In defence of bad art

Every so often some dipshit writes an essay about how artists need to embrace AI. I'm not linking to this week's, I'm not linking to any of them, because they're all trash for losers, but I am going to respond to one of the common arguments that has always made me furious.

The first time I heard it was actually from a human friend – he's a coder, he was into ChatGPT, this was when it first appeared, I do not know if he still is because I don't bring it up with him. I generally like to have a nice time when I see my friends, instead of getting mad.

The argument is this: a vast amount of human created art and entertainment is terrible, so why shouldn't we be ok with AI generated slop?

Look, I am extremely judgemental about art and entertainment. I hate it when things are bad, man. Books, films, tv shows, plays, music, painting and sculpture (to the extent that I know anything about painting and sculpture).

I think it's good to be discerning, actually, and I think audiences do deserve better than a lot of the stuff they're expected to accept. I am frequently annoyed by shit movies being raved about – I realise taste is subjective but honestly sometimes everyone is just wrong! The thing is bad!

(I don't enjoy this about myself, it's a bummer being the only person on the girls night out who thinks Mamma Mia! sucks, but it sucks! I love musicals and I want them to be good instead of bad! Sorry if that makes me a killjoy, I'll just sit here alone on my hill of correct opinions.)

But for the sake of argument, let's assume all those making this argument are talking about bad art that's less subjective. However correct my opinion of Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again might be, they made a collective billion dollars at the box office, and are beloved by multiple people I know! People I respect, even.

Let's assume also that we're not talking about failed art. We're not talking about something like The Room, for example, where one guy who had no idea how to make a film made one anyway. He tried his hardest and the film at the end is terrible. People are always going to try their hardest at something because for no reason other than that they want to, and most of them are going to do a bad job.

We can leave them alone.

I think, for the most part, when people say that AI slop is no worse than loads of human made stuff, they are largely talking about mass produced commercial entertainment. Scyfy movies like Toxic Shark (2017), for example, or Mills & Boon books.

A lot of the time when someone's dismissive of these areas of art and entertainment you know that they haven't really engaged with it at all. They assume they're all the same – and they assume they're all made in the same way: churned out at pace to satisfy what they imagine is an audience willing to lap up whatever shit they're given.

And there are, of course, people behind that work that see the audience that way as well. Executives who want to make money off a genre they don't understand or respect and who therefore don't see the point in spending proper time or care or money to make it. The kinds of people who might be inclined to think that paying writers is pointless if an AI can do the job.

Now obviously I personally believe that everything is worth making is worth taking time over, and I would much rather all the trashy disaster movies and romance novels were given the budgets they need to do that. But even if that happens, loads of them will still be dogshit.

And that's good. That's the how it works. That's the creative ecosystem.

Most things are bad! The way you get plenty of good things – as an individual artists and as an industry – is by making lots of things! Sometimes the bad things never see the light of day, sometimes the bad things are released, but either way, they matter. The fact that they're created by humans matters.

There are practical reasons for this, naturally. For example, it's important for artists to get paid so they can keep making art. Also any work on your craft improves your craft – we only get good artists by letting people make lots of bad shit.

But the less tangible, less practical reason is that human made art that is bad had inherent value simply because it is human made art. And I mean that, even when I'm bitching about how we all deserve better than Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, which I turned off after half an hour the other day because it's dogshit.

All art, all entertainment is part of an ancient, endless conversation about what it means to be alive; from cave art to Homer to Danielle Steel to Mark Atkins, writer director of Empire of the Sharks (2017).

Whether an LLM can write Hamlet, whether an endless room of monkeys could write Hamlet is as relevant a question as whether an LLM can write Supercroc, which is to say it's irrelevant.

It's not that if a Monkey wrote Hamlet, that Hamlet wouldn't have some value. More value than Supercroc, maybe. But it loses one of it's most important aspects – that it allows us to feel our own humanity reflected back at us by someone who's been dead for half a century – and gets nothing in return.

The question of the quality of a particular work, it's artistic value or commercial importance, has its place, but it's not here. Bad art is important and it's important that it's made by people.

We can't give it up to the machines.