Soulful vs soulless creativity

One artist’s response to our AI overlords

When I recently learned of Meta’s plans to create entirely AI-generated profiles on Facebook and Instagram, I was horrified. Having been in hospital for almost 300 days, I spend a considerable amount of time on social media updating folks on my recovery and trying to maintain connections with the outside world. I suddenly imagined all those real people I’m reaching out to for support being replaced by glass-eyed AI-generated avatars responding with hollow, but encouraging AI-generated platitudes… and it chilled me to the bone.

Is Meta really so desperate for user interaction that it’s willing to create it artificially?

Are we as human beings so desperate for followers, likes and engagement that we’re willing to accept AI-generated substitutes?

Stefan, quite rightly, has been baffled by how deeply this development has disturbed me. It wasn’t that long ago I was pumping the generative AI platform, Midjourney, with wild prompts for my Better as Stained Glass project. I loved seeing what the AI would come up with when I asked it for physically impossible creations like a stained glass slow cooker or saxophone. I also loved seeing the stark limitations of AI when trying to create something too far outside its database’s experience such as a stained glass wheelchair.

Better as Stained Glass AI experiments (2023)

For this reason, I’ve never been particularly concerned about AI taking my job as a visual artist. Much of my work is rooted in my personal experience and, when an AI can be a 3’7” woman in a wheelchair… well, it can give me a call.

I get that many creatives are genuinely terrified for their livelihood. Truth be told, many of the images utilized in this newsletter are sourced from AI through Adobe Stock. While I could create original artwork for each post and I will often do a quick manipulation in Photoshop to tweak the image to be closer to what I’m looking for, I also know that my focus here is conveying my ideas with words. If I were creating illustrations from scratch too, I’d write far fewer articles and that’s a trade-off in my limited time and resources that I am willing to accept.

Some argue it’s the speed at which AI can generate images and the fact that their databases are trained on the work of real artists. This argument is also hard to square entirely because technology has always been a massive disruptor for creatives—just ask the manuscript illustrators who were replaced by the printing press or the realistic portrait painters who were side swiped by the invention of photography.

Artists have always been living blenders of all the work that has come before them. My work is a prime example of this as I blend together my iPhone snapshot reference with the intense colours of Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass, the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and the loose painting techniques of the Impressionists. In the world of creatives, this type of blending is considered perfectly normal and acceptable, so it’s not the AI’s ability to do it at lightning speed that I have an objection to.

“Wistful Lola”, acrylic on canvas (2023)

It wasn’t until I was re-listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s audiobook, “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond” that I finally hit upon why this recent surge of all things AI has suddenly become disturbing to me.

Gilbert believes that creativity comes from outside human beings. Essentially, the way she describes it is that ideas float along in the ether until they happen upon a creative human being who is willing to bring that idea into reality as a poem, a painting, a line of music and so on. Gilbert herself notes this is not a new concept as the Romans believed that creatives weren’t themselves geniuses but had a genius or muse spirit separate from themselves that supported their efforts.

She likens them to Dobey the House Elf of Harry Potter fame who lives in the walls of a house and embodies those floating ideas from the ether. Some of our muses are diligent and dedicated and others, like Dobey, are a little more absentminded.

It was recalling this anecdote—which Gilbert also describes in her TEDtalk that I’ve included below—that sparked the thought…

Do AIs get House Elves? I bet they don’t.

I suddenly had this mental image of all those ideas floating out in the ether in search of human hosts. I imagined them like scrawny House Elves standing in the cold outside, their noses pressed up against windows as they peered into rooms lit only by computer screens. The forlorn creative muse would sigh and then shuffle off into the snow.

But then, the House Elf would come upon a studio with a warm glow emanating from a door that was just barely cracked open. It would slip inside and find a creative bent over their craft. They would watch the creative from the corner of the room as they laboured with passion over a painting… a journal… a guitar… a tapestry… day after day.

Should they grant this creative the idea that they’ve been carrying so carefully from door to door to door?

Is the creative diligent enough to bring this idea fully into reality?

Most importantly, what kind of world will we be creating if we aren’t leaving doors cracked open to allow our creative muses in?

This I believe is the source of my unease about AI. Not its inherent immortality, but my fear that if we lean into it too much we’ll become disconnected from a uniquely human kind of magic. It’s the kind of lightning bolt from the blue that caused me to write this article about AI and creativity at 5am in bed on my phone for fear that I’d lose the tickling insight that has been trying to edge its way sideways out of my brain for days.

Hat tip to my House Elf for this one. You have been very persistent.

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Athena is currently on medical leave from creativity coaching with Tilted Windmills while she heals in hospital, but hopes to be back to coaching later this year. You can read about her ongoing rehab journey in Athena’s Art Newsletter.

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