creation – SLAMFitzsimons

Black and yellow line on black asphalt road with words "rapid " and "slow " written on it.

Image by Constantin Stanciu

in today’s world modern technology has added a lot to enhance everyday living. it enables us to communicate across vast distances, simplifies many daily tasks, and enables advances in many scientific areas. it helps us to perform tasks that were once long and laborious in minutes. it removes the time from a task.

we have engaged with tools when word processing to simplify and speed up the process of writing. the spell and grammar checker. the formatting tool. all of these has aided to quicken the time between the generation of the idea to it appearing on a page to publication. and now we have “AI” being pushed by large tech companies who promote the speed it can do everyday writing tasks. they say it is the dawning of a new age of writing. that it will enhance our work and make things easier. that the distance between idea to publication is almost nonexistent.

but is this rush to embrace speed such a good thing?

when i write or read i like to take my time. i like to chew the words over in my mouth. formulate and restructure the sentence in my mind. think ahead to where that sentence is going and contemplate what possible one could follow. for a while i dabbled with speeding up my work by writing my first draft directly onto a computer device. i reduced down the process between idea, composition, editing. speed was the king. but was my writing any better? was the process easier? no.

so i went back to basics. i put time back into the process. instead of the computer i switched to a notebook and pen. i allowed myself time to chew over thoughts and ideas. for the sentence to brew in my head. it may have only added a few extra seconds but they were valuable seconds. and i added further time. instead of being in a rush to get everything down i added deliberate pauses. stopping mid scene or paragraph and leaving it to pick up another day. the novel would get written but it needed the time to plant roots, develop its stem system, branch out and flourish.

the writing world has been guilty of this push for speed for a long time. writers publishing word counts. publishers demanding certain word numbers. a false dichotomy that demanded volume over quality. how often have we all read a book and thought ‘this section drags?’ what if there had been a bit less insistence on word count? what if the need for word numbers had been reduced? then we could have spent time on choosing our words more carefully and putting forward our best sentences.

so i demand of myself: be slow. take time in the writing process. don’t rush towards arbitrary targets. reduce the pace. grab a pen and note book. better still a slab of granite and carving tools. chip away at my sentences. letter by letter. word by word. until i have a great monument to my writing. something to stand tall and admire.

let’s talk about art and the creation of art and what is art.
when people first wanted to record what they saw or happened they painted on the walls of caves with paints they created from things around them. it represented what they saw and did. then over time the technology improved. paper. canvases. but people continued to paint to show what they saw.

photography was invented and replaced painting as a technology for recording. painting became art. people used to record events on their cameras. people, places, things. until the rise of the movie camera which replaced the camera as a means to record events. so photography became art and movies became the way to record events. a new technology on the scene. this in its turn became superseded by computers. each new technology reducing the previous to art. the old technology became a means of expression. the representation of the idea.

and now we find ourselves with a new technology making redundant the old. AI. all before is reduced to art. obsolete technology the expression of art. text and image. but what of AI? some say that they create art using AI. they enter the commands and something is produced. they call it art. they claim creation. but is creation just merely the idea and the output?

when earlier artists created an artefact was it merely the output that was considered the art? the result of thought, experimentation, technique, the breaking of rules and the inventing of rules. does not the process also make the art. with AI there is no process. there is simply the input of the idea and the output. there is no experimentation with the materials, the developing of technique, the following of rules and the breaking of rules. that was all done by the artists whose work was scraped and stolen. there is no original technique and expression of process. the process is gone. bastardised. just idea and output.

am i being too hard on the AI creator? i think not. previous technologies that became art did not rely upon the stealing of the work of others. it is not an averaging of many different people’s thoughts, processes and ideas. and even when previous creators made art with dead technologies based on other creatives’ ideas they acknowledged the fact. they made reference to it. they did not claim it was solely their creation. they owned up to the great artists they were inspired by. AI artefacts make no such reference or admittance. they lie that they are original, something new. rather than an amalgamation of many creatives’ ideas.

if you want to be seen as a creator of art then engage with the process of art. take time to develop your skills. find your own voice. develop your own techniques. break the rules your way. develop your own new rules. don’t short cut and steal another’s work and claim it yours. you did not own the process. the work is not yours.