I just listened to author Brandon Sanderson speak about AI and art for twenty minutes, and I have notes.

Look, I think Brando Sando is a great guy. I don’t know him personally, but at least everything I do know about him is positive. He’s incredible successful, has legions of fans, and he either has a strong mind for business or knows how to delegate like a mofo. Honestly, if you want insight into where the industry is going, Brandon is constantly pioneering the ways forward. 

But unfortunately this recent keynote speech was really just a lot of anti-AI circle jerking. Here it is if you’d like to watch it before we get into this:

First off, I want to clarify that Brandon Sanderson is in a precarious position regarding AI. We can’t be sure anything he says about it is his honest opinion.

There are two reasons:

1. He’s smart, and he knows damn well that if he takes any position other than “AI bad”, public opinion will destroy him. Not because the loudest voices are correct, but simply because they’re…well…loud. 
2. He has something personal at stake, and it’s not art. It’s his career. Brandon Sanderson didn’t build his fame on being a great writer. He built it on being a prolific writer. He writes a lot, and even most of his fans will admit that the quality of his prose isn’t his strength. With that in mind, he’s the most at risk of being replaced by AI, because the one thing it’s already capable of doing is writing mediocre work quickly. In other words, AI is a direct threat to Brandon’s position in the market.
   

So, yes. I believe it’s safe to say that Brandon Sanderson has no choice but to take a personal and guarded position on AI rather than an objective or rational one.

Moving on to the video…

He spends the first half of the keynote basically saying everything I’ve said before. Photography didn’t eliminate painting. Movies didn’t kill the stage play. He actually makes so many good points that allow a person to see AI objectively — as a tool — rather than emotionally as some kind of existential threat that I briefly wondered if he’d been reading my angry rants on the subject. (lol)

I was on board — then he screws it all up… 

See, he tells all these stories about times in the past when people flipped out about technology ruining art and were proven wrong with time — and then crumbles his entire narrative by saying that AI is different. 

Holy cow. Brandon is a storyteller, so I feel like he should know that the reason we tell these stories, the reason they matter, is because we can look at them and learn. We can see that this has all happened before and it’s going to work out, and we can generally anticipate how from that corpus of stories. 

The stories are there to show us patterns and give us something other than blind guesswork to extrapolate from. We evolved a strong link to stories because we use them to learn.

We do NOT tell stories so we can look at them and say, “this exact thing happened fifty other times over the last hundred years, but this time it’s different because of my personal feelings.”

And that’s exactly what he did.

Sanderson ended up in a completely broken analogy wherein he compared AI as it stands now with Data from Star Trek: TNG. Everything he said after that falls down. 

This is because AI is not an entity or a being. It’s a tool. A human has to use it. It can’t “appreciate what it has created”, sure, but neither can a Sony A9 camera or Adobe Illustrator. In an effort to make the AI an enemy, he’s given it some sort of agency that it doesn’t have, and then he claims that its agency is falsely earned? I guess?

He also tells us that Artificial Intelligence is only concerned about the product. Well, so is a camera. So is Photoshop and so is a pencil. Again, these are all tools. You don’t expect your paintbrush to have some in-born passion about what you — the user — are painting, so why the hell would AI?

The truth of the matter is that the second half of this keynote was really just meaningless nonsense about AI that only works if you deliberately try to think of AI as a person. Which I guess is something that only AI haters do, because no one who knows anything about tech does in the slightest. We think about it like any type of software.

Some people can replace an accountant with TurboTax, or Rand McNally with GPS. It’s like that. In other words, it does what software has been doing since the freakin’ 1980s. 

AI can’t produce art — on that we pretty much all agree…

But neither can any of the thousands of other tools we use to create things. That’s just the nature of tools. Should we crap on hammers because they can’t build a house? Is Google Docs garbage because it doesn’t appreciate what I’m typing into it? Why are we still debating this? AI is not a creature with a mind and will. Sorry, but the comparison to Data is simply wrong, if not outright disingenuous. 

I’m not writing this just to bag on Brandon’s opinion, especially since I know what he said might not even be his opinion but a necessary virtue signal. What I really want to do is turn everyone’s attention away from this horribly misunderstood, oversimplified, and overemotional “AI good or bad” topic toward something that actually matters. 

You see, we’re attacking the wrong enemy here…

People scream about how AI produces shoddy work that’s not really art, but they’re failing to see what’s coming out of the mass entertainment old guard right now. Yeah. Slop. Shoddy work that’s about as far from art as you can get. Hollywood, streaming services, and big publishing houses are dumping a ton of garbage in front of us and it has nothing to do with AI.

Why does that matter? Because I firmly believe that what’s going to save us from this hell of bad books, movies, games, and shows is independent creators. Indie game devs, indie authors, indie film studios. We don’t have corporate masters and meaningless metrics to answer to. We can explore ideologies and moralities that aren’t officially sanctioned by whoever’s cutting the checks. 

Indies are already stepping up in force and showing the world that big names don’t mean shit any more because the bar for quality has been lowered so deep that you need a shovel to find it. Three years ago, I was pissed off at how ideologically gatekept the publishing industry has become — and now you couldn’t pay me enough to dip a toe in that pool of slime. I used to dream of having one of my stories adapted into a AAA game, and now I’d be genuinely terrified if 99% of AAA studios showed interest. 

If we want anything done right in this current entertainment black hole, we really have to do it ourselves. And we have to do it without becoming beholden to anyone who wants to shove their ideological agendas onto our work.

Toward that end, I propose that any tool which allows an indie creator or group of indie creatives to get their superior work to the masses is a good tool. If that means if an author who has a better story to tell than all the hack writers in Hollywood needs to use AI to finish it, edit it, or put a cover on it, so be it. The net gain is that the better work, the superior human output, is allowed into the world. To hell with what tool they used to get there.

I’ve said this before, but AI is only a force multiplier right now. It can’t make you a better creative than you are. It’s also not a being. It’s not a force that can just produce a novel of worth at the push of a button, no more than throwing a camera against a wall guarantees that you’re going to end up with an award-winning photograph.

It could very well be a weapon that we can all use in the war against the corruption and enshitification of media. But before that can happen, people have to understand it. They have to let go of their purely emotional reactions to what they think AI is and take the time to learn what it really is.

Perhaps most importantly, they have to keep in mind that people like Brandon Sanderson (and anyone in Hollywood) have more loyalty to their own best interests than to “art”, so we must always take what they say with a grain of salt.