What to Use to Make Your Art

On A.I., wasting your time, and non-process process

If you’re in Portland, OR I’ll be in conversation with

Genevieve Hudson

on July 12 about my latest novel. Hope to see you there!

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Hi friends.

The best thing I read this week was this fascinating short piece in The New Yorker by my smart friend Kyle Chayka: “A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts.” From the article:

In an experiment last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups and asked to write SAT-style essays in response to broad prompts such as “Must our achievements benefit others in order to make us truly happy?” One group was asked to rely on only their own brains to write the essays. A second was given access to Google Search to look up relevant information. The third was allowed to use ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence large language model (L.L.M.) that can generate full passages or essays in response to user queries.

All students wore headsets embedded with electrodes to measure their brain activity. The results were grim. The tests on those who used ChatGPT showed, generally, that they were using their brain less, being less creative, making less connections between different parts of their brain, and remembering less of what was produced. Another key result is that many of their responses ending up converging on the same ideas and using the same words.

She continued, “Average everything everywhere all at once—that’s kind of what we’re looking at here.”

The idea of being average—accepting average for myself and my work—makes me shudder.

Sometimes I read the news and everything seems so terrible, and there seems a futility to making an effort in terms of doing the right thing. But I never think to myself: Why bother writing my own words when A.I. is taking over so many things in our world? Like I could just dump a bunch of ideas into a chat window and type, “write this like Jami Attenberg,” and then get something readable out of it. Why not just check out for a while, make my life easier?

I never think that because it would be removing something pleasurable from my existence—the chance to write my own work. It would also be rejecting a stabilizing force in my life. Also it’s CHEATING. And, finally, it’s just a waste of my precious of time to bother with making anything less than original.

I’ll repeat that: It is a waste of time in this life to make anything less than original.

OK, I’ll finish with this. Yesterday in my journal I wrote this as a reminder to myself:

It’s OK to sit still and stare off into space and think. It’s OK to be in your head. It’s part of the process. It’s not always pen to paper. Sometimes it’s daydreaming, sometimes it’s reading, sometimes it’s morning stretches so you can stay strong, walk a little taller, stay alive a little bit longer.

I don’t know why I’m ending on this note except maybe that I just want you to think for a second about the value of your unique experiences and how that translates to creating your own work. Your life, your voice, your wisdom, your gaze, your daydreams, your morning stretches, all the things that make you utterly you.

Use that to make your art.

Sending love,

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.