AI: Going to Change Everything
AI is going to call every human’s creativity into question and make it possible for everyone to be a creator
I am the author of the Barbie Poem and the painter of “Babies on Fire.” It’s a companion painting to this poem.
I wrote these poems and made this and other paintings when I was young.
I knew “Babies on Fire” wasn’t pretty. I wanted to express my emotions about war and someone thinking they had to have an abortion because of society and their boyfriend or husband, but who didn’t really want it.
“Babies on Fire” is 6'x6' and I built the canvas, gessoed it, and framed it myself.
I painted it myself, too.
The Loss From Fear
After college and what happened to me, I lost the ability to freely create. I no longer knew how to express my thoughts and feelings without being afraid of what others might think or say or do.
The Loss From Money
After I attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1984, I experienced a resurgence of creativity. But I was trying to duplicate horror stories. I’m not a horror writer, really.
I realized I couldn’t sell stories like I wanted to tell commercially, and I needed to work to support myself and my family. I gave up my three terrible part-time jobs (reporter at local newspaper and radio station, car sales) and went to work at the United Way.
The Loss From Conformity
I gave my work at the United Way all of my time and effort outside of home, family, and friends. After two-and-a-half years, another job opened up, being Director of Family Service Association in Redlands. As when I went to my interview and half the room said, “I remember your grandmother wheeling you downtown in your baby carriage,” I knew I had the job.
I was only 26 years old and became the head of an organization charged with helping very low income and — soon — homeless families. Most of them were the working poor.
I surprised Bruce the other day when a television program mentioned Jack Kemp, the former football player, Senator, and Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD).
“I knew Jack Kemp,” I told Bruce. He was actually impressed when I told him how that came to be.
Here is a story from that time.
The Loss From Caregiving
In 1991, I became pregnant with my daughter Meredith. My grandmother who had raised me was beginning to decline severely from dementia (later diagnosed as Alzheimers Disease). My father and stepmother both had congestive heart failure and COPD. My father was hospitalized several times.
By the next year, I was getting up to change Meredith’s diaper at 3:00 a.m., lying back down for a few moments, and the phone was ringing …
Hello, this is Redlands PD, your grandmother was out again, can you come get her?
Meredith was a little girl when we finally got Nana into Camelot Care, a small residential home for people with Alzheimers and other dementias.
The Loss From the Culture We Live In
When Meredith was 4 years old, I made the choice to return to school to get my MFA, with the stated, pictured goal of teaching college and writing part-time. I received my MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University in Orange, CA with full honors in 1999. My thesis committee chair was James P. Blaylock.
It was no loss in any way to sit down with Jim every week to shoot the bull.
So many favorite stories, but I guess my ultimate fave was the one where …
Jim Blaylock and Tim Powers are lifelong friends who were students at Cal State Fullerton back in the day. They heard the famous writer Harlan Ellison was going to speak on campus. Jim & Tim entered the lecture hall and stayed in the back. After a bit, Harlan yelled, “Who wants to be a writer? Everybody who wants to be a writer get up and stand on your chair!” Harlan mocked and harangued all those standing (not including Jim & Tim, who were apparently cowering) until only one tall guy in the front remained standing.
Jim said, “We laughed so much at that guy.”
In recent years, Jim had gone hiking with Kim “Stan” Stanley Robinson. Jim said they were both hiking on opposite sides of a stream, maybe up by Holy Jim Falls, and he told Stan this story about the guy who wouldn’t sit down when Harlan was making fun of him.
Stan stopped hiking and said across the stream, “I was that guy.”
Anyone’s real writing career is going to be exactly like standing on that chair with a tiny, terrifying man screaming at you.
My daughter is now 31 years old.
None of the well-meaning publishing (not writing) advice given to me by either Jim or Tim was true.
I’ve written three commercial media tie-in novels (not published under my name). I’ve published 50 books in total, the majority nonfiction work for hire, direct payment to me.
When I finished the best book of my life in 2013, and I knew it was good, I wrote my agent. She said, “Not now dear, I’m negotiating Season 6 for George.”
Jim and Tim were cowering, and Stan Robinson was proudly standing on a chair during a unique, golden time when writers could be themselves and tell stories that meant something to them. Not necessarily for an excellent living, but for a form of a living. Tim Powers never lived a rich lifestyle and to my knowledge to this day, he still does not. But Tim Powers and Jim Blaylock, school and life friends, were able to write their own peculiar, charming, creative tales and commercially publish them to a significant and adoring readership.
I was the wrong sex, and wrong generation — with the right sensibility — for that.
That’s absolutely fine. I already wrote and published “Mad For The Mints.”
You know how our restaurants and supermarkets are filled with fake food, other stores are filled with clothing that feels like cotton but is made from fossil fuel, and every “streaming service” is filled with unoriginal, duplicative fake music, shows, and movies and all of it? The deluge of the Slurge From Slurgistan?
They Are Telling You AI Will Be More Of The Same: Harder, Faster
AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs!!!
I would actually appreciate if AI had assisted with writing a significant number of the books I’ve had to write for cash.
I truly don’t think anybody needs or particularly wants the type of derivative work that AI is putting out now, whether it is AI-generated images or written material.
AI is an excellent tool in other ways; I think in many ways, it’s a game-changer. I think it’s going to level the playing field by doing something it’s already known to be very good at: summary.
Give language model AIs a text and they will quickly and for the most part, accurately summarize them.
In the past, “leaders” and bosses would pay many workers to do this; this “work” is no longer essential except for checking and verification.
But thing is: everyone will now have the summaries. Not just the bosses.
This is already evident in Google search results which come with the generative AI disclaimer.
Work More, Harder, Faster: For Your Self
The reason any of us humans should be doing creative work at all isn’t the same reason that Michaelangelo had for painting the Sistine Chapel (Work for Hire — Papal patron).
It’s the reason I painted “Babies on Fire.” I was compelled by a creative force that had nothing to do with money and zero to do with what any outsider told me an “audience” wanted to see.
To this day I am astonished at the massive number of a-creative people who devote their lives to going around and trashing people’s work, ideas, and in many cases, livelihoods because they purport to not “like” it — or usually — they want to enforce what is presented as “commercial taste” on others.
Commercial taste is the same as it ever was: the taste of the few and the bullies and human hogs. Billionaires, who are today’s versions of Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Hammurabi, all those guys. Or they’re today’s versions of the Egyptian temple priests or Michaelangelo’s Pope Julius.
I do not want a “patron.” If a patron proposed themselves, I would decline the offer.
I just want to do my work, my way.
The question for all creative people, whether they are writers, artists, filmmakers, or musicians isn’t “Will people pay for it?” (these days — it’s not people, it is determined by billionaire directed algorithm with an extra dash of whatever bad mojo they want to push that day) it’s —
“Do I want to do this?”
and “Why do I want to do this?”
I’ve always done my real creative work for three reasons:
I wanted to discover what I believe or know (curiosity and learning)
I wanted to express something I felt (growth and change)
I wanted to make something wonderful (adding to the world)
Do you see this “I” word? If I put my name on it, it is mine, and it has come from me.
Oscar Wilde wrote about this.
His grandson Merlyn Holland faxed me his original typescripts once upon a time, maybe about the same time as I drove by the Nixon Library and stopped and realized, “oh boy is all this propaganda a load of horse shit.”
I can’t overstate the value of generative AI as a tool for learning and comprehension.
I can state what I’m trying to say a different way, by analogy:
Remember when slave owners made it illegal for slaves to learn to read and write?
It’s like that. Generative AI is going to suck rocks for a while because 99% of everything, exactly like Ted Sturgeon said, is crap. It takes the 99% and regurgitates, re-slurgitates it.
It’s not a replacement for human writing, it is a mirror that shows a sad, boring, unoriginal, and uninspiring image that demands every creative person to take the uncompromising steps that are required —
To truly create.
The true writers will always be the human ones.
THANK YOU for this. The hype around AI will invariably fade--it's just capitalism running out of real things to sell, so "innovating" un-products nobody asked for in a last gasp for profits. Software was finished 20-25 years ago--there's been nothing new since. Thus 'features' and bloat nobody asked for, so there's something new to permanently rent to us--you don't own software anymore, silly--benefit the billionaires, not us.
On KEXP's weekly music biz show, a guest declared this was the best time in history to be an artist. You don't have to get permission from someone in a suit to make a record and get it out there. It's harder than ever to make any money, but if you want to go that way, there are no gatekeepers.
Your point on that stripe of 'creative' person who only criticizes and declaims the works of others--while not taking any risks themselves--is an important one. "Do I like this?" and "Is this good?" are two separate, unrelated questions. It's a blow to our culture that people aren't taught this important distinction.
I thought the "99% of everything is crap" quote was from Harlan! But Sturgeon was an early hero, so I'm just as happy it's from him. :)