This year has been a strange one for creative people, and well, not just strange – it’s been disheartening, demoralising, and possibly even heartbreaking. We have seen the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) produced art which has been devastating to people who created visual arts and graphic designs; we have also had AI text generators make every author question what now actually makes their writing of value; and we have had large corporations squeeze us all in so many little ways that any money we are able to gather together as creatives gets squirmed away by website fees, payment fees, advertising fees, and cheap knock-off brands stealing our creative work and selling it for peanuts. It has all made me deeply question what I personally value in life and after thinking long and hard, I’m here to tell you the answer is that I want something real.

AI functions by accessing huge data bases and making summarised outputs. In text that means it’s really great at creating vanilla content. If it’s a topic that has been pumped out a million times by many different writers, it will give fairly good, average looking content that is hard to pick out from those written by actual humans. Ask it to give you five tips for weight loss, or a guide to things to do in your local city, and yeah it will fill a page, but it will be lacking something. Ask it a few questions about something very niche and it will get it wildly wrong. I asked it to tell me about Australian Druidry once (if this is the first time you’ve come across my work, that’s the title of a book I wrote), and what it gave me was absolute nonsense and honestly, a bit offensive.

AI art, similarly, draws on huge caches of data and makes summaries, so that images we have seen a million times like a cat or a sunflower could be common enough that we don’t notice the AI has copied. But when we ask for something very specific or unique, it struggles to come up with a new idea – it can’t – so it almost outright copies the art of the one or two artists it can draw the idea from. Sometimes even down to their signature. This is an ethical nightmare, but I think we are also on the edge of a huge change in what we even think art is.

What is art? What is creativity? What makes writing or art “good”? Can AI create anything truly “good” or is it dependent on a human element? Do we want to be supporting AI as an art creator? What will that mean for the world we live in? How is it going to affect human brains if we longer have art made by humans? There are so many questions swimming around in my head about it all, but I know, deep in my heart, the idea of AI creating art for us makes me feel a bit sick.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think rejecting it outright is the answer. It can be a useful tool, and I don’t want to make the mistake the ancient Druids did of rejecting writing because they valued the memory – yes continue to value the memory, but write stuff down too, silly Druids. Can you imagine? Don’t do that. Let’s work with AI, but also alongside it, let’s question what it means for us. For existence. For art.

For me, it keeps leading me to the real. AI can help us with the vanilla, basic information that most people who write were pretty sick of writing anyway, let’s face it. What we want from humans is personal experience. The dynamic fact. The personalised meaning. I’ll let AI write the article on “Five ways to meditate with crystals” and let the humans write the article “My experience with rainbow obsidian while sitting in a cave”. If AI can do it, I don’t want it. I want to read things that are so specific AI can’t write it. I want human, real, experiential. I want to read my way into another human’s experience. And I don’t ever want AI to be able to do that.

With art, what I want is for the experience to come to me. Interactive art, tactile art. Something in the here and now. Physical art over digitised art. Ritual, music, experience. We have seen this become more important with music, as record sales became less important due to streaming services, many artists have taken to giving huge performances and intimate experiences to their listeners. I wonder if we will see more of this with visual art as well?

What brings them all together is the question of what is real? What do we value? To me, it’s what I can see, hear, feel, taste and smell. It’s the experience of life. It’s proof of humanity. Show me what is real in you and I will see the art of your existence.

What do you think? Are you seeking the real too? I look forward to seeing your thoughts in the comments.