To Hell with Your Status Symbol
Against the wannabe artistic aristocrats.
It is not what goes into one’s mouth that defiles a person; what comes out of the mouth is what defiles him.
-Matthew 15:11 (NCB)
Welcome,
This post is a response to an article by
of . As you can tell from the title, I greatly disagree with his post. And I’ll explain why.Please give Mr. Khodadoost’s article a read for context of what I’m about to get into. But to summarize, he’s arguing that in light of AI-generated content, typos are now the “new status symbol”. After all, it’s the only way to prove that something - whether it be an image, an essay, or even an entire book - is produced by a human being rather than a robot. Keep this in mind.
Also, while this should go without saying, I must say that none of what I said below should be taken as a personal attack. IOW, this isn’t personal and shouldn’t be taken as such.
But let us move on.
First, let’s delve into our imagination for a bit. Imagine you’re a chef who runs a family restaurant. Now imagine you’re frustrated by McDonald’s and other fast food joints because they make their food quickly and efficiently; more importantly, their food taste good enough that people keep on coming back.
So what are you supposed to do?
Naturally, the answer is to have your cat take a shit on your food before serving it to the customer.
That’s what Mr. Khodadoost is basically proposing for writers like me. Well if that’s your new status symbol, then consider me a proletarian.
I can write some super essay about how artists and writers are looking for love in all the wrong places, how they shouldn’t base their identity on something as stupid as “being a writer”, how their anti-AI crusade borders on being a cult, how AI “slop” only became prominent because we ourselves have been producing mostly slop for some time… but I won’t. Because frankly, I don’t care. I’m done with performative hatred of AI-generated stuff (personally I prefer ‘algorithmically illustrated’, as coined by
).
You guys can have your halal signs and the artistic equivalent to “no pork, no lard”. I’m doing my own thing. With AI, without AI, why does it matter? Why do you wish to impose your religion on me?
Maybe I should take a page out of the playbook of the late, great J.R.R. Tolkien. When a German publisher seeking to publish The Hobbit in Germany asked him whether or not he had Jewish ancestry (the Nazis were in charge at the time), Tolkien had this to say:
But I digress.
Frankly, much of the stuff I’ve seen from “real artists” are crap anyways (oh wait, am I allowed to say that?). It’s the reason why I went indie or international. I like the works of
or or or or (I can keep going) not because their works are “AI-free” or “100% human” but because they’re good, because they touch upon the true, the good, and the beautiful in their own ways. I don’t share ’s optimism on AI; but frankly, I’m beginning to think that he’s on to something when he’s dunking on pretentious artists who think they can get away with anything provided that it has a “human touch”.
To hell with that. Status symbol? You mean y’all the artistic aristocracy now?
Until next time,
Michael P. Marpaung
PS. Fix your damn typos.
A postscript:
So I've been sitting on this article here for a while because I don't know if I should publish it. Frankly, this felt too confrontational to me. But hey, "who dares wins", right? And I think this is something that really needs to be said at this point.
That said, if you're looking for my thoughts on this but more philosophically inclined rather than being a full-on jeremiad, you might enjoy this article instead: https://germanicus.substack.com/p/art-is-not-a-business-article
Regardless of style, I stand by both articles.
1) Thanks very much for the shoutout. I greatly appreciate it, and I echo your sentiments.
2) You've hit the nail on the head by calling the anti-AI crowd a cult. Most (not all, but most) of them have turned being against AI into their whole identity, and they're hellbent on shoving their "purity" down everyone's throats like it's some sort of holy virtue. Like you, I can't help but notice that a lot of that crowd are not particularly good writers/artists themselves, so you have to wonder what really underscores their animosity.
3) Be against AI, don't be against AI: I really don't give a crap. Personally, I'm against it, and I would never use it in my own writing. Even though I've been known to utilize it occasionally, I think AI art is ugly - even the stuff that looks "good." That being said, it's fun as heck for those of us who are NOT artistically inclined to experiment with the tools available to us to visualize our stories.
4) It's REALLY NOT THAT HARD to tell when something's been written by AI. Instead of outing yourself as being too dumb to tell the difference, maybe learn to be more observant and insightful.