, and evolution in the aftermath of Darwin. Among the places that have published his critical work are The Robert Frost Review and the Mark Twain Journal. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.