The Cost of AI Art
brandonsanderson.com
brandonsanderson.com
Yet.
I don't know if it will always stay this way, though. If one day I read a novel and I think, this is a great novel. I appreciated it, I felt myself growing from it. And then later I learn it was written by an AI. That's it, that will prove that great AI novels are possible. I will know it when I see it. I haven't seen it yet, but if it happens, I'll know.
So it's really just a technical question. Not a philosophical one.
That's not what the essay is about. Sanderson spends the first half of the essay examining reasons for his strong feelings against AI. He also touches on the fact that he already struggles to discern generative AI from human art.
Eventually, he concludes that his real objection to generative AI has nothing to do with the quality, and everything to do with the process by which it was created. He believes (as do I) that focusing solely on the end product of generating a painting or a novel, robs would be artists of the valuable learning experience of failing repeatedly to create art, and then eventually rising past that failure to finish something. In this way, he thinks one of the real hallmarks of art is that it's transformative for the human who creates it, going so far to state that __humans are the art__ itself.
Can AI kludge together a ripping story? Sure. But there is a reason people still write new books and buy new books - we crave the human connection and reflection of our current times and mores.
This isn't just a high art thing. My kids read completely different YA novels than I did, with just a few older canon titles persisting. I can hand them a book I loved as a kid and it just doesn't connect with them anymore.
How I think AI CAN produce art that people want is through careful human curation and guided generation. This is structurally the same as "human-in-the-loop" programming. We can connect to the artistry of the construction, in other words the human behind the LLM that influenced how the plot was structured, the characters developed and all the rest.
This is akin to a bad writer with a really good editor, or maybe the reverse. Either way, I think we will see a bunch of this and wring our hands because AI art is here, but I don't think we can ever take the human out of that equation. There needs to be a seed of "new" for us to give a shit.
What this article is trying to get across is that art is a transformative process for the human who creates it, and by using LLMs to quickly generate results, robs the would be artist of the ability for that transformation to take place. Here's a quote from Sanderson:
"Why did I write White Sand Prime? It wasn’t to produce a book to sell. I knew at the time that I couldn’t write a book that was going to sell. It was for the satisfaction of having written a novel, feeling the accomplishment, and learning how to do it. I tell you right now, if you’ve never finished a project on this level, it’s one of the most sweet, beautiful, and transcendent moments. I was holding that manuscript, thinking to myself, “I did it. I did it."
He in essence claims there is some intangible attribute of a work that defines it as art or not depending on both the person who made it and the process they went through.
It does seem like a slightly romantic notion, since for any given item you can’t know if it’s art or not just by looking at it, which seems a bit odd. But then again, I suppose there’s a reason people pay for guided tours at museums so they can learn about the history and background of a work.
Side note: the title is editorialised; it should be “The Hidden Cost of AI Art: Brandon Sanderson's Keynote”
I'm not sure it is. I think his whole stance here is that you should create art for yourself, not because there is some intrinsic use to whatever you create, but because the artist has an insatiable need to create __something__. Creating art is therefor as much an act of personal growth as it is a past time. To rob yourself of that growth in his eyes, is to discard such growth.