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So, you’re a person who has decided to embark on a creative journey of self-expression — to make art, in other words. First off, this is awesome! The universe needs more people making art, whether that art is writing, painting, music or any other form that humans are capable of creating. You have the drive, now all you need is to find an instrument. Will it be a guitar? A pen? A paint brush? A camera? Yarn for fiber art? What will you choose to take those first steps into a larger creative world?
What? You say you’re just going to type prompts into a generative “AI” interface? After all, with a single sentence, generative “AI” can plop out something that seems passably like human-created music, or writing, or illustration, or whatever. It’s super-easy to use and results, at least at first glance, look… pretty good! It seems like an effective way to jump into a creative life, no?
Well… there are lots of counter-arguments creative people might make to this (not the least of which is that prompting a generative “AI” makes one an artist exactly as much as pushing a button on an automated hotel pancake maker makes one a chef), but let me attempt a metaphor that I think works pretty well:
Remember Guitar Hero? It was a really cool rhythm video game where a player, armed with a special guitar-shaped button controller, would pick a song, and then press the buttons, singly or in combination, in time to visual cues on a screen. You got points for hitting buttons at the correct time, and for doing that lots of times in a row. It was fun and at higher levels you could absolutely give your fingers a workout — let’s face it, if you could get through the entire of “Through the Fire and Flames” on expert level, you were a friggin’ god.
What you weren’t was a guitar player.
That’s because nothing about Guitar Hero taught you how to play guitar — what it taught you was how to use the guitar-shaped controller for the game. Was it a skill pressing the buttons at the right time? Yes! But it was a non-transferrable skill that had no application for the actual musical instrument. The game’s gameplay mechanic doesn’t map to the mechanics of a guitar in any meaningful sense; it doesn’t teach you scales or chords or how to put them together in new and unexpected ways to create something original. All you could do with Guitar Hero was use the controller in the way the game-makers wanted you to, in time with the songs they chose, to accrue points and achievements that they specified.
Sure, it’s all gamified and fun and even addictive, but at the end of the day no outside, transferable skill accrues to the player. To do that, you have to set the controller down, pick up an actual guitar, and start another, entirely different journey. And perhaps some Guitar Hero player did or will, which is awesome. It means at some point they were not satisfied with pretending to play the guitar, following someone else’s rules and set-up. They still started, effectively, at zero. There was a whole new skill tree to be learned that had very little to do with the game, outside of the shape of the controller.
Being a Guitar Hero player did not — and does not! — equal being a guitar player.
So, let’s come back to “AI,” which in this case is “generative ‘AI,'” the sort which powers most consumer-facing “AI” like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or Grok. Like Guitar Hero, generative “AI” has a vast database of artist’s work to draw from (but unlike Guitar Hero, whose makers licensed that work and compensated the musicians and songwriters, most generative “AI” training data is pirated and uncompensated). Like Guitar Hero, generative “AI” is programmed by its makers; its outputs are to a greater or lesser extent shaped by those makers through algorithms and weights, which is why Anthropic’s Claude “AI” has a different “personality” than say, “Grok,” and why “AI” text and images have a particular tone and texture which is easy enough to clock when you see enough of it. Like Guitar Hero, “AI” is fun to play with and the results, again, at least superficially, can be pretty cool. A well-tuned prompt can create some initially impressive results.
But, like Guitar Hero, no outside creative skill has been acquired or developed. Every result is self-contained within the domain of a program whose owners have their own goals and agenda, and to whom nearly every benefit accrues. Material generated by “AI” can’t be owned by the prompter if it is purely generated by the “AI,” and even partial “AI” generation in a work raises legal concerns regarding rights and ownership. In a very real sense “AI” can’t even be directly controlled — prompting is an interface with the underlying weights and algorithms of the “AI,” chosen and directed by others. The more granular the prompting, the more the underlying “AI” can use its weights and algorithms to fulfill the request, but at the end of the day, you still get what you get. If it’s not exactly what you wanted you have to hope another prompt will get it closer. You keep pressing the button on the automated pancake maker, hoping it will make exactly the pancake you want.
Prompting, like playing with the Guitar Hero controller, doesn’t teach you how to do anything else. Prompting doesn’t give one the eventual skill to sit at a keyboard and write a short story or a novel. It doesn’t give one the ability to play a musical instrument. It doesn’t let you pick up a pen and create a drawing. The skill required for all of those — not to mention the life experience to create meaning with them — lives somewhere else. When you’re using “AI,” you can’t get there from here. You have to start again from zero. The time you spent in “AI” doesn’t count for this, except in the very limited sense of showing you what you don’t want.
Just like being good at Guitar Hero does not make one a guitar player, being able to prompt doesn’t easily make one a creator. At best, it tells what is essentially a statistical engine what you want it to output based on the vast database of other people’s work that it is drawing from. Nothing it cobbles together gives you the experience of creation; the only benefit of that crank of the “AI” flywheel is to the company that owns the “AI.” The image or music or video or text is not from you, it’s just something you asked for. You’re not the creator. You are, perhaps, the creator’s manager.
And, look, for some people that’s enough! There is a reason why legions of Facebookers flood their feeds with images and video of “AI” cats (and why, rather less adorably, legions of bots flood those same feeds with fake images of people their prompters want you to hate). Lots of people don’t want to be “creative” in any meaningful sense of the world, they just want those images of cats having coffee or whatever. Not everyone who played Guitar Hero wanted to actually play guitar, either. That’s fine (well, for Guitar Hero. “AI” has resource and rights issues to deal with no matter how it’s used. But I trust we all understand where I’m going here).
But if you want to create, it helps to create. You can’t just prompt your way into it. You have to do it. You have to learn and work and build skills and ability. You have to be bad at it before you can be good at it. Your creativity has to be inherent and portable, something you carry with you wherever you go, not contingent on a service provided by billionaires who have their finger on the scale of how that service does its thing.
Because, among any other thing, who is to say how long any of these “AI” are going to be around? The last installment of Guitar Hero came out more than a decade ago. The online version of the game shut down in 2020. Everyone who ever had mad skills on Guitar Hero has had those skills out to pasture for a while now. Now, apparently there’s going to be an updated version of the Guitar Hero concept later this year, which is cool and I hope is as much fun as the previous version. We’ll see how long it lasts. Meanwhile, as long as their fingers and shoulders hold out, everyone who ever learned guitar still has those skills and the ability to use them.
So, keep that in mind as your start your journey of self-expression. You have a whole bunch of paths you can go down here. Some will be harder and take more time than others. But those are the ones that are more likely to get you to where you want to go, to develop the skills and abilities to let you say what you want to say, how you want to say it, without having to rely on anyone or anything else, to make it happen. Your choice! Pick well.
— JS
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