Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing I once heard Christopher Doyle say when asked, during a Q&A, what art is.
“The right question,” he said, “is, who is an artist?”
Art, simply, is the thing that an artist makes.
At the time, I thought that was a non-answer, because he never actually defined who an artist is, or what makes one an artist.
At a gathering a few weeks ago, I met a writer who was really anxious about LLMs getting good at writing because,
“Very soon, I wouldn’t be able to write the book I want to write because an LLM would be able to do it better.”
Another writer who was there tried to reassure him by saying that LLMs – at least at the moment – cannot write that well. Or rather, that whatever they write is obvious.
“And people,” the other writer said, “want to read other people. So you should still write.”
I think the argument about whether or not LLMs can now – or will at some point be able to – write better than a human writer is a complete distraction. The real question is,
What’s writing for?
In one of his podcast episodes, Ezra Klein flipped that famous Joan Didion quote – I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking – to say that often, we write to convince ourselves of what we think.
Either way, I think the point of writing, primarily, lies in its impact on the writer.
I write because the process of writing changes me neurologically. In the process of wrestling with the ideas, I make new discoveries, and previously unformed ideas connect in my brain.
And it’s precisely because of that that I believe getting an LLM to write a first draft of anything creative that you will then edit after is quite frankly nonsensical.
I understand the fear of the blank page. There’s so much inertia in sitting there and not knowing the first word to kickstart the essay, short story, or whatever. And so we try to engineer some momentum by already having words on the page we can move around.
But the blank page is scary because going into uncharted territory is scary. And as writers, going into uncharted territory is the job. The friction is the point because friction is how the grooves are made. If the grooves come easy, you’re probably just threading through some old paths.
A portrait photographer I like once wrote that the goal of his photo shoots is to get his subjects to have fun. To facilitate a good time, and the photos are just evidence of the fun had.
The experience is the point, the images are just proof.
I believe it’s the same with writing. The goal is the exploration. It’s about going on an internal journey and coming back with evidence. The evidence is the essay or short story or whatever – some kind of map that can take someone who reads it along on the same journey. But whether or not anyone actually reads it is secondary.
But I do understand why people who primarily make money from writing – especially for ads or social media content – would use an LLM for drafting. Because if you don’t, someone else might, and then you might lose your livelihood because you can’t hit deliverables that no human person alone can reasonably be expected to.
Like Ted Chiang said, most of our fears of technology are actually fears about capitalism.
Back when I had a day job, one of the secondary (or even tertiary) tasks I had to do was creating documentation after every production, and for most of those, I mostly typed bullet points of how the production went into an LLM, and it spit out a well-formatted document I could send to my manager, who I’m certain did not read through it all.
But were those documents art?
Which brings me back to the question asked of Chris Doyle – What is art?
Yes, art is what an artist does, but who is an artist? Can an LLM be an artist?
I think – at least at the moment – the answer to whether or not LLMs can create art is unknowable, because it’s unknowable whether or not LLMs go through some sort of internal transformation in the process of making that specific work.
The real question is, how much transformation does the person doing the prompting go through?
Because creativity is the pursuit of curiosity. It requires one to start from not-knowing. And when a curious not-knowing person goes into the unknown not knowing what they’ll find, and then in the process comes out with something that captures the essence of that curiosity… that’s an artist. But without a transformation, that person – at least for that specific project – is not an artist, and thus whatever they create as part of that project is not art.
Because the work of an artist is not easy. And it’s not fast. And the art part of the work cannot be automated.
Art takes as long as it needs to take, and for the artist, the grind is worth doing even if nothing comes out the other end.