My coworkers an incredibly excited about the potential of the various algorithms that many tech companies have been incorrectly calling “artificial intelligences.” I’ve argued with them about the definitions, the massive number of ethical issues involved, the fact that they’re actually useless if you’re trying to create something, and how they’ve essentially become a fad since now anything that needs to be sold to the public is described as somehow using AI or an algorithm even when it doesn’t really make sense. All I’ve gotten for my effort is the official title of team luddite. Apparently no one cares that almost all of these algorithms are built on theft or that they’re already being used to take the jobs of artists. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some of them even think that’s a good thing, given how they all seem to be falling into the same side of the issue as every single shitty techbro who thinks that artists are snooty, stuck up, smugly superior, and need to be taken down a peg. I’ve tried to explain to them that capitalism and modern society have been devaluing art and artists for so long that it’s almost impossible for someone to make a consistent living in any art career without more luck than is fair to need for the category of jobs that produces the entirety of popular culture.

It can be incredibly draining, these days, to be an artist. Every day I’m seeing more and more evidence of people devaluing the skills I’ve spent so many years honing. Even the tools I use, Microsoft Word, WordPress, and Google Docs are trying to stick their Large Language Models into my work, doing everything from suggesting entire sentences to offering to write entire blog posts for me. It has gotten to the point where I’ve had to fight Microsoft Word’s grammar and word choice suggestions because it keeps trying to dumb down things I’m writing when I’m taking notes during team meetings. I’ve tried and failed to find ways to protect my writing on this publicly available site so I could make sure that no LLMs are scraping my text. I’ve had to argue with my coworkers about how the one of us who is out for a few weeks, recovering from surgery, might not appreciate learning that most of the team wrote their “get well soon” limericks using an LLM since he’s known company-wide for his funny limericks and poetry. I think I might be the only one who wrote a limerick myself (at least out of all the coworkers at the breakroom table during that conversation, which was about 80% of the team).

It’s frustrating to constantly run into the unbreakable wall of their indifference. I’ve tried every argument I could come up with, linked every good article I could find, and they’re convinced it’s just a tool. Sure, maybe it is just a tool, but it’s a useless one. The current versions of these programs can’t really create things, just take snippets of the stuff it was fed and recombine it all into something made of those parts. They’ve tried to counterargue that this is the same thing that people do when they look at art or read books; that artists are just taking bits and pieces of all the media they’ve ever consumed and combining the parts into something new. Sure, some people might do that, but most artists add themselves to the piece. Most artists have a sense of self and an identity that processes everything they’ve ever read, watched, or heard, that makes the combination something entirely unique to them. So far, there’s nothing like that for LLMs. They’re just incredibly granular copy-and-paste machines.

I don’t really know what to do anymore. No one cares. No one wants to consider that maybe doing something like replacing artists with a machine is bad. No one wants to think that maybe it would be better to support the arts and artists rather than find a way to circumvent them. It is exhausting to have my work and identity as a storyteller constantly devalued by the people I work with on a daily basis. People I already don’t trust enough to properly come out to. People I’ve frequently entertained with my stories and jokes in meetings. Some of whom I’ve even run tabletop roleplaying games for. I don’t know if they realize that this is what they’re doing, that they’re insulting me and my work directly, but I’m running out of ways to excuse their reactions to my statements about how maybe all this “innovation” isn’t actually a good thing. Part of me wants to consider staging a small protest by refusing to do any writing or creative work just to drive a point home about how much of that stuff I do in my day-to-day work since they don’t seem to care about how it impacts the things I do outside the office. I doubt I could get away with that at work, though.

Being an artist has been an increasing struggle over the last few decades and I’ve gone from thinking I might someday publish a book and support myself with my writing to thinking I’m going to need a multimedia empire of creations just to make ends meet if I ever manage to get that ball rolling. These days, though, as algorithms have gone from making shitty internet pictures full of nightmares to being the main means of producing the intro to a Marvel TV show, I find myself losing hope that anyone cares about writing in general, much less my writing in particular. It’s not like I’ve really been able to get anyone I care about terribly invested in what I make. It’s not like most of my work here gets much attention or even seen by that many people. I mean, I’ve mostly given up on trying to get anyone I know to read my work and just try to be grateful when I see that someone has clicked a link I shared. The world has just become more and more hostile to creatively-oriented people and I’m just not sure that it’s worth the work I put in most days. After all, if I can’t even convince people that horrible copyright infringement (which should actually be relatable to them because we’re all knowledge workers) is bad, how can I ever hope to convince anyone that my creative work has value?