Rough Ground

In this post, Alan Jacobs reiterates things he’s said in previous posts that informed my most recent newsletter.

I’m basically repeating here the message of Nick Carr’s book The Glass Cage, and much of Matt Crawford’s work, and more than a few of my earlier essays, but: automation deskills. Art that hasn’t been taken through the long slow process of developmental demonstration — art that has shied from resistance and pursued “the smooth things” — will suffer, will settle for the predictable and palatable, will be boring. And the exercise of hard-won human skills is a good thing in itself, regardless of what “product” it leads to.

The link is worth following if only to see the difference between the architectural sketches of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry.

Time’s Corner: What is New

This is yesterday’s issue of my newsletter Time’s Corner.

The other day my brother showed me some videos created by Google’s Veo 3 tool. Watching them, I felt like the Spartan king seeing a catapult for the first time: “Here is the death of valor.” What’s the point of struggling to make a beautiful film or portrait or poem if any rube with a computer can do the same thing?

The thing is, I actually like making movies and taking pictures and writing poems. I don’t just like having them. I like making them. At the end of the day, I’m not too worried about Veo 3 personally. So, I’m going to ask a more neutral question: What are these tools for?

Like all tools, AI is decided to make work easier, usually by making it more efficient. They reduce friction. Is there any benefit to reducing friction in creative work?

Alan Jacobs wrote about this a few years ago. The friction between the artist’s ideal and the limits of his tools is a key factor in creating art. Artists need their materials to push back. (This is what always bothered me about that video of Glen Keane animating in virtual reality. “You can do anything you want.” Yeah, but what I want is to not be able to do anything I want.) On the one hand, artists don’t want to make their work more efficient. But, on the other hand, artists can and do adopt new tools. Someone had to invent the lead pencil, after all.

I suppose the answer to my question depends on what you’re going for. In the filmmaking industry, digital video has almost entirely replaced actual film because it’s gobs easier to record, manage, edit, and alter. If you want to make a great-looking movie as quickly and cheaply as possible, digital is the way to go.

But not everyone wants to do that. I recently met a filmmaker here in Birmingham who loves using DVR cameras (remember those?). He makes music videos for bands who want a certain, unconventional look, and DVR gives him that look. (He also mentioned that people behave way differently in front of a camcorder than they do in front of a phone. Pull out a phone and everyone turns away. Turn on a camcorder and they all start mugging and crowding to get into the frame.)

I do most of my writing on the computer because it’s fast and I like the semi-formal look of type on a white background. When I need to slow down and think through a scene or paragraph, I put out pen and paper. (Not pencil. Too easy to erase.) But most of the time, I’m after speed, and the computer gives me that. Could you use an LLM in the same way?

Cory Doctorow has written that his main problem with AI art is the lack of communication behind it. Art communicates via the million micro-decisions made by the artist in creating it. Each stroke of paint (or the keyboard) tells something about the artist’s thoughts. You can create AI art without making very many decisions; hence, according to Doctorow, its uncanniness.

But what if there is intention behind it? If an artist uses Dall-E, or whatever, to make hundreds of versions of his idea, then chooses from among those hundreds, makes adjustments, generates a hundred more, etc. If a poet has ChatGPT spit out a poem about the rain, then changes a word, then another word, then another, chops the whole apart and puts it back together? Does that make it just like any other tool, one step beyond using a word processor?

Let’s say I’m writing a scene and I’m stuck. “What would Jane say in response to Michael’s comment?” I wonder. Being the old-fashioned writer I am, I would do one of the following:

  1. Lean back and stare at the wall for a while
  2. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and start writing one bad line after another, in the hopes of jostling loose a good idea
  3. Go for a walk

It’s very easy to imagine a younger writer developing a different process. “What would Jane say to Michael?” she wonders. She opens ChatGPT, types in Michael’s line, and asks it to generate fifty different things Jane could say in response. She skims the output, selects the best option, copies, pastes, and continues on her way.

There’s much more to say, but this newsletter is already long. Let me add one thing: The problem with using AI tools to make art is that they trick you into thinking that they are creating something new. They aren’t. What an AI spits out may seem new, but it’s an amalgamation of vast quantities of words or images created by human beings. Now, my grad school professors would probably say, “What’s the difference?” All of us our simply parroting stuff we’ve heard or read. We’re just super-advanced LLMs made out of meat. But that’s simply not true. Human beings can come up with new things. (They can make new humans, after all, each with an individual soul.) Machines can’t.

Creating Needs

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism:

At first glance, a society based on mass consumption appears to encourage self-indulgence in its most blatant forms. Strictly considered, however, modern advertising seeks to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt. It seeks to create needs, not to fulfill them; to generate new anxieties instead of allaying old ones. By surrounding the consumer with images of the good life, and by associating them with the glamour of celebrity and success, mass culture encourages the ordinary man to cultivate extraordinary tastes, to identify himself with the privileged minority against the rest, and to join them, in his fantasies, in a life of exquisite comfort and sensual refinement. Yet the propaganda of commodities simultaneously makes him acutely unhappy with his lot. By fostering grandiose aspirations, it also fosters self-denigration and self-contempt.

It reminds me of my friend Ryan’s observation that commercials are “trying to make you sad.”

Pocket is Buttoned

I was surprised at the relief I felt on reading this. I’ve had dozens (scores?) of articles in my Pocket reading queue for probably ten years, all of which I’ve told myself I’ll “read later.” They’re about to vanish forever. Finally, I’ll be able to sleep at night.

Old Sage

No man appears in safety before the public eye unless he first relishes obscurity. No man is safe in speaking unless he loves to be silent. No man rules safely unless he is willing to be ruled. No man commands safely unless he has learned well how to obey. No man rejoices safely unless he has within him the testimony of a good conscience.

Thomas à Kempis

Full of Years

Jacob’s story, like David’s, is virtually unique in ancient literature in its searching representation of the radical transformations a person undergoes in the slow course of time. The powerful young man who made his way across the Jordan to Mesopotamia with only his walking staff, who wrestled with stones and men and divine beings, is now an old man tottering on the brink of the grave, bearing the deep wounds of his long life.

Robert Alter

Efficient Speech

For nearly two centuries, we’ve embraced the relentless speeding up of communication by mechanical means, believing that the industrial ideals of efficiency, productivity, and optimization are as applicable to speech as to the manufacture of widgets. More recently, we’ve embraced the mechanization of editing, allowing software to replace people in choosing the information we see (and don’t see). With LLMs, the industrialization ethic moves at last into the creation of the very content of our speech.

Nicholas Carr

Happy at Home

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

— Dr. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750

via

UPDATE – 6/26/25

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was often visited at home by fans, many of whom wanted his autograph. He wrote a short poem and had copies made so as to have a ready supply on hand. Here’s what he wrote:

Stay, stay at home, my heart and rest.
Home-keeping hearts are happiest.
For those that wander they know not where,
Are full of trouble and full of care,
To stay at home is best.

Source

What Copyright is For

If you ask most people what copyright is for, they’ll tell you it’s about protecting artists. But that was never its goal. It was only meant to incentivise creative work by granting a temporary monopoly to its creator. By limiting control to a set period, the system was supposed to encourage production while guaranteeing that works would eventually enter the public domain for collective use. Case in point: when the US first implemented copyright in 1790 (inspired by similar laws in Britain), protection lasted just 14 years, with a one-time renewal for another 14. Early lawmakers saw copyright as a tradeoff – short-term exclusivity in exchange for long-term public access. As a federal appeals court put it in Authors Guild v. Google Inc. (2015), “while authors are undoubtedly important intended beneficiaries of copyright, the ultimate, intended beneficiary is the public.”

Elizabeth Goodspeed