Turdpolishers & Paint-By-Numbers

“Are you working on your novel? 
Write it carefully: shit us some good shit.”
– Gustave Flaubert

My mom once tried a landscape paint-by-numbers kit.  Took her more than two years to complete it; fortunately back in the 1950s they offered oil based paints so they didn’t dry out sitting in their capped little cups.

Being a housewife consumed most of her time in the 1950s to early 60s so she rarely had the opportunity to work on it.

If she had the energy, she didn’t have the time; if she had the time, she didn’t have the energy.

But finish it she did eventually, more a sense of relief than accomplishment.  I recall we all congratulated her on it but even at that tender age I could tell it really didn’t look as good as what real artists painted.

Mom talked about framing it once it dried thoroughly but I can’t remember ever seeing it after she finally completed it.

Mind you, I deny no one their pleasure.  If you like paint-by-numbers projects, you go right ahead and enjoy yourself!

Likewise if you enjoy adult coloring books* you go right ahead and color them.

I occasionally print out black and white comics art and sci-fi illustrations to color in with markers and color pencils.  It’s fun, it’s relaxing, and there’s a certain bare minimum amount of creativity involved in my choosing how to color it as well as trying to improve my skill level re color pencils.

Is it art?  Only by the lowest bar imaginable, but yeah, since a human’s involved, we can call it art.

I think of the equivalent of this with AI as turdpolishing.

The defeatist acceptance of AI in creative endeavors is dispiriting to me.

I concede AI is good for crunching huge numbers and finding patterns we humans might easily overlook -- and even there you need to take care about AI “hallucinating” (i.e., making stuff up).

In creative areas — art / music / writing — there is no art to what AI spews out unless there is a human to interpret it.

Like Rorschach blots, AI “creations” are actually more or less random conglomerations.

Sure, you can give them detailed prompts ///but they will never respond to the prompts exactly the same way twice///.

This is why grotesqueries -- sci-fi / fantasy / horror / surrealist – prompts produce the most satisfying results to humans.

What we’re looking at is supposed to be weird, so we overlook / forgive all the numerous flaws in it.

What more and more human creators do is use AI to block out what they want -- be it sight / song / story -- that they then refine and hone into something more personal and genuinely artistic.

I’ve posted elsewhere there are things AI can do in creative fields that I find helpful:

• Creative prompts that a human builds a personal work off
  Preliminary copy editing in text to speed up the rewriting process
  Summaries of existing work to speed up research

But others are using AI to create rough first drafts they will subsequently rewrite and polish and edit into a somewhat more personal work.

It’s like paint-by-numbers:  Some practitioners will do it far more skillfully that others and have a far more polished looking final work…

…but it’s still paint-by-numbers.

And you’ll never see it in a museum.

You can polish a turd to a bright, brilliant sheen but all you get is a polished turd.

© Buzz Dixon

*  Adult as in grownup, not pornographic, you sick little monkeys…