Museum Pages: Botticelli, AI, and Missing the Point
Important announcement! After a year and a half of The Word Cave, I’m opening up paid subscriptions.
I’ve resisted adding a paid option so far because I like the freedom to publish as frequently or infrequently as I want… so I’m not putting up a paywall on posts. Museum Pages and What is a Novel? series installments and my other random essays will still be free to read—but now you can chip in a few bucks a month to help buy me time to write them, if you feel so inclined.
As a thank you, I’m adding some bonus materials for paid subscribers—starting with an advice-column-style series where you can submit questions about anything writing- and publishing-related! (I’ll send out an invitation to submit questions after I reach 20 paid subscriptions—an arbitrary milestone that feels like a reasonable first goal.)
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Botticelli, AI, and Missing the Point
At the Uffizi Gallery in Florence this spring, I watched one person after another walk up to Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, snap a photo, and walk away—without ever stopping to actually look at the masterpiece with their own eyes. It felt like I was witnessing the dissolution of humanity in real time, right there in front of me, and suddenly the gallery felt extremely hot and airless. I speed-walked to the nearest exit, discovered that it was the emergency exit, and slipped through it anyway because yes, it was an emergency… a spiritual, existential emergency.
Once I was outside, in the hot Florence sun leaning against an old stone wall as streams of tourists passed me on the narrow street, I took some deep breaths and thought about why exactly I was so upset—I’m often irritated by other people’s museum habits, but not usually to the point of panic. I figured out eventually what the photo-taking museum-goers reminded me of: People who call themselves writers, but who want to bypass the only part of writing that really matters—the work—and skip straight to the end product. They reminded me of people who use so-called AI products like ChatGPT to “write” for them.
What bothered me so much at the Uffizi was not the act of photographing itself—I have often been moved by a work of art and, after standing in front of it for however long it takes for the emotional ripples it set off in me to settle, snapped a photograph to remember it by (or to use as a header image in a newsletter I plan to write about the piece…). Documenting meaningful experiences is a very human impulse, and often intertwined with the creative drive. But what is lost when you skip over the meaningful experience, straight to the documentation? Everything! Everything is lost. The photograph becomes a hollow artifact of a missed opportunity, rendering the entire exercise meaningless and empty. This is what bothered me so much that I used the museum’s emergency exit so I wouldn’t start screaming at people.
“Writers” who use AI to come up with ideas for them, or to solve structural issues, or whatever other essential parts of the writing process they rationalize surrendering to an algorithm, are similarly skipping over the actual experience, trying to cut straight to the documentation. To the thing they can post online and be praised for. To the evidence of an experience they never actually had. And similarly, they are rendering the entire exercise meaningless and empty. This also makes me want to scream at people.
The desire to skip over the actual writing, and the ability to do so and somehow convince yourself that whatever trite drivel the algorithm spits out is “your” work, is so confounding to me that I get flustered trying to express how little I understand it. How perverse and corrupt I find it. How much contempt I feel for anyone who does it. I’ve wanted to write something about the use of AI in art and writing for a while, but I’ve worried that the intensity of my outrage might make me sound less reasonable. But you know what? I’m both pissed off and correct.
Writing is thinking—it is both a way to think and evidence of thinking. The words that end up on the page are only a trail left behind by a mind at work, a photograph taken to commemorate an experience. Finding the right words, figuring out what order to put them in, getting it wrong over and over again until you get it right—that’s the point! To struggle through the work and have something to show for it at the end. Which is not, I promise you, the same thing as letting an algorithm produce a bastardized version of how you might write if you had the self-respect to do so.
In person, The Birth of Venus is larger than you might expect—the figures almost life-size. It is genuinely grand, in scale as well in beauty. In person, you can see delicate strands of gold leaf in Venus’s hair, catching the light. In person, the painting itself is a divine event, not just a depiction of one. And even though we’ve all seen reproductions of it hundreds or thousands of times in art textbooks and on tote bags and mugs, seeing it in person feels like seeing it for the first time. That’s the point: A rare chance to encounter this breathtaking object face-to-face. Which is not, I promise you, the same as looking at a photo you snapped of it on your tiny phone screen.
Personally, I think that the devastating environmental costs of AI, or the fact that it’s the product of massive theft from actual human artists, or that it’s transparently a tool of fascism should each be more than enough to keep anyone from using it for any reason at all (yes, even that small use you’ve convinced yourself is harmless), let alone the combination of all of these reasons. But I understand that these are all measures of outward impact—how AI hurts other people, or society at large—and that a lot of people are for some reason quite unmoved by the outward impacts of their actions. But if you don’t care that you’re speeding up climate change or stealing directly from your peers (yes, directly—if you use AI, I consider you someone who has stolen from me personally), or playing right into the techno-fascists’ hands, don’t you at least care that you’re also stealing from yourself?
In fact, what you’re stealing from yourself by using AI to “write” is arguably even worse than what you’ve stolen from me and thousands of other artists: You’ve stolen our life’s work, but you’re stealing your own life. I mean that literally: You’re stealing your own emotional and intellectual and spiritual experience of being alive. And in the process, you are actively making yourself stupider, stealing your own ability to think. (And no, for fuck’s sake, using AI is not equivalent to using a calculator or a thesaurus, tools that were not built on theft, that don’t devastate the environment, and that don’t have strong penchants for blatant falsehood, contributing to our post-truth culture and all of its terrifying implications.)
Why?
No truly, why?* Even well-paid writers are not paid well. We do it for the irresistible, delicious, difficult and rewarding experience of the work itself. The work is the thing that changes you, not the product. So if you don’t enjoy writing, why bother? Why not go fake your way through some other profession, one where you at least might get health insurance?
If you can’t be bothered to look at the art, why go to the museum?
Museum Pages is an ongoing series about writing and visual art. Read past installments here.
*Don’t answer this. If you’re an AI apologist who feels the urge to explain to me why the way you use AI is totally fine, please resist that urge. Please know that I have no interest in anything you have to say on this or any other subject, that I have as little respect for you as I do for cops or billionaires or anyone else who is working actively against the interests of humanity, and that I will never read a single word you produce whether here in my comments or in books or articles that you falsely claim to have written.
And for everyone else, a reminder: You can help support the real human work of this real human writer by becoming a paid subscriber for just $5 per month, or $55 per year!
You can also become a founding member for $150 and get feedback from me on an essay. (This is something I no longer offer through my regular editorial services—you can only get it by subscribing.)
PS: Speaking of techno-fascists, I’m planning to migrate this newsletter off of Substack because of the platform’s politics. The reason I haven’t made this move already is that all of the alternative platforms charge fees, and while I haven’t minded writing this newsletter for free, I can’t justify paying to write it. So I’m hoping to secure enough paid subscriptions to offset the costs of hosting The Word Cave somewhere less gross.
Mmmm, THIS is the piece I've been wanting to read about the intersection of art and AI. I'll be sharing this everywhere.
Fully agree with every word. Reminds me of a line in Alexis M. Smith's GLACIERS, "The ferry from Seattle was crowded with other families, not Alaskan families but the kind of loose-minded travelers who pointed and photographed without really seeing."