The Struggle Is Real

What you lose when you surrender your creative process to the AI swarm

About ten years ago, Jack White sat down for a conversation with Conan O’Brien where they dug into not only his creative process, but his entire philosophy of art. The full thing is worth a watch, but there’s a particular passage where White focuses on the way digital tools have infiltrated the music industry. Suddenly a musician doesn’t have to be able to sing on key to be a professional vocalist. 

The more he talks, the more it becomes clear that one of the major differences between White and many, many other artists isn’t their particular answer to the question of when or how to use these tools. It’s whether they realize there even is a question.

I have a big chip on my shoulder about responsibility for technology. When the telephone first came out, people learned telephone etiquette… it was a new kind of politeness because you couldn’t see the other person…

Nowadays I think the new technology is ‘here; give me the toy,’ and I don’t give a damn about anything… about anything ‘rules.’

The newest toy is, obviously, the current Cambrian Explosion of creative AI programs. Image generators like Craiyon and MidJourney, text generators like ChatGPT, and God only knows what else.

And boy, do people want that new toy. 

It’s a little shocking to see how quickly artists have started outsourcing various tasks to the new suite of AI tools. We’re only about seven months out from the release of Dall-E 2, and already you see illustrators, writers, and even preachers (!) trying to figure out just how much they can hand over to these machines.

Their hope seems to be that AI can act as an accelerant to the creative process. A visual artist can use it to get a glimpse of what a quick sketch will look like as a finished image, or quickly version out several different compositions to see which one they like best. Writers can hire it out as a concept artist that brings them reference images for the characters and settings of their story, or use a text bot to quickly bang out an outline or generate a first draft of a dialogue scene.

In essence, using AI can dramatically shrink the distance between their initial idea and the final product. The AI tools essentially help them skip over the parts of the creative process that involve nothing more than tedious spadework or time-consuming trial and error.

It’s a tough thing to know and see your peers doing those things, and nobody cares. The musicians don’t really care that much, and the crowd definitely doesn’t really even notice or know what’s going on. But I know. And that becomes a big question about art.

If you do something that’s important and extremely involved in pushing yourself and making something beautiful happen, but no one will know it, should you do it? Or should you cheat, because no one will really know that either?

All of this seems to betray a belief that, when you get right down to it, the key creative act is simply “having the idea.” This is a terrible misunderstanding. Not only is creativity far more about the creative process than it is about having the initial idea, the idea itself can only really be understood by going through the process.

Do you know what the “idea” for Lord of the Rings was?

(Yes, it’s too easy to reach for Tolkien in a conversation about this, but… well, he shouldn’t have kept such good records of his writing process if he didn’t want to be cited on it over and over again.)

Lord of the Rings began as a plain sequel to The Hobbit (simply referred to as “Hobbit” for a long time in Tolkien’s letters). The story didn’t start with much except the notion that Bilbo’s heir – who began life as “Bingo Baggins” – would set off on an adventure, and that this adventure would explore the nature of Bilbo’s magic ring.

What you can see happen as Tolkien begins to write, however, is that little narrative thread concerning Bilbo’s invisibility ring draws Frodo (Bingo) into the center of an entirely different type of story. One that, if we’re being honest with ourselves, has very little in common with the original Hobbit. (They made some movies out of it a while back, if you’re curious.) Per Tolkien: “Stories get out of hand.”

Now, imagine if Tolkien had tried to shorten the decade that Lord of the Rings demanded of him. Imagine if he had skipped over the tedium of figuring out what Hobbit 2 was even about, and simply asked ChatGPT to come up with an outline for him. It’s likely that it would have given him something much closer to… well, Hobbit 2. And the world would be poorer for it.

The creative process is creativity.

Furthermore, it’s supposed to be hard. Pain is part of the path. AI tools start to look like the skill uploader in The Matrix. Like Neo, artists can just know kung fu and skip over the years it takes to master multiple disciplines. They can finally get down to the simple business of kicking ass.

But The Matrix is a fantasy. In reality, skipping the painful part of learning kung fu would be a disaster. Let’s say you were suddenly gifted the kicking power of Wonderboy Thompson, and stepped into the UFC Octagon. There’s a good chance that the very first kick you landed would snap your leg in half.

See, something that happens when you train for years is that the bones in your shins (or knuckles, or whatever you’re training) get conditioned. They actually grow denser, which is what lets them take the abuse that striking with the intensity and precision of a striker Wonderboy entails. In other words, the ability to kick like Wonderboy isn’t simply knowing how to kick, it’s also the accrued artifacts of actually kicking, over and over, day after day after day. 

The struggle is real. It has meaning. The pain of the path cannot be separated from the meaning of the final accomplishment.

Some people would say who would care? So what? The image is great, it’s two dimensional anyways, what does it matter how it was created?... But just taking the easy way out through technology is not always fulfilling, either…

Because here’s the deal. All the books, all the movies, all the documentaries that are made about these people that we are interested in, who we think accomplished something amazing, you know… who wants to hear that they took the easy way out?