Art, AI, and the Courage to Create
“The process of making art,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.”[2]
Cameron Russell • How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir
Human existence is characterized by a perpetual dissatisfaction, a divine discontent, with who we are now, and what our world looks like now, compared to what it could be. Change is unpredictable; we rarely know how things will turn out in the end. But we still invite it, still seek it out.
Artmaking is, for many, an essential part of enacting these... See more
Artmaking is, for many, an essential part of enacting these... See more
This is one of the many reasons why I find the current conversation about so-called generative AI so immensely frustrating: there’s all this hype about making everything easier and faster, about how we can eliminate all the work involved in the making of words and images. But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is ... See more
Mandy Brown • Coming Home
People keep asking me about AI and I really think how you feel about AI comes down to whether you believe art is about producing things (images, objects, data files, “content”) or about a way of operating in the world as an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional creature.
Austin Kleon • AI can’t kill anything worth preserving - Austin Kleon
This is why art matters: because it dredges our psychic depths in ways that even the artist may not understand. “The arts,” writes the Zen poet Gary Snyder, following Levi-Strauss, “are the wilderness areas of the imagination, surviving like national parks in the midst of civilized minds.” Strange things grow in the wilderness; unusual plants thriv... See more
Paul Kingsnorth • The Great Work: Alchemy and the Power of Words – Paul Kingsnorth
AI now promises results without the reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards. No one dreams of merely pushing a button to generate their magnum opus. The struggle is what makes it count, what gives it weight.1