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sean pan's avatar

I wrote this elsewhere, of art before Gen AI, and I think it fits:

I just wanted to recall for a moment of what it felt like to write before this entire AI business, and to me, why this has always haunted and hurt me so much since.

To me, art has always been magical. It was always the practical evidence of a special soulfulness of humanity, no, of life itself - because I've never really excluded the majesty of whale songs, of bird dances, or fishes arranging rocks beneath the waves from the fundamental aspect of art, and in that sense, the relationship that it has always had with love. To be alone with one's imagination, to have a little bit of inspiration and then to be able to draw from the realm of the dreams and to stabilize it into something that is a little bit of marvelous, and then to stabilize it and deliver it with skill has always been an experience somewhere between meditation, prayer and magic-making, to become part of something eternal and powerful.

I remember being able to turn a phrase here and there, a little better or not, and then accumulating a huge number of ideas and clippings inside of my universe's notes so that I would be able to "discover" things about the universe. Like any writer might tell you, there is the sense of creation but there is also the sense of exploration, as if the world and the people inside had always existed and then you come to get to know them, to feel as them, and to love them - even the worst of them, because of how close you've had to be to each and every one of them.

I miss that.

I miss the feel of the subtle word and the echo of emotion from an empyrean realm, now violated by this monster of words and math; I miss even the ability to write of the future, in a time when the future seems to have become foreclosed to machines; I miss the ability to think of heroes and villains, in a time when people may no longer matter.

So there is a lot of nostalgia for the feeling of the art that way, for the feeling of the magical, and for that sense of the contact with the divine, the natural, and how it all seems to be one and the same. I wonder about the accusations of "gatekeeping" and in a way, it never made any sense, because it was never about keeping anyone else from coming to art; indeed, I would have wished everyone to be able to participate in that sense of the wonder of creation, via that process of imagination and that focus of will, to invest a part of themselves so that it becomes etched into the child-process. As only Vladímir Nabokov could have written Lolita, and only Twain could have written Tom Sawyer, so only I could have written what I wrote. And if someone would have read me, then in a way, he or she would know me and in defiance of time and distance, a kind of soul-connection would truly be. As the quote goes:

"Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul."

That, there, is the soul of the artist in product of the work.

And then there is AI, a monster that is the mimic, that creates words without experience, without life, and without any of that sense of pain or joy. Of course, I despise it. It denies everything that has been the artist - the sense of the self in the work, the sense of life's meaning, and indeed, even the sense of a future.

I have always called it the anti-life equation for a reason. What else could it be, but a thing that kills the very beauty of the soul?

PS:

For artists here that are not writers - which I think is most, I feel like the part which most resembles it is the sketch, to scrawl and to experiment until something appears. I've had an artistic friend who almost complete an entire landscape before realizing that he needed to redo it from scratch, and so that was a discovery too.

Its all a terrible lot of work. Creation isn't easy.

But it is all *so terribly beautiful, because of that effort and that recreation and reimagination.*

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Solomon Maxwell's avatar

Never bought an iPad or iPhone, but I gotta say... this all seems like a rather manufactured drama. All it showed was a bunch of physical representations of things people do with iPads and squished them... into an iPad.

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