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Notes -
Gotta close the gestalt at least.
Artemiy Lebedev, the self-appointed Graphic Design Guru of Russia, has a famous note in his «Kovodstvo» (... «'Idance») blog: Idea worth negative million bucks. It's all very fair and clever and biting, it's only a shame Artemiy would've been a nobody without his illustrious mother, and his contribution to Russian design is probably measured in negative billions.
Regardless, I understand the contempt that doers feel for idea guys (and ChatGPT shows just how commodified random combinations of premises can be made). It's the same sort of contempt artists on 4chan feel for «prompteurs». Prompts can be auto-generated ad nauseam by a shell script, Greg Rutkowsky had to polish his craft for decades.
Mayakovsky was, presumably, like Rutkowsky. He wrote:
I don't like Mayakovsky or what he moved people towards.
I'm an idea guy. Ideas are like stick figures. But not all stick figures are created equal. One will never become as good an artist as Murata, and it's possible, likely even, that Murata believes himself to be a greater mangaka on the account of his ability to make technical artistic choices; he's wrong and it's a tragedy that One has to compromise with him in producing an artistically competent work. Frankly, One's time was wasted on learning to draw. It'd be proper for him to stick to his figures, and let someone like Oh!Great experiment with styles, to then use their finished forms at his discretion. This is one aspect of AI's promise for human creativity – distilling forms of talent, to recombine them without crippling compromise.
In any case, defining the inherent worth of artistic work through choices made feels odd.
For me it's not a matter of choices. There are instrumental choices made along the way, but mostly just mechanical effort towards crystallizing the idea into its finished shape, reverse-diffusing it from noise towards a predestined output – If I were to abuse this metaphor again. Suppose my fingers are cut off and I have to type with my tongue, or use some BCI with 15 characters per minute; that'd be the end of my participation here – just not worth the time; and moreover, it'd probably be impossible to finish any meaningful piece while the idea is alive and breathing (this post was not finished in time, and so it'll never be 1/5th as decent or 1/3rd as responsive to you as it should've been). It's a fragile thing – a true (pardon my hubris) idea; it's far more than a random seed. It's chosen near-instantaneously from an infinite murky space of triviality, grasped, and the ability to see its glitter is what matters; while this ability is perhaps developed and polished in some relation to iterative effort dedicated to implementation, it has a dimension that lies outside the entire artistic craft and has more to do – with some talent, of course, but more interestingly with unique human experience, that inner achievement which shitty Twitter illustrators purport to convey but probably lack; unlike artists whose fame they hide behind. Rubén David González Gallego has cerebral palsy. He has proven one can be a compelling writer in even worse circumstances than my hypothetical; I can't help but wonder how much more he'd have given the world without his handicaps. Quantitatively and qualitatively more – for the same reason of the impermanence of inspirations. And contrariwise, were it possible to diffuse faster, typing or rather altering the text – or other canvas – at the equivalent of 1000 char/minute globally, improving the work in its every point as the brain sees fit and as an algorithm can do – hoo boy, how some idea guys would shine.
Or not.
We are ankle-deep in the sea of generated creativity, both technical and ideational – watching the tsunami wave as it crashes down. I hope that when it recedes, the survivors will discover some jewels in the wreckage, something essentially solid and irreducible to combinatorial glass bead game guided by random seeds. Some true ideas. It's in our interest that they remain human-made.
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