Artistic Practice at the Dawn of Generative Artificial Intelligence
There was a time I assumed that J.D. Salinger must be mentally ill. I was in my twenties and committed to getting a book published by any means necessary. I got a Master of Fine Arts degree, hewed to a strict, 5 am daily writing schedule, and scanned the bios in debut novels to figure out if the authors were younger than me. I submitted to literary journals, attended readings, and stayed on top of who was publishing what where. The idea that someone like Salinger would voluntarily turn his back on a life of publishing books, giving interviews, and attending public events baffled me so much that I assumed he must have been dealing with intense trauma, phobias, neuroses, and social anxiety. It was the nineties and I was formulating a concept of what it meant to be an author in the world, which involved procuring a certain degree of cultural status and maintaining and expanding it through the production of a body of work. While the private act of writing was its own reward, I was still a young person attempting to plant my flag like any other, and the terrain I hoped to plant it in was American Literature.
Decades later, I started thinking about J.D. Salinger again in light of a yoga practice I started around age 45. I learned that Salinger was a devotee of Vedanta Hinduism and frequently read The Bhagavad Gita. When I discovered the sacred text myself, I was astonished by an economical narrative that offered both mystical and practical rewards, wrapped within the story of a friendship on a battlefield. I came to appreciate why the creator of Franny and Holden might have been captivated by the story of Arjuna the archer and his faithful charioteer Krishna. At the heart of the Gita is the idea that enlightenment is the result of detaching from the fruits of one’s actions. In other words, live your life with integrity, but don’t get too hung up on how things turn out. Concentrate on the task at hand and make that the reward, and don’t make your decision to pursue or not pursue something contingent on what it provides for you or where it takes you in the end. I find this particularly excellent and practical advice for novelists, who commit years, sometimes decades, to projects that may or may not ever see the light of day. Personally, this means that I don’t consider the five unpublished manuscripts I’ve produced in the last thirty years as failures compared to the five that did turn into published books. Taking this position isn’t some form of high-minded artistic virtue signaling; it’s just a practical way to protect myself emotionally and mentally from the possibility that no one will ever read works that I structured my life around for several years.
I’ve spent some time over the past couple years paying attention to the field of generative AI — artificial intelligence programs that produce works of writing or images based on written prompts. I encountered OpenAI’s GPT-3 in the summer of 2021, experimented with it intensely for a couple months, and had my mind repeatedly blown by how sophisticated, weird, and uncanny the output could be. I fed it an unfinished story idea that I’d held onto for years, about an underachieving cult leader. My premise was that for every profession there had to exist someone who is the absolute worst at it. I wondered what the funniest job would be that someone could be worst at, and cult leader immediately sprang to mind. For years, all I had to show for this idea was an opening sentence: Does it really have to be this difficult to convince a dozen people to commit mass suicide?
Working with GPT-3 through several cycles of prompts, the story developed into something hilarious and unexpected. For some reason, the AI decided that the cult meeting where my underachieving guru was trying to convince everyone to drink the literal Kool-Aid was taking place in a middle school cafeteria. At one point, all the characters rushed into the Boys bathroom and crammed into a single stall. Writing with an AI felt like engaging in a game with an unhinged collaborator, and it was crazy fun. I set up a Substack where I posted my AI-prompted stories for awhile. Then I got bored and went back to working on the novel I started a few years ago.
More recently, I discovered Midjourney, an AI that produces shockingly accurate illustrations from text prompts. I’ve used it to create architectural renderings of houses in a variety of styles, dreamscapes, renderings of the insides of UFOs, black and white street scenes that look like daguerrotypes, landscapes of Heaven, and a portrait of Charles Manson in the style of Norman Rockwell. As with GPT-3, my initial burst of enthusiasm for it tapered off considerably after the first couple months. Now I hardly use it at all. I got bored with it.
Generative AI is one of the big tech stories of 2022. Its emergence feels like a science fiction scenario from 20 years ago. I even have a quaint story in my first story collection titled “Written by Machines” about a fictional AI that writes poems, but my imagination circa 2004 was no match for how generative AI actually developed two decades later. As is the case with any emergent technology of note, generative AI is provoking discussions about whether certain jobs that we always assumed belonged solely to the realm of human beings will now be outsourced to machines. Like chess players in the era of Deep Blue, now visual artists and writers are starting to sweat that the algorithms are coming for our livelihoods. That’s an entirely reasonable way to regard the arrival of Generative AI. Portraitists had the same concerns when photography showed up on the scene, and I’m sure drummers regarded early drum machines with similar worries of obsolescence. Somehow, despite these advances, people still paint portraits in oil and still bang kits with sticks.
There’s another way to think about creative pursuits that get disrupted by technologies. That is, artistic discipline as its own reward, disconnected from any expectation of a livelihood or even an audience. The Salinger/Gita way, if you will.
There are two ways to experience a work of art. One, by receiving it via one’s senses. Two, in the act of creating it. The world is awash in considerations of art from the perspective of the consumer, but less discussion about the inherent value of what art does to us as we create it.
To me, writing a novel is a shitshow punctuated by moments of trascendence. The process of advancing through many drafts is a mess that seems designed to continually convince me of how stupid and inadequate I am. Sometimes when I write a first draft, I feel like I’m wading through mud or trying to articulate myself through a mouth full of marbles. Sometimes I’ll finish a page or two convinced that the prose is golden only to come back a couple days or weeks later to discover with horror the garbage I actually barfed onto the page. But the great thing about writing, unlike musical performance or acting on a stage, is that you get as many do-overs as you want. You get to make lots of incremental improvements over time. These incremental improvements start adding up until you reach a point at which you have no choice but to accept your own limited range as a writer. If you’re lucky, you end up with a manuscript that has a few sentences in it that are so good that you’re surprised you wrote them. Finishing a novel involves coming to terms with your limitations while generating enough enthusiasm to leap into the next project in order to correct the last one’s flaws, with delusions about your talent utterly refreshed, as you begin the cycle of disappointment and enlightenment all over again.
Who would choose to put themselves through a process in which elation, confusion, and self loathing maintain such intimate and aggravating proximity? If the point of living is to find something that earns you adulation and pays well as quickly and with as little effort as possible, choosing a novelist’s life is ill advised.
For whatever reason, writing has never felt like a choice to me. Before I was old enough to write, I remember watching my mother writing with a ballpoint pen and feeling an immense urge to get on with it and learn how to do it myself. The basic contract of my existence seems to stipulate that I’m oligated to write or suffer some kind of existential consequence. Writing allows me to alter my own brain chemistry. When I was in fourth grade, I discovered that I could induce spatial hallucinations by writing; oftentimes during “free write” periods in class, I felt I was levitating above my desk, my body tilted forward so that my face was facing to the floor. I’ve found that as long as I’m working on a book, life is fine at worst, joyful at best, and it actually doesn’t even matter whether that book gets published in the end. The point of writing is the writing itself and it doesn’t require any external justification for me to continue doing it. The truth is, I just love doing it, now more than ever, and this love only continues to grow.
Everyone seems to want what they’re doing to get them somewhere. The points in my writing life when I’ve struggled hardest are precisely the times when I was striving the most for some form of external validation or reward. When it doesn’t occur to me to care what happens with something I’m writing, the work tends to arrive with neither excess strain nor fanfare. When the words are flowing well, I make sure to offer a little prayer of gratitude, often aloud, to whatever force in the universe allows this activity to happen. The rest, as they say, is gravy.
Arguments about whether AI is going to take your job, whether it’s “just as creative” as a flesh and blood artist, or whether it can “improve creativity” ignore the inherent value of the practice of art and how this experiential dimension transcends concerns with material or social success. It doesn’t matter if machines steal the livelihoods of every illustrator and copywriter on the planet overnight — making pictures with your hands and putting words together on a page will remain transformative pursuits that require no external justification. While generative AI is astonishing as a production tool, it has yet to replace the inherent rewards of quietly creating art in the temple of one’s own brain. If the disruptions of previous technologies like photography, electronic musical instruments, and typewriters and word processors provide any foreshadowing, it’s that technogical advances in creative tools foment artistic breakthroughs by people. Never bet against human creativity. I’m not excited about generative AI because of what human beings will do with it. I’m excited to see what human beings do in response to it.
J.D. Salinger, as we now know, kept writing. His most famous protagonist, who railed against the phonies, provided the author the financial independence to live for decades on a 90-acre New Hampshire estate, where he studied the mystics of the world’s religions and privately pursued his craft. His son, Matthew Salinger, has reportedly been preparing a number of books for posthumous publication. While I once took Salinger’s reclusiveness as a sign of emotional disturbance, I now regard his retreat from public life as the most selfless and generous act of one of world’s great writers. When we have the fortune to read these novels and stories, we’ll be reading the works of a man who detached from the tyranny of results, whose indifference to public acclaim, when viewed within the context of what I imagine will be masterpieces, will demonstrate the power and beauty of private acts of creation. Artificial intelligence couldn’t be more irrelevant to such a gift.
