Anything (A)I Can Do, You Can Do Better

Artists and writers are questioning whether there’s still a point in creating art or if they should surrender to the rising tide of AI slop.

I don’t want to be someone who just moans about AI, so I was going to postpone this post. All my posts so far have been about tech, and I want to write about something else. I don’t even find AI very interesting—useful to some extent, sure, but not interesting.

When I saw the new AI-generated Coca-Cola Christmas advert, I felt like I had to get something out of my system though. Watching the ad, it becomes glaringly obvious that AI isn’t capable of originality, and the slop it creates is only useful for producing soulless corporate nonsense.

Our ability to reason, self-awareness, and opposable thumbs are often said to separate us from animals. But I believe valuing aesthetics over practicality should also be high on that list.

I also believe art has become vital to our survival—especially in today’s world, where we are convinced that we’re headed toward doom. We are losing faith and struggling to find meaning. Maybe our meaning is just to create.

The AI crowd would have us believe that we won’t have to work or create anymore. Everything will be solved. AI will do our jobs and make art. But it’s all a fallacy. AI has already run out of its precious training data, poisoning the well with its generated sludge. And if their own words are to be believed, there will be even less data in the future as AI takes the jobs of artists and writers. Some experts believe that as much as 99.9% of the internet will be created by AI by 2030, with the most optimistic estimates still over 90%.

Their utopia is a world where even movies are perfectly generated for you. But how quickly would you grow tired of watching the perfect movie every time? We’d develop no taste if we never saw a bad movie or listened to a bad song. We’d grow no backbone or character if we never had to lift a finger. AI isn’t generating art; it’s generating generations of grown-up babies. Anything your heart desires, only a prompt away.

Utopia can’t be separated from dystopia. Life is in the imperfections, and art is only interesting because of the imperfections of lived experiences. That’s why human art is always better than AI art, and why utopia is a pipe dream. You can fake perfection; you can’t fake imperfection. It’s like that George Carlin quote: “If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?” If you perfectly try to be imperfect, which one are you? AI would only attempt imperfection if you asked it to—trying to perfect imperfection while failing at both.

Don’t mistake imperfection for being bad. AI slop is usually bad. Sometimes it can be good in the sense that it’s impressive to look at, but it’s never interesting. At least not to me. AI can scrape interesting info and serve it up to you, but that doesn’t make the actual work of the AI interesting—it has simply stolen something interesting. The Mona Lisa is interesting to look at in the Louvre, and it’s still probably interesting to look at in an art thief’s house. The act of stealing something isn’t admirable, even if the thing you stole is.

AI is faster, though, and in this fact, the AI crowd relishes, as to them, efficiency is the end goal. Happiness and inner peace are mine, which is why I can never find common ground with their ilk. If speed were the main criterion by which we judged art, then speed painting would be the most valuable—and it’s definitely not. Putting a price on art is notoriously difficult because there are no metrics or stats to price it by. The value is determined by how it makes us feel, what it makes us think, who the artist is, and countless known and unknown factors. Speed is rarely one of them. Unless you just fired the marketing department and need a new Coca-Cola advert at the click of a button.

The more I’m exposed to AI slop, the more I want to embrace imperfections. When AI tells me I’m doing something wrong, I must be doing something right. I’m now happy when I see Grammarly’s colored underlines telling me my sentence structure isn’t perfect. Ten years ago, I wrote a song lyric with the chorus:

“I hate the way you always spell love in Times New Roman 12-point font.
I’ll leave it all on a post-it note, or with that song we wrote about home.”

I think it sums up how I feel about all of this. How boring it will all be when everything is perfectly structured and spelled AI slop.

As a former illustrator and current contrarian, I recently decided to take up drawing again—just to spite everyone saying that art is dead or dying, and you won’t be able to work as an artist soon. I think it’s all hogwash. I think once the AI slop has saturated every nook and cranny of our lives and the internet, the value of anything made by a human will go up.

Imagine if I’m wrong. What if, in the future, art history will teach us that hominids began creating art in the form of ochre markings hundreds of thousands of years ago. That we continued to make art until the 2020s, when we stopped because we didn’t have to make it anymore, and now we just look at and appreciate the AI slop created for us. The End.

Tell a 3-year-old to stop drawing. Tell him he can put his coloring pencils down because he doesn’t have to do it anymore. AI will do it for him. The point is obvious when the example is a 3-year-old, and it should be just as obvious if it’s a 30-year-old or a 100-year-old. We don’t create art because we have to, but because we can and want to. And at the same time, we don’t create art just because we can, but because we have to. I do, at least. In creating art, we’ve become dependent upon continuing to do so. If we stopped, we’d lose our culture, and we would surely become just animals again.

To the AI bros, I propose a deal: you keep the AI slop—preferably tucked away in the Metaverse alongside the NFTs—and we, the humans of the real world, will keep the art. You don’t seem to value it much anyway, so it feels like a fair trade for both sides because we sure as hell don’t value the slop much.