reading

Ughhh so busy lately, feel like there's too much to focus on and can't focus on any one thing! Tired, busy! Stuff happening! Aaa!

In the meantime, I've been thinking about genAI lately after seeing a post from someone who had chatgpt helping them "write" a children's book that it was lying about saving so they lost all of it, and another guy who was upset his work blocked chatgpt and now he'd have to do his job, and so on and so forth. I don't have to go over all the AI arguments from the creative side of things, I'm sure you've heard all of them by now. Many times the argument goes that the value of a work of art is the effort and skill that goes into it, the human element that makes it real and personal. Which I agree with! But it wasn't something I really ever thought about on a personal level until recently.

A lot of arguments for AI revolve around making things faster with less effort. I was thinking about Handplates, and if I had access to a magic machine that didn't hurt the environment or steal from people or any of that, if it was run totally on perfect harmless magic and it could do exactly what I wanted and capture my artistic vision completely, would I have used that for Handplates instead of drawing it myself?

And my answer was an instinctual and instant no. Never. Never ever. The idea is so repellent to me, way more than in any theoretical argument about art as a whole. When you get down to the personal level, of art you personally made or created, the answer to it seems so violently clear. At least for me, anyway.

The process is part of what makes art so valuable - you can find artists everywhere that talk about how the act of creating the art is why they create, is what brings them joy. Handplates was a long, long project that took a ton of effort and time. Some of the pages took 24 hours of straight work (not all at once, over several days, but I did time it). 24 hours I could've spent any other way doing any number of things. If I had that magic perfect machine, would I have used it instead? No.

And it isn't just in a theoretical way or a matter of principle about the creative process. I streamed working on pages to keep myself focused. And people would come to those streams to watch and joke and chat, and I got to know them, and we became friends. I met really good and dear friends I care about that have improved my life for the better! And it's because of the process. It didn't just add value to the piece of art itself, but it added value to my own life. That process didn't just create the art, it created a small community around the streams I did where people met and became friends and got to know each other.

Like, that's a tangible thing! A real benefit that the artistic process brought to me, and my friends too! That artistic process shifted the trajectory of my life! And this isn't even considering how the shape of Handplates changed and shifted in ways as it went along, as I made friends and talked with them and got ideas, moved things around, learned more with each page, studied and read and refined things, changed my mind, got hit with inspiration, all things that only happened because the process of making Handplates took so long. The length of that process is what made it what it is.

Making Handplates helped me outside of creating the art too, it helped give me something solid to focus on when I was falling apart. That's a benefit that's outside the creation of the art itself, an intangible positive effect on my life and wellbeing. Sitting for those 24 hours, drawing and chatting and watching things with my friends, helped me. Meeting all those people improved my life. And all of it was because of the process! Not the final result, but the process of creation!

And with that magic machine, I could've just went "make me a page about Gaster killing someone for the first time" and got it in like five minutes, and all of that disappears. Everything I could've gained from it, gone. That time spent with others, all gone. It could give me back the exact same page as the one that exists, but to me it'd be worthless. It didn't cost anything to make, it didn't give me anything to make. I didn't gain anything from making it, because I didn't make it. The machine did.

It would save me time, it'd convey my vision, but it wouldn't count in my mind. It wouldn't be mine. Even if the result was exactly the same, whether I hit the magic button or sat for a cumulative day sketching and inking and coloring and shading everything, only one of them would be real to me. Only one would count. And if I could've fed that magic machine every Handplates idea all at once, get the entire comic done in one whack to dole it out on a regular schedule, it'd be nothing. It'd mean nothing to me. I feel like it'd mean nothing to everyone else as well. I'd lose so much and for what? A product with nothing behind it. What value would it really have if you could just pop it out instantly? I'd lose so much without the process of creation, and for what?

It was the same kind of reaction I had to thinking about going to this magic machine and saying "Finish this first draft of this Vargas chapter, find a good breaking point". It makes my skin crawl, it fills me with this visceral disgust at the thought of it. Even if the machine was just giving me suggestions, was just doing spellchecks, all of it is just so repellent to me. It's a kind of "don't touch that" reaction, just MINE MINE MINE MINE over and over. Going to another human being for ideas or beta-ing and such is fine, but thinking of going to a machine is just uuuughhhhh. It's such a powerful reaction to even just the thought of it. My writing is mine, my art is mine, I don't want a machine touching it. The thought of the machine being able to mimic my writing style would make it even worse. Seeing it try to write more in Vargas while sounding like me is horrifying to me, just awful awful awful.

I've always agreed with how part of why creative people create things is because we love the act of creation, and that's a thing that a lot of techbros and such pushing for AI slop don't understand. The goal in those cases is just to make the content fast to make a quick buck, the creative process is just an obstacle to skip on the way to the money. I guess it wasn't until I thought about it about my work specifically that I realized just how visceral my disgust at the thought of it was. That and just how much I've gained from that process! There are a lot of benefits to it that I didn't even think of until I put it in these terms.

And the process has even cost me things, like when I hurt my arm for a while because I worked on a page for too long (that was on me, I should've stopped earlier). Would I have used that perfect machine to make the new pages while my arm was healing? No. I would rather have waited until I healed to start it up again. Would I have used the perfect machine to write the fic I had in mind at the time (the strangels one, for the record)? No, I just used a TTS. It wouldn't be mine if I let a machine do it instead, and why should I be proud of something that wasn't mine? Something I didn't make? Something I gave away to something else to do? Why should I get any sense of accomplishment from it? What would even be the point? Right now at this moment I have so many ideas, it's hard to even decide what to work on. Would I use that perfect machine to do some of them, so I could focus on others? No. Absolutely not. What would even be the point? I might as well just throw that idea in the garbage if I cared that little about it.

I dunno, just some loose thoughts, haha.

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