I’ve written about this before – I don’t know where and don’t feel like searching for it – about when working with generative AI that the role of the artist (I don’t like the word “creator” for a variety of reasons here) becomes something like the First Viewer. Or First Reader, or First Listener, or First Whateverer. Discoverer.

If anyone can create something similar with gen AI (which… I’m not really sure is democratizing, so much as it is a flattening & homogenization – to be truly democratizing, I think it would have to honor human uniqueness a great deal more than it does – rather than forcing all outputs into a rather constrained, if sometimes pretty box), then the question becomes almost less about what was created and more about the who and the context of the Act of Discovery. What drove this person there? How did they seek it out? What did they do when they found it? How does sharing it with others change it?

There’s that line in Billy Joel’s ‘Summer, Highland Falls‘ (from the excellent Turnstiles album) that goes:

And I believe there is a time for meditation
In cathedrals of our own

Sometimes sharing our own private world-building with others can be richly rewarding. Other times, it can be like opening up your private mental-emotional life and its secret signs and signifiers to a bunch of strangers with bad intentions and grabby hands. (I’m still wrapping my head around that phrase btw:)

In each case, the sign can be broken into two parts, the signifier and the signified.  The signifier is the thing, item, or code that we ‘read’ – so, a drawing, a word, a photo.  Each signifier has a signified, the idea or meaning being expressed by that signifier.  Only together do they form a sign.  There is often no intrinsic or direct relationship between a signifier and a signified – no signifier-signified system is ‘better’ than another.  Language is flexible, constructed, and changeable.  de Saussure uses the word ‘arbitrariness’ to describe this relationship.

Anyway, there’s a concept in Jungian psychology which has always interested me as an artist: active imagination. In that context it doesn’t mean that your imagination is working too hard. It means like you engage actively through waking states and physical acts (like artwork or journaling) to engage with what is perceived to be the contents of the subconscious mind as represented through dreams, and visions, etc.

There are many different ways of doing that, but the whole thing cleaves very close to how I’ve always used AI. It’s been an exploration of the technologies themselves and their raw limits and capabilities for sure, but as expressions of the parallel deeper explanation of the realms of the self and other as expressed through artwork and storytelling I’ve been working on for decades.

It’s why I don’t care at all about this criticism of “using AI in art makes it not art” or makes it “not yours” because you didn’t “create” it etc. First, I’ve been thinking about this and like Tolkien’s concept of subcreation here, but I won’t get into it because this is already digressive enough and it has to stop somewhere. Second, none of those divisions, categories, and labels even exist in my mind when I get into that flow state and everything is working, and you’re getting the results from the machine that match what you’re after well enough to proceed on to the next part, the next step, the next try. The exploration goes on and on.

To me it’s a deep and extremely creative Act of Listening. You listen for the small voice, you peer through the dark and find the little light, and you keep going. You don’t try to explain it to yourself, though everyone demands you do it for them – if they can even be bothered to care. And why should they? It’s your world, your subcreation, why even take the risk of letting them in? Why not keep it locked up tight and tidy and never let anyone else’s ships sail those inner seas and sully those waters with their unwelcome waste products.

But I think the answer is we have to respect the active-creative process of listening of others as well. And to share deeply is to enrich not just one’s own listening, but that of others as well. Not all are listening, even fewer are whatever whatever. Don’t reduce listening to merely a passive act, and the rest will take care of itself. Seek. Find. Invoke. Create. Repeat.

So for me, whether it has been for bookmaking or musicmaking or other kinds of internet merrymaking, using AI has always been a tool of this emerging brand of active-creative listening, a kind of listening that bears fruit, that invokes a new thing into existence, which has the potential to become a touchpoint not just for oneself but for no one can know how many countless others who too are sitting at home listening, and waiting for their sign.