You can't prompt your way to meaning

AI isn't useless, but personal fulfillment from creative work is equal to what was sacrificed to make it

Still from Blade Runner 2049

The world is using generative AI for various things and so far this hasn’t turned my media life into pure slop, which the prognosticators keep predicting. That’s because I buy music, subscribe to blogs and watch movies from people who have a distinct voice and point of view. For music I even know the specific style an artist likes to do mastering work in. If they used tech as part of the process they put in enough careful tailoring of any machine output that it still felt human. So I don’t really care that a tool helped them. I personally compose electronic music I couldn’t produce without a fusion of technology and human creativity. Many things we enjoy are this way. But there’s a tradeoff in ceding control and specificity for speed in using AI for this work.

I’ve played around with the latest AI products for awhile and they are useful to me, in the ways an administrative assistant is useful. It helps me answer simple questions like how to complete a recipe if I only have a few ingredients in the house and require a substitution, without wading through webspam. That’s very useful. But, the output is existentially unsatisfying for serious creative work, for the same reasons I wouldn’t have an administrative assistant help me in studio with composition. Also more important here is that I did not make it. I prompted it. It's not the same.

I’ve been thinking about why this is, because I don’t see many others pausing to consider it. If you lived in a futuristic society like the one in Star Trek, would something you asked a replicator to render be satisfying? The answer is yes, but in a transactional way. The thing would do the job of feeding you. But would you tell anyone about what you replicated with pride? Would you grow through it? Would you still bother learning to cook at all?

What does it mean for your direct skills as a human when a machine can deliver the same output in a fraction of the time, perhaps instantly? Would we get very good at prompting? Would that become the new craftsmanship? Or maybe we would drift into pursuits the machines can't touch, whatever those turn out to be. Perhaps the feeling of creating something yourself would become an artisanal hobby.

There’s a quote from John Ruskin: “no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.” Ruskin was writing in the 19th century about art and architecture, but his words have something to say about prompting. The imperfections aren’t defects, they’re the fingerprint, the brushstroke, the evidence of attention. And more than that: the presence of care. You could program such imperfections in, but only if you already had a corpus of original works to train the AI on would the output have your personal signature. Otherwise, you’re simply living in the shadow of someone else (or more to the point, the averaging of many others).

That’s why when I make music I don’t use presets or loops in my software, even though they’d save time. They’re just not that interesting. They don’t feel alive, although if I make them my own and edit a bit I can make them usable. The friction of building something from scratch or even editing to be unique involves the human choices of small accents, random accidents, even the limitations of your own skill all contribute to the satisfaction. It’s not the product alone, it’s the process. It’s knowing you made it. Prompting provides no intrinsic reward even if you became good enough at it you did get some very brief extrinsic reward in the form of social media likes. And the former is existentially satisfying while the latter is cheap, fleeting dopamine that leaves you empty.

None of this is a luddite rejection of AI. I’m sharing the limitations of this technology and tradeoffs, similar to my posts on AI nihilism and also on the risk of AI reducing us to cattle. I can only share thoughts because I actually tinker with these products, and I sense many creatives who reject it never do this. I think prompting is a similar kind of literacy as web search. But both are a thin kind of literacy, and a lonely one, if you don’t also make some original things with your own hands. There’s a kind of solipsistic sadness in mechanistic, instant output with no human struggle behind it. The same is true everywhere: while we no longer have to run away from predators for survival, many now run for fulfillment. Someone who only drove everywhere is physically obese, and spiritual obesity is real too. I see it everywhere, even before generative AI was widespread.

Maybe the tools will get better. Maybe they’ll even fool us. But if they do, I think we’ll still find ourselves looking for the rough edges or any sign someone cared enough to actually create something themselves with their own brand and style, something the AIs can only borrow from others. None of this is ever really you, because few prompting can ask the AI to prompt something in their style, as they’ve never developed one. The thing no one talks about is it’s already very efficient to make creative work, and at some point, there’s diminishing returns in automation (it only seems faster, but you still have to do the work of editing, and it just adds more time at the end). Tradeoffs in creativity are real and anyway creative pursuits are not factory work. It’s play. Some inefficiency might be the key to making anything of consequence.

It’s a sad state of affairs if in the future humans are merely assembling the creative equivalent of IKEA furniture and human creativity becomes an anachronism. I don’t think this happens. It’s just too fulfilling to do this type of work yourself. Being freed to craft our own art should be the point of all the productivity gains of mechanized process-driven work. After all if this is not the endgame, what else could it be?