Go Make Things

a little rant against AI

Our neighborhood elementary school has a ceramics studio, and for the third spring in a row I have attended open-to-school-families ceramics studio time on Saturday mornings. The space is opened by a parent ceramicist who does demos and troubleshoots builds and fires the kiln, and neighborhood parents + a few kids take to the wheels and table tops to make berry bowls and candle holders and all manner of things. It’s lovely; even when most of my time and attention is spent helping my kids wedge their clay or manage their frustration, this regular extracurricular time has helped turn smile-and-wave acquaintances into new friends. Third spaces, what a gift!

My specialty remains pinch pot critters. The first year I made a few horrible too-small lumpy bowls and a couple of charming slugs with no function beyond delighting me; the second year I made a bunch of garbage and also a bull vessel that I am inordinately proud of. This year I made a bird lantern! When you blow out the candle, the smoke comes out of the mouth! It was really fun to make, and also it is too heavy for its size by quite a lot, the metallic glaze didn’t fire as promised, and the object itself is deeply impractical. It’s imperfect and I love it! This kind of slow progress born of exploration and play is everything I want out of a hobby, you know what I mean? Just look!

Bird lantern glamor shot!

Surprisingly neat little flashlight

Gandalf-worthy smoke tricks + Ilan’s top-hat-wearing-spider-bank lurking behind

Last time I was in the studio I overheard some fellow hobby-ceramicist parents chatting about not knowing what to make, and they joked about asking Claude. They laughed and went on about how they ask Claude about everything, hahaha! So tired, just ask Claude! Because I’m out of the loop it took me a few beats to figure out what they were talking about. Then they got on their phones and asked Claude what they should make out of clay. In this just for fun, just for play, free, no pressure, hobby art time.

It felt like I was on an alien planet I’d read about but kind of thought was theoretical: real people actually do this??? Not to say I’m on an island isolated from the ubiquitous reality of AI usage: plenty of friends mention having asked ChatGPT things I would just google; a close friend is a medical researcher who works with massive data sets, and AI is revolutionizing her approach to her work; my husband, who works in analytics, is reading deeply and widely to try to stay ahead of a curve that might lead to a collapse, or at least dramatic restructuring, of his career. And also...someone I know said that their boss mentioned in a meeting that he used Grok to write a love note for his wife’s birthday card. A parent I know used ChatGPT to write a poem from the Tooth Fairy. Welcome, deep nauseated horror in the pit of my stomach.

I don’t directly engage with the techno-dystopic aspects of what it is to be alive in 2026, but I think about it all the time as an artist and educator, as a parent, and as a person who spends a lot of time thinking about what makes life worth living. Other people (including recently da Pope??) have been more articulate than I care to take time to be about how dehumanizing it is to scoop THINKING or CREATIVE EXPRESSION out of your Self and saying a shitty aggregate average (best case scenario!) is just as good. I’m sure you’ve read just as many articles, or at least headlines, about AI psychosis and the antisocial effects of intense chatbot engagement. I’m generally a warmly nonjudgmental person, delighted by the many ways there are of being a person, but this stuff makes me feel like a Tim Robinson character yelling about how stupid it all is. Grok can’t tell your wife how much you love her! Claude can’t replace the perfect creative combustion engine of boredom and play! What are we DOING here!!! I deeply resent this moment in history that I and my community of artists are wasting our time engaging with these tech bro idiots and all of their acolytes in their profound misunderstanding of art and creativity and intelligence and what makes being alive meaningful. What a waste of my/our time.

And also: I feel so grateful and privileged that my work doesn’t have anything to do with all this garbage. I’ve joked with Tom that working on paper every day is a psychological bunker for aaaaaall the 2026 darkness. (Not to say I’m unaffected: I used to have a steady trickle of okay-to-great freelance illustration jobs landing in my inbox from word of mouth and repeat clients, and those have all dried up, a likely combination of nowhere having art budgets + continued publishing collapse + AI image gen). What I mean is, unlike many friends, I don’t have a day job with a CEO announcing a new strategy that demands I spend a certain percentage of my week using whatever new AI platform they bought into. I don’t HAVE to engage. I feel very lucky that my daily work and my life’s work are both in the physical world: caring for my children, encouraging my students to read more broadly and dig in deeper, feeding kitchen scraps to my bin of worms and watering my seedlings, sauteing onions, tuning up all the bikes, and spending as many hours a day as I can, now that the teaching semester is over, trying to make this book a reality. Sometimes that means keeping up a steady marks-on-paper-per-hour rate, but not always. In case the work of creative work is opaque to you, this is how I spent a day last week. So:

There is an important two page sequence that I have known from early drafts wasn’t quite working. The job of these pages is to shift from one understanding of what is happening in the whole chapter into a bigger/slightly sideways understanding. I’ve been putting these pages off because I’ve been intimidated, and I finally felt ready to face them. I penciled the pages as I had them thumbnailed out, because sometimes the idea is solid and I just need to see it executed to understand how the pages function, but it still didn’t work. So I rearranged the order--what if I put page 2 before page 1?---re-read the whole chapter with them rearranged, realized that it was much better but needed some nudging to now make linear narrative sense in this new sequence. After making those adjustments I ate lunch, came back, re-read it with this new order, and goddamnit it still didn’t work. Maybe what it needed was to happen faster: could I compress it all to one page? It could work without page 2 if I added just a little more text for context, to smooth over this shift. I adjusted the pencils again. I took a break to look at the garden, stretch, and return to look at it with fresh eyes. My standard is that each page needs to feel inevitable, and it just didn’t: this important sequence still felt forced. GODDAMNIT. I re-read the whole chapter, got to this now-one-page sequence, and it really did need the other page for pacing. I added it back into the flow, and it turns out this original order worked better with the tiny adjustments I’d been making along the way. Then my alarm went off to go pick up the kids: pencils down, lights off, the work day is done.

It was a long, productive day of creative work that ended up with almost 0 visible progress or change. It was a long, productive day of creative work that will result in a much better book.

My take on AI and art is now and will always be annoyed dismissal. Frankly, it isn’t my problem and it isn’t anywhere near my turf. It can never do what I can do. It can never do what my kids could do when they first picked up a marker to try to represent something they saw or felt on paper, because those marks were is an inherently personal process of individual perception and processing. Could I have created a prompt about the narrative challenge I was facing into an AI chat bot, feed it a list of personal literary and poetic and comic references, feed it my whole body of work, and ask it to give me 20 variants? Sure. And what a self-destructive nightmare thing to do, to dilute my own understanding of what I’m trying to say, to take out the emotional processing, to steal from my own self the often painful working-through-it process that has the potential to lead to huge new understandings and creative breakthroughs.

The process is the art. The output is just a relic that everyone else gets to see.

The more art I make, the more students I mentor, the more friends I see fight through the messy process of turning an idea into an extant thing, the more it feels like every art object, every book, every movie, every too-heavy clay bird lantern, is a miracle. Instead of doing nothing--which is so easy!--and instead of doing all the other labors of life and care--which are so time consuming!--we made something. A little notch in the bed post of life. Today I made a page. Today I made up silly songs on the walk home from the park and made my daughter laugh. Today I made a small pile of collaborative drawings of animals playing instruments with my kids. Today I made some pretty boring tacos. I was here, today. I made something.

I can’t believe that people are so willing to give that away.

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Related: Jeffrey Brown made a truly wonderful little instagram comic about this that J. T. Yost is kickstarting into minicomics and prints. Check it out: Climb Every Mountain

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