An Active Choice: Analog Art & Book Authoring “By Hand” In An Increasingly AI-Generative World
The more mechanized art, design, writing, and creativity become, the more analog I go with my own creative projects.
*Not* in defiance, disdain, or resistance; I understand the scale, speed, value, and benefits of generative creativity and I’m just as wired and socio-technological as most anyone else.
But perhaps my deep dive into more analog art and human-authored content sans AI-anything is best explained by sharing with you this tidbit below 👇🏽 from a TCC Loyalty Forum presentation I watched on YouTube a few weeks ago.
The speaker on the video clip was ex-Googler, entrepreneur, writer, and AI expert “Mo” Gawdat.
During his presentation (The Future of AI and How It Will Shape Our World, May 2024), Gawdat told the audience he had just finished his latest book, and that this most recent bestseller and fourth book would be “his last book.”
“I’m no longer writing books, that’s it; I’m no longer going to write books again,” shared Mo with an awaiting audience.
For his next topic, Mo will instead go speak about it, prepare speeches about the subject, do podcasts, webinars, and such, BUT he won’t write the book.
Why?
Because he’s going to ask an AI to write his (fifth) book.
As he explains it …
“I no longer need to do the tasks that they (the AI) can do better than me.”
Circling back to my analog art and writing pursuits amidst our immersive generative-AI world …
I agree with Mo; AI is faster and far more efficient at *many* things and tasks we humans have been accustomed to doing ourselves.
I’m not disputing these realities.
Yet, what said facts omit or dismiss are contexts.
For example
In the context of business, where maximizing profits while keeping costs low is the end-all and be all, EFFICIENCY — in terms of lightening speed and tremendous scale — trumps pretty much just about everything else, and understandably so.
Thus, efficiency — more so than authenticity or creativity — is the primary tenet in the business world.
In such a world, AI’ing whatever can be AI’d makes more sense to pursue from a shareholder or stakeholder point of view.
But in spaces where humans still have creative choice, expressive desire, and some sense of agency, the “fact” that AI can do things “better” becomes a contextual statement.
What does “better” mean?
If better means “superior to” something else in terms of type or quality, then we must ask ourselves what are we comparing “better” to before we can determine if “better” is really “better.”
Wow, the above statement is a rather tongue-twisting mouthful lol … but I digress.
What I mean to say is that “better” — in the context of human-creativity tasks — should consider a human being’s intent, will, desire, passion, and agency.
Perhaps Mo is ok, as he states, to let AI write his fifth, sixth, and other future book(s). I see nothing wrong with this; it makes perfect sense given his chosen profession, chosen expertise, and chosen industry. As an entrepreneur, Mo can readily make such decisions for his brand and business and his shift towards the “AI will write my future books” direction he spotlights is in close alignment with where many AI trends seem to be headed, in general.
But the operative word or idea here I wish to emphasize is that of “choice.”
Writing a book, no matter what the reason, is usually a personal endeavor of sorts, even when it’s for business or industry purposes.
The volume of time we invest, the breadth of research we undertake, and the thousands of words and ideas we pour across chapters and hundreds of pages is also a physical manifestation of our innate creativity and human agency.
It’s not that AI can’t do all that “better” than we can; surely it can do many things “better.”
But in the context of creative work and creative agency, “better” is only “better” *if* we CHOOSE or DECIDE it’s better to hand over such tasks to AI.
In other words
At the time of this writing, I’m busy writing my first (visual poetry) book: EXUDE.
When I say I’m writing my first book … I mean *me* without an ounce of generative AI.
And it’s not me just writing; it’s also me doing all the illustration, collage art, and book design as well.
In fact, there’s no part in my upcoming book where I’ve enlisted generative AI for authoring or image-making support, and this was a purposeful decision right from the onset.
Trust me, I know I could’ve easily, at any point in time during my book writing and design work, gone the AI-generative route but I actively chose not to. Not because I’m anti-AI, no. And not because I don’t know how to use generative tools to speed up my publishing and design process.
I chose to do all the writing and the design for EXUDE from human scratch because this debut book is a deeply personal passion project.
And that’s my whole point.
I didn’t go the AI-generative route for my creative project simply because I didn’t want nor choose to.
I set out WANTING and CHOOSING to do all the creative expression work for my visual poetry project.
It was my intent, will, and desire to be the one (and not AI) thinking about which syllables to refine, what phrases to reword, which images to crop, and so on. To me, taking the time to author visceral words and hand-make every piece of visual art entirely offline (before uploading for digital production) was a true labor of creative love I wholeheartedly wanted to do.
In sum, WANTING is very different than NEEDING.
Mo said he no longer needs to do the tasks that the AI can do better than he can.
But ‘needing’ is very different than wanting.
When you “need” to do something, you may not have as much freedom of choice in the matter as you might have when you intentionally WANT to do something yourself.
And that’s all I’m saying.
Indeed there are and will be (many) times, I concede, when we’ll all “need” for AI to do certain things “better” than us. This is a sobering and growing truth with no end in immediate AI sight.
BUT let’s not forget there’ll also be select times when we actively seek out and purposefully choose to do the creative work ourselves — especially when it’s compelled by reasons related to our own inspirational pleasure, psychological mindfulness, or human-expressive purposes.
Such instances are far more about wanting to fulfill our deeply held creative desires and pursuit of our joyful aspirations — things no “better AI” knows as much about like we humans do.
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