GenAI: Killing Craft

When I was about eight years old, I became irrationally upset by the fact that I had all these fantastic stories and ideas swirling around in my head that required real work to become, well, real. Why was I gifted with such a fabulous imagination in a world that completely ignored my thoughts? I even wrote an essay about it, titled something like, “On the Extreme Frustration of Not Being Able to Manipulate Reality with my Mind.” As painful as this realization was, I persevered and eventually either learned to do the work or accepted the fact there are some things I simply cannot do. Today, though, it feels like we’re all at the mercy of that 8-year old’s irrational feelings in the form of GenAI. In the minds of many, GenAI represents a kind of magical power that bypasses the messy and difficult process of craft and simply creates the wildest dreams out of thin air. It’s an undeniably alluring idea, which is one reason the whole world is shoveling money into it like a stoker shoveling coal into a runaway train’s boiler.  But for many of us creative types, the craft is the fun part. We enjoy tediously picking away at prose to make it tighter, more understandable, more relatable. We love pushing pixels to make our digital art perfect on a level no one else will ever notice. The craft is cathartic and human and the reason we all got into this in the first place. It brings us joy and peace, distracts us from our overactive and hypercritical minds. So our hearts fall and our souls whither when they tell us, “just put that paragraph in ChatGPT and ask it to streamline the text.” Because for us, pouring over every word and space in a paragraph is the good part of the job. GenAI is made to optimize outcomes and maximize profits. Both of these are of course necessary in a world driven by profits, but creative professionals try to at least shoehorn some humanity into the work, to create some kind of connection. And making those human connections requires human effort, not just probabilistic guesses from a machine. It requires careful thinking and arduous tinkering. This toiling and tinkering also creates a sort of insulation between us (the artists) and the ultimate purpose of our corporate/commercial work. If we can focus on these tiny turns of phrases or minute adjustments to kerning, we can create distance between us and the cold machinery of capitalism. This is the creative process and it’s why we do what we do. This desire to eliminate creativity in the name of production is why I loathe GenAI. I also hate how it has stolen the work of countless humans, dumped it into a mathematical meat grinder, and excreted unimaginable amounts of inedible creative sausage. I am also keenly aware that this process consumes gigawatts of energy and millions of gallons of water (even if it isn’t strictly drinking water). GenAI is not only anti creativity, it’s horrifically inefficient. According to the International Energy Agency, a typical AI-focused hyperscaler data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households. In comparison, a single human brain, which is capable of everything from scoring 100 points in a basketball game to coming up with General Relativity, consumes about 20 watts. It can also navigate the real world, remember things, and have experiences. The human brain is a miracle and to offload so much of its creativity to an inefficient machine in the name of production and progress is heartbreaking and criminal.  Don’t get me wrong, I believe there are real uses for machine learning and GenAI. Both technologies can be used to model and improve systems and can be invaluable in doing many things in science, like identifying new galaxies in old telescope data or finding cancer cells hidden in medical scans. It can be a tremendous boon for any task that requires sifting through unimaginable amounts of data, or for helping humans comprehend huge, complex systems. It can help in ways I can’t even begin to fathom because I’m