Taking a stand against LLMs in the arts (it’s what Conan would do)

“In a system where men are protected by hired forces, and waited on by machines, how can any real self-confidence and self-reliance be induced, or long-sustained?”

--Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard, a champion of hard labor and an admirer of the physical, hated machine-work. He believed the fate of the men who worked on machinery was to become machines themselves: 

“Standardization is crushing the heart and soul, the blood and the guts, out of humanity and the eventual result will be either complete and unrelieved slavery or the destruction of civilization and return to barbarism. Once men sang the praises of ephemeral gods carved out of ivory and wood. Now they sing equally senseless praises to equally ephemeral and vain gods of Science and Commerce and Progress. Hell.”

--Letter from Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, Oct. 1931

Howard was right; vain gods are here, and vain men and women are using them to create the soulless simulacra of art. “Creators” (I will not use the term authors or artists) surrender their craft, and their soul, to the machine. They prompt large language models to produce aggregated content and then put their name on it. 

I’ve decided I really do hate this shit. And to take a stand against it. 

Author Paul Kingsnorth recently declared a Writers Against AI Campaign. Consider this my digital signature on the manifesto.

AI in the arts* is an outrage because it diminishes that which makes us human through the insidious forces of aggregation, standardization, and the elimination of ingenuity and effort.

Art is the result of effort and skill, talent, and commitment to craft. It isn’t easy, and it shouldn’t be. Hard work is the point. Learning a craft is the point. These make you a better person. Which is what art does: It elevates the artist, and we participate in it, as people. We want to see people succeed, and enjoy the output of people, not machine simulacra. 

A sincere question for the AI enthusiasts.

Do you enjoy football, or boxing? The Olympic games? Do you admire people who transform their bodies on the bodybuilding stage, or who go to boot camp to pass through the fire and become better versions of themselves?

If so, why not surrender all of this to machines, too? After all, robots are faster, and stronger. Not subject to injuries, gridlocked contract negotiations, illness, aging.

When you celebrate AI art, you are celebrating a machine, not a person.

Most of us want to see people on the stage. We admire the human spirit, in all its frailty and limitation. We cheer when it rises above, agonize when it fails. And cheer again when we see someone pick themselves up from the dirt, out of the ashes of defeat, and try again. There is nobility in this.

Art is no different. 

Bringing true art into the world must remain hard work, because that is the point. You’re working for yourself, not letting the machine do it for you. Start using LLMs and you become dependent on them, and ultimately a slave.

Howard read everything he could. He experienced rejection. He rewrote drafts. He experimented in different genres and created new ones. He created fabulous worlds and titanically heroic characters while working in the most banal and arid landscape imaginable.

His poetry and fire came from within, his great passions and outrages and loves, hammered out on a steel typewriter.* And despite occasional bouts of self-loathing, he was damned proud of it. 

Howard would be outraged by our willing surrender to the machine. We know this because he said so, again and again.

“I look back with envy at the greater freedom known by my ancestors on the frontier. Hard work? Certainly they worked hard. But they were building something; making the most of opportunities; working for themselves, not merely cogs grinding in a soulless machine, as is the modern working man, whose life is a constant round of barren toil infinitely more monotonous and crushing than the toil on the frontier.”

--Letter from Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, Jan. 1934

Art is uniquely human and must be kept that way. We go to Robert E. Howard Days, and visit his home, and attend panels, to honor the man. Are going to go to OpenAI Days, or Anthropic Days? To honor CEOs who fully admit that these machines have a nonzero chance of destroying humanity? Whose companies deliberately stole authors’ copyrighted works, ingested them illegally and without permission, and now sells them back to customers for monthly subscription fees? And whose products now choke the internet with artificial slop?

I reject this future. 

What would Conan do? He’d smash the metal motherfuckers to junk.

Choose your side.

I know where I stand. I am a Writer Against AI.

*I believe LLMs have valid applications, just not in the arts. Shove your “luddite” claims up your ass.

**Yes, a machine, but one that sits dumb and inert. Each letter must be pressed into paper by force of will, generated by a human brain.