In The Image: Embracing Friction

AI & The Struggle of Art

Welcome to the September installment of In The Image — a bimonthly guest column on the intersection of faith and the arts, written by Matthew J. Andrews. In addition to serving as a previous poetry editor for Solum, Matthew is a private investigator and writer. He is the author of the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember and the full-length collection The Hours, which was published by Solum on Easter Day.

AI & the Struggle of Art

For a few years, I was fortunate enough to not think very much about AI. I was certainly aware of its existence, but news about AI—its development and capabilities, the boasts of its advocates and the concerns of its critics—always seemed interesting and noteworthy, but also distant and impersonal, like a natural disaster in another continent or a scandal in some other country’s government.

That is no longer the case. In what felt like an instant, AI was everywhere I looked. Every professional conference I go to now has someone hawking it as the only path forward, every workplace tool has “AI capabilities,” and I’m being forced into conversations about how, and if, AI can be implemented ethically into the work I do every day. It wasn’t long after that I started receiving AI-generated emails from colleagues and clients, that I started having customer service interactions that never once involved a human being besides myself, that I started feeling a general sense of unease about the future and regret for my years of apathy. In short: I’ve been pushed into having to think about AI very quickly.

And there is much to think about: the economic impact of all the jobs that will be lost if the Tech Bros get their way; the environmental impact of all the energy required to answer our many queries; the religious undertones of the ambitions of some of these companies (OpenAI’s Sam Altman has openly expressed his desire to create a “magic intelligence in the sky”); and the existential questions of what it means to be human in a world where humans are becoming increasingly replaceable. But since this is a column about art, let’s zero in on that arena. What impact does generative AI have on those of us who write, make music, draw, act, take photographs, or pursue some other creative avenue?

I want to start to answer that question in an unlikely place: college. I’ve been reading my fair share of technocriticism recently, but few shook me quite like James D. Walsh’s article for New York Magazine entitled “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College.” “Generative-AI chatbots,” Walsh writes, “take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays.” To sum up the effect, Walsh quotes a student as bragging that “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.”

Later in the piece, Walsh speaks with a professor, Troy Jollimore, who shares his concerns: “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate…Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” Jollimore has my sympathies because he’s describing college as a place that is no longer about intellectual enrichment, but about completing a series of tasks to get a reward at the end. And he is not lamenting about the possibility of a grim future, but the present as he currently sees it.

When writing about AI and the ways it makes our lives easier, people often describe it as removing friction, smoothing out the obstacles that stand between us and whatever it is we want done. The word makes sense, but it always strikes me as one of those clinical terms that, while accurate, creates a safe distance. What AI really removes is struggle, the hard work involved in doing something unfamiliar or slightly above our present abilities. The students Walsh describes no longer struggle with weighty concepts, complex literature, grandiose theories, comparative analysis, or really any sort of comprehensive or systemic thinking. But as Jollimore points out, struggle is essential to developing real understanding, real intellectual and cultural literacy.

This echoes the crux of my concerns about how AI can impact art: that we will hand over the creative reigns and become artistically illiterate as a result. I don’t necessarily mean that we’ll lose our culture knowledge, that all of poetry will disintegrate because no one reads The Iliad anymore, but that our creative muscles will atrophy, that we will slowly forget what it means to create art, which is a big part of what it means to be human. So much of creating is, very broadly, struggle: practicing brush strokes until you reach expertise, wrestling with a character you’re trying to bring to life, reading the same line of a poem you’re working on over and over again because you just can’t seem to find the right word to say what you mean. To create meaningful art requires space and time, conceptual contemplation, editing and reediting.

The reality is that artists now have access to a tool that can magically take a lot of this struggle away, that promises to make creative work easier. It’s quite a temptation, but as we know, the apple brings consequences once you bite into it. Here’s Ethan Mollick, in his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, imagining a future where artists are “thriving” with AI:

So now, in many ways, humanities majors can produce some of the most interesting “code.” Writers are often the best at prompting AI for written material because they are skilled at describing the effects they want prose to create (“end on an ominous note,” “make the tone increasingly frantic”). They are good editors, so they can provide instructions back to the AI (“make the second paragraph more vivid”). They can quickly run experiments with audiences and styles by knowing many examples of both (“make this like something in The New Yorker,” “do this in the style of John McPhee”). And they can manipulate narrative to get the AI to think in the way they want.

It’s not Terminator-bad, but its insidiously dehumanizing; writing has become “code” and we have become assistants to the machines. This is not a future we want to embrace.

As Christians, all of this should be especially resonant because across denominations and theological positions, we share the belief that spiritual formation is a process that cannot be short-circuited. To grow spiritually in any meaningful way, one must pursue any number of disciplines: prayer and contemplation, reading and study, fasting, pilgrimage, and confession. One must sit in uncomfortable silences, practice painful levels of self-reflection, wrestle with doubts, pray earnestly, and fight through the effects of sin and temptation. In other words, one must struggle. One must work not for the sake of work itself or because enlightenment is earned through effort, but because that work helps to turn our gaze outward and awakens us to the voice and presence of a God all around us.

We understand intuitively that a faith that isn’t disciplined and doesn’t strive to higher understanding isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s usually lacking in depth, wisdom, and character. In the same way we see cheap spirituality for what it is, let us reject cheapness in the expressions of our humanity, in the art we create and the art we consume. Let us embrace the succulent fruit of struggle.

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