Jigsaw puzzles are a fun way of doing something on a slow Christmas break day. Cindy has one with a show Christmas scene. We listened to a podcast while she sorted all the edge pieces, and then collected all the yellow pieces for bits of the taxicabs.
“Look at how weird these people look,” she said. It was an impressionistic painting of a Christmas city, so lights were blobs of color, and the perspective was purposefully ziggurat-y so you could see everything in focus.
The people Cindy pointed to looked bad. One person’s head was detached from his body, holding on by a single line. Others were geometric shapes, but not the shapes you’d imagine to suggest a human. From afar it was like a Monet painting, pleasingly balanced. Up close, it became a nightmare.
An AI nightmare.
“I think this is AI,” I said, ruining the experience.
Cindy fought it, but after a minute convinced herself. Every new detail she found was one that was better explained by AI puking up a soulless replication of a painting than someone actually making choices.
There was an outdoor patio with giants on it: they’d be 40 feet tall by the perspective of the painting.
There were cars fully square, cars with no front window, cars on the sidewalk, sidewalks that disappeared into the road or a building, median strips that cut into intersections. All signs were gobbledygook, written in Klingon. I couldn’t actually see what anything was: that yellow taxi maybe was also supposed to be a flower stand? That storefront was maybe a bus? Maybe both the front of a bus and the side of a bus and a storefront?
“I can’t do this anymore,” Cindy said, “this puzzle is ruined.” It’s still a puzzle, so we carefully put all the pieces back into the box, and carefully closed the box.
We have a fire pit, and now we have kindling for it.
I looked up “AI jigsaw puzzle Christmas” to find a picture of what she assembled. I am chagrined to tell you I scrolled through hundreds and hundreds of AI Christmas jigsaw puzzles, and none were the one we had.
We acquired it from someone who bought it at a yard sale, so tracking its provenance is tough. And the box has less information on it than you’d think was possible: just the perhaps unnecessary words “MADE IN CHINA” and some internal codes.
Just like all of you, I’ve had a lot of conversations about AI and AI art. One thing all the conversations have in common is that no creative person likes AI. This isn’t (necessarily) because AI is going to swoop in and take our jobs. It’s because uncreative people seem to think AI will let them create something instantaneously, without the effort of creation, and that they’ll get away with it.
Every writer at some point is told by a well-meaning person, “Hey, I’ve got a really great idea for a book: I just need someone to write it.” There are many responses from this idea, from the empathetic to snarky.
But the idea is the easy part: doing the work of creation is the hard part. I’ve had the idea to walk across America: that idea nets me exactly 0.000 miles walked.
My buddy walked out of a long movie saying it was overstuffed, and that someone should instead make a trilogy out of that one movie. And in fact that’s what HE was going to do over the next decade.
He hasn’t made that trilogy of movies.
Creation is also the fun part of creation! Why miss out on it? It’s like making a little doorway directly into your stomach so you never have to taste a potato chip. No one wants that!
For some people the idea is actually the hard part, and they take years to get a single idea and hold onto that ember like a sourdough starter. Those people aren’t experiencing creativity very often. Ironically, they may make for wonderful creative types, since they understand and value a good idea!
They do have to do the work, though. We all do. And we know that.
AI is a cheat. It’s not doing the work. “Do you like AI?” is a pretty clear and distinct way of finding out if someone is at heart a creative type. Creatives dislike it. Noncreative types feel they’ve found the shortcut to generate creative output without having to do any work.
The problem: no one wants to eat AI slop. It’s foul and repulsive, finding new ways to trigger the uncanny-valley fight-or-flight response. Noncreative types apparently can’t see it, and don’t understand why they can’t keep adding sawdust and cardboard to the meatloaf.
AI art will get better; perhaps it already has. And plenty of wonderful AI tools exist: they’re just called software. But gross pukey AI is still out there in abundance, served by people who think it’s just as good as a painting someone spent a week making. This devalues the artist, devalues the art, and devalues the consumer of the art, all at once.
I don’t want to see AI puke. I don’t want ANYONE to see AI puke, the way Anthony Bourdain doesn't want ANYONE eating a chicken nugget, or Neil Young doesn’t want ANYONE to listen to a compressed lossy MP3 file.
PRINCESS LEIA OF THE WEEK
Unrelated acronym week!
Here’s the Lift and Escalator Industry Assocation.
MICKEY MOUSE OF THE WEEK
(Here’s a false rumor: that the inventor of the mouse meant it to be an acronym for manual user-operated select equipment. This is not true; he did not intend that.)
SUPER MARIO OF THE WEEK
March 10 - MAR10 — is National Mario Day. Used to be Naitonal Video Game Dya but that’s migrated to September, for reasons. MAR10 is now just for Mario.
SPIDER-MAN OF THE WEEK
An infection mnemonic for nurses to remember infection control.
Spider-Man, Spider-Man/helps the nurses to stop the spread!
UPCOMING APPEARANCES
JANUARY 10-12: FAN EXPO NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans, LA
JANUARY 24-26: FAN EXPO PORTLAND — Portland, OR
MARCH 21-23: FAN EXPO CLEVELAND — Cleveland, OH
MAY 16-18: FAN EXPO PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia, PA
OCTOBER 17-19: BALTIMORE COMIC-CON — Baltimore, MD