Art, AI, and the Courage to Create

'What do you suppose creation is?'

The cursor blinks impatiently while I stare at the screen. I look at the title of this piece, which sits tall and proud in its capital letters, perched atop the page as though on a throne. ‘Case in point,’ I say to myself. There is something intimidating about an empty page. Fear, anguish, and also excitement show up when you set out to write because it is a deliberate step into the unknown, a yielding to something other.

‘We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down,’ said Kurt Vonnegut. Who knows what will emerge from the recesses of your subconscious during the descent. Isn’t that compelling? Yes, but what if you don’t like what you discover? (the writer, that is, never mind the reader). Even worse, what if those wings never unfold? What if all you discover is emptiness?

Some say that you never truly know what you think until you write it down, or get it out via whatever medium you dabble in. ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?,’ said E.M. Forster. Writing is the life of the mind, invoked and transcribed in the same breath. When you write something down, you engender it, validate it, even, in the realm of the known. You descend and ascend at the same time, gaining a birds-eye-view while diligently picking through quantum detail. I will stick with writing as an example for simplicity’s sake, however everything I am saying applies to art and creativity at large. 

There are two kinds of writing (in the context of this post); alive writing and dead writing. Alive writing invokes sensuousness, expansion, and insight. It transforms and enlarges its reader. It is a kind of disclosure; simultaneously immanent and transcendent. Dead writing is passive, sentimental and afraid of telling the truth. It discloses nothing except its own performance. The sentimentality is a front rather than a risk taken. Alive writing is a process wherein you forget it's even writing. Dead writing is a product that is too self conscious for its own good. It is an outcome of not being honest with yourself. It respects neither writer nor reader, instead it presents us with a mirage, having never truly made contact with the real.

I told myself I wouldn’t write about writing because a) is that even ‘real’ writing and b) we’re all, understandably, bored of the ‘meta move’ this entails, especially since Substack is becoming an infinite regression of writers writing about writing.

What I’m really writing about is what it means to try and make sense of (and with) your soul through creativity, and why it’s important. Is what you’re reading here actually lifeless because it is choosing to avert its own death? I might not have jumped off yet, but I am at least peering over the edge.

There are numerous risks at play in this moment of writing, including the risk of giving birth to something that may soon be dead. By the time this reaches you and I have long abandoned my keyboard, whatever this is may have hit the bottom. The vibration of the present moment as I hear it now will be different somehow. ‘You had to be there,’ I’ll say…

However, I’m afraid to admit that that get out of jail free card won’t work; what we’re dealing with here is a bottomless hole (cue: Handsome Family).

We hear it from the greats all the time – you must risk being awful at whatever it is you’re doing on the off chance you might actually be good at it, and even then, who cares if you’re good at it (well, lots of people, it turns out). ‘If there's a voice in your head saying, 'you can't paint,' you must surely paint, and silence that voice,’ said Van Gogh. Besides, who and what are we creating for? Love, money, self-respect?

Society indoctrinates us with the idea that we must master everything, especially that which serves capital. Gentle hobbies are a thing of the past. We’re in the age of the ‘side hustle’, ‘middle hustle’, ‘full frontal hustle’... If it does not serve capital, then it must be forced into submission, one way or another. Such is the impoverished state of our souls inside this deranged trance of consumption that art and creativity have become a means to an economic end. And I’m not talking about artists getting paid, I’m talking about the never ending churn of ‘content’, of ‘having to say something’ rather than ‘having something to say’. 

Art is a way as well as an outcome. It may well be a means to an end, but the ends are things like personal integration, spiritual insight, kinship with the Earth, aesthetic and erotic sensation, and, the end to end them all, aliveness. Even then, that doesn’t really have an end, because your bones simply turn into food for baby worms which turn into food for baby birds and so on. Nature is hard to define, but above all, I would say nature is an artist. It’s that kind of something from nothing that leaves me with no choice but to declare magic!

Creativity is the underlying logic of aliveness, but to be alive, truly alive, takes courage, because what lies ahead is astonishing, terrifying, beautiful emptiness (see: a blank page/canvas/choose your suffering-come-liberation). To create something alive you must risk being alive yourself. ‘The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion,’ said Camus.

There has been a lot of debate recently about the impact artificial intelligence is having on art and creativity. Many thought, perhaps naively, that AI would release us from economic servitude and enable us to live free and whimsical lives. Instead, AI is whiling away its time creating images, movies, and poems, while the rest of us plough on with our spreadsheets. Painters fear for their craft, and musicians and writers struggle to sustain their already precarious livelihoods in the wake of cheap digital labour.

What concerns me about AI is not that Chat GPT is going to produce prettier, more visually complex pictures than we can, or more world-changing tomes – the greater cause for alarm is that AI is encroaching on a psychospiritual process vital to our being human.

The murky realm of creation is where we grapple with the dark matter of our subconscious and hone our inner resources. Outsourcing this fundamental metabolic process is rendering us intellectually and creatively impotent. The point is to try. The point is to make what we call ‘mistakes’. The point is to get lost in the darkness of it all.

The point, I’m sorry to say, is to struggle, often alone. This is not to romanticise the already sickly ‘suffering artist’ trope. This is to say, and I wish I had less crude and corny words, but here we are: no pain, no gain, ‘bitches’.

When we relinquish agency over our creativity, we relinquish agency over our aliveness. It’s called ‘shooting yourself in the foot’. They say a gun is a neutral tool. They say that about AI, too.

Art is the way we understand the things in life which are hard to understand, of which there are many. Art is freedom. It is living inquiry. When we use AI to make art, we forfeit the eros of life and our responsibility towards it, ourselves, and others, and we give up our freedom and the courage to discover ourselves in the process.

What do you suppose creation is?
What do you suppose will satisfy the Soul, except to walk free, and own no superior?
What do you suppose I have intimated to you in a hundred ways, 
but that man or woman is as good as God?
And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?
And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
And that you or any one must approach Creations through such laws?

– Walt Whitman