Should AI be used in art? (Yes)

Technology always expands art, even if it upsets some people first. Let's take both a historical and first principles (mathematical) view of writing fiction with AI.

My wife and I just launched our new writing community for aspiring sci-fi/fantasy authors, called Literary Launchpad. This is our love, our passion, and how we found each other. I had a friend recently ask me “Dave, you know all about AI, and, well, it seems like writing is the first thing that generative AI is going to destroy.”

The unspoken question was this: why stake my livelihood on writing at all?

The short answer is this: because technology has never destroyed art.

The longer answer is because I believe the market for aspiring writers will expand greatly due to the rise of the meaning economy.

Dall-e did its best. Bless it’s little machine heart.

Demand for Art is Growing

I’m a numbers guy. I like first principles. So, rather than give you an infodump for each sector, let’s just take it rapid-fire style:

1. Broadway revenue has increased dramatically over the last 25 years. Why? The meaning economy has already started, and the demand for authenticity is increasing. Note: Demand is both in real terms, such as consumer dollars as well as cultural/psychological demand. Based on the data, gross revenue grew from $0.2M to $1.8M since the early 1980’s.

2. Online photography courses have a CAGR of almost 8%. That’s a huge growth market! But why? Is it because millions more people dream of becoming world class NatGeo photographers? No, not really. But millions more people do want to learn a new art and pursue their dreams and develop new skills.

3. I just signed up for a course on mastering the handpan, along with 25,000 others. I picked this course because it’s taught in part by Malte Marten, who has a ton of beautiful videos on YouTube and I said “Yes! I want to play like him!” I have no dreams or aspirations of making money like Malte, or ever with the handpan, but I do want to be able to play beautiful music.

My hypothesis about the meaning economy seems to be somewhat accurate.

Tech Doesn’t Destroy Art

When portrait photography first became a thing, portrait painters poo-pooed it and called it a low form of art, a commercialization of their art form. After all, it was infinitely faster and cheaper, but it lacked the color and the human touch of real human painters. (Sound familiar already?)

But, over time, photography became it’s own art form. Did painting go anywhere? No, there are plenty of painters in the world, producing plenty of canvasses. There are roughly 2.5 million artists in America alone, and the fine art industry is expected to grow with a CAGR of over 10% for the next decade. Paintings still constitute 70% of the inventory cleared by auction houses.

But what about Midjourney and Dall-e? Aren’t those destroying art? No more than digital art or photography destroyed paintings.

AI art generators are just the next camera. If the photograph didn’t destroy paintings, then neither will AI. Just as digital art was considered a “low art” by “serious artists” for the last several decades, now AI art will be considered “lowest on the pecking order” for a while.

Cinema didn’t destroy theater.

Spotify didn’t destroy concerts.

Photography didn’t destroy paintings.

AI won’t destroy art.

Disability and Privilege

One angle that I rarely seen discussed is that of disability and privilege, which I get an inside view on from my communities. Many members of my communities have struggled in some form or other in their life. Many dreamed of producing art, anime, or music throughout their life, but they never had the spare time or resources to learn. Animation is a grueling process, and making music requires a tremendous investment in both time and money.

However, AI tools like Midjourney and Runway and Suno have enabled my fans to live their dreams and bring their visions to life. Are they going to compete with Disney or Studio Ghibli? Absolutely not, but that doesn’t make their individual artist journeys any less valuable or meaningful to them.

Not every YouTube creator (*raises hand*) can afford editors or artists or high production value. But guess what? Tools like Midjourney raise the floor of my production dramatically, from thumbnails to illustrations in my slide decks. It’s just another tool in a creator’s hand.

Up until now, engaging in fine art (or art in general) has generally required either a lot of privilege or a lot of sacrifice. For anyone concerned with human meaning, the proliferation of art and the expansion of participation in the arts (even by AI, which is just another tool) is a good thing.

Consider the cost of translation. Maybe some of the best storytellers out there don’t speak English and can’t afford a professional translator? Or editors. I’m about to spend another $3,000 on getting my sequel novel edited just because I love this art. This is a negative ROI for me, I’ve spent far more on my novel than I’m probably ever going to make, and I’m going out of my way to spend huge amounts on a human editor even though AI can hypothetically serve the same purpose. More on that later, and why I don’t think AI will ever replace the je n'sais quoi of human feedback. (Believe me, I’ve tried, and even though context windows are more than large enough to consume entire novels, the feedback is just… suboptimal)

With that being said, I would never begrudge any of my fans for resorting to getting developmental feedback from AI if they can’t afford an editor.

Astronomical Numbers

Even if AI gets “better than humans” at writing novels, your novel will still be totally unique. I asked ChatGPT with o1-preview to estimate how many unique novels there could be with a word count of just 50,000. Do you know what it came up with? One of the largest numbers I’ve ever seen.

ChatGPT estimates that there are around 10^100,000 possible novels of 50,000 words. That’s 1 followed by one hundred thousand zeroes. Like I said, I’m a first principles kind of guy. I like numbers.

Check out it’s work below:

10^100,000, give or take a few orders of magnitude.

Even ChatGPT was kind of blown away by this number.

This number is astronomically large, far exceeding the number of atoms in the observable universe (which is estimated to be around 10^80).

This illustrates the virtually limitless creative possibilities when writing a novel, even when constrained to meaningful and realistic word combinations.

Statistically speaking, humanity will never write every possible novel. There are functionally infinite possible stories to tell! Do you know how freaking cool that is to realize???

I don’t care how good AI gets. It’s already better than me at writing prose, so sometimes it just helps me tell my story better. But it’s still my story.

What is it good for?

Developmental Feedback

I mentioned earlier that AI doesn’t really provide good developmental feedback. As prompt engineer and finetuning expert, I know how these models think, inside and out, and I still can’t coax great feedback from them. Instead, I can feed them an entire manuscript (which was not possible even a year or so ago!) and then we can spitball.

Spitballing with AI is actually one of the best usecases. Rather than handing my manuscript to a beta reader or editor, who will take days or weeks to go over it, and then provide feedback in the form of a few notes and maybe some conversation, the AI is ready to go instantly. Faster and cheaper, if not better.

“What are some ideas you have to make this character’s arc more interesting?”

This is the key thing: don’t ask it yes or no questions, or to make judgments like “Is this good?” That sort of thing isn’t what these models are good for. They are better at qualitative and open-ended stuff. Here are some examples of questions that I DO ask AI when working on a manuscript.

• Can you tell me what’s good and not so great about this character’s arc?

• Brainstorm some ways I can improve this scene.

• Provide some suggestions for developmental or structural changes (Claude doesn’t seem to understand what this means and requires some explanation)

It still takes some cajoling and explanation, perhaps because this task is so far outside the chatbot’s training distribution. It also clearly just does not have any intuition for the emotional impact that stories have, so it completely misses the gravity of certain events and character arcs.

If I hadn’t gone through 17 drafts of my first novel, as well as two rounds with editors, I simply wouldn’t know enough about developmental editing to even ask the AI the right questions.

Using AI for developmental feedback would take… a lot of time to unpack so I’m not even going to try here.

Where it shines: Copyediting Prose

I will admit: I use AI (just like a lot of people) to fill up blank pages. As they say in the writing world: you can’t edit a blank page. In other words, AI is great for barfing out rough drafts. I know that every work is going to take many rounds of editing and revisions, a lot of sculpting and massage and reflection.

To show you what I mean, here’s an example. I’ve been working on a Cyberpunk 2077 fanfic (don’t judge, many writers get started on fanfics).

My process goes something like this: brainstorm the plot and outline with AI, manually fix it, then blitz through a rough draft just to get something on the page. Below is the fourth draft of this story:

The “Comment” feature on MS Word and Google Docs is invaluable. It allows you to take notes as you go!

Here’s what I did: I copied the whole first chapter into Claude and gave it a bit of context:

Claude really went off the rails, as I said, it really kinda sucks at developmental changes. In this case, it randomly opened with an attack from outsiders, completely ignoring most of my instructions.

Claud still has a hard time following instructions and frequently goes bonkers with word count. If you ask it to increase length by “25%” it’s liable to quadruple the length. Again, these tasks seem like they are so far outside the training distribution that Claude really has no idea what it’s doing. It takes a lot of patience sometimes, but every now and then, with practice, you can get into a groove.

Below is an example of giving it very surgical instructions and it actually working:

Sometimes Claude really just gets it right. Here’s an example, and why I say that it really shines at editing prose.

Closing Thoughts

Why isn’t AI a threat to authors or editors? It will never have vision. It will never have the human experience and the subjective phenomenon of a story burning in your soul, trying to claw its way out of you.

There are functionally infinite stories to be told, and even given the same exact plot beats, character arcs, and themes, ten writers will give you ten entirely different stories. AI will only accelerate the telling of more great stories.

My wife and I just launched our writing community, Literary Launchpad, and so I have a special offer for all my Substack subscribers. At the time of writing, we’re at 80 members and we have a special founder-member deal of just $1 per month, but that offer closes once we hit 100 members! Then it goes up to $5 for the next hundred members, and then on up to $15 per month!

Check it out here: https://www.skool.com/literary-launchpad/about

Here’s our landing page. Or launch page?

Our goal is to become the premier speculative fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, etc) community on the internet, covering the entire art and business of writing. Whether you’re an aspiring writer who never knew where to begin or a semi-pro looking to break into the pro markets, we’ve got you covered. Not only do my wife and I have years of experience in the art of writing, we also bring our very different perspectives on the pathways to getting publishes. She’s gone the traditional route, and I’ve gone self-pub.

• Sci-fi

• Fantasy

• Horror

• Magical realism, and more

Then, whatever format you prefer, poetry, flash fiction, short stories, novellas, screenplays, comics, or novels - we’re here to help!

There’s so much to learn about the art and business of writing. We have a lot to teach and we’re just getting started building out our classes!