Why Do You Create? (Or: Why It’s Ok To Admit You’re A Commercial Artist)
Using AI In The New Social Web — A Mini-Series Recap of the Decline of Signals in 2022 and Building for a Bullish 2023
PART 2: Creative commerce, after copyright
Click farming never quickened anyone’s pulse, but it clearly worked well enough to take its share of screen real estate and mindspace in the only web we’ve ever really known.
Thing is, engagement is dead now. A consequence of the decline of signal quality and deliverability. Maybe not predictable enough, but it should have been. All across the old social web, inflated stats and status games have gone down the value drain alongside ad spend, tanking stocks, and influencer reputations.
The decline of signals is one reason engagement is having a recession nostalgia moment. But there is another.
It is in this great expansion brought about by creative synthesis AI, that we can see a parallel reason for both the sharp fall off of meaningful engagement metrics on the social web, and the transformative promise of a way up and out.
The decline side, as usual, is easier to catch first.
The main reason for the drop off is mass confusion over what makes one creative work any more valuable than any other.
As much as many very online artists are uncomfortable with it, what stirs up interest and conflict over creative works is wrapped up entirely in the scarcity of value.
If all we cared about was the emotion a work of art evokes in a viewer, or the write up of a critic’s opinion, we would fill our streets with museums as infinite storehouses for records and monuments to our acclaim saved to the public memory. They’d sprout up as commonly as Blockbuster and Starbucks in the 90’s. In this timeline, everyone would have their 15 minutes at the exact same time, forever.
There is nothing wrong with admitting that the only reason we fight so bitterly over the meaning, usefulness, and limits of copyright is because we’ve never yet come up with a better model to express the value of commercial work.
But copyright is broken in a lightspeed information age, if it ever really delivered.
When the cost to transport a message, an idea, or a creative work of any complexity, around the world in 0.1337 seconds, give or take, is almost free, our ability insists it should be also. That clashes with our desire to be valued, to be seen, and yes, to make money.
No, the “AI Art is theft” argument, following so soon after “NFTs are theft”, is false on its face. Copyright has no useful role to play with how creative synthesis models actually work. Not if you know firsthand how they are trained, and used. And, maybe counterintuitively, the lack of artist “protections” isn’t why your engagement rates are gone and forgotten. (Nevermind the side story question of why only artists in before a certain time would get to be deemed artists, who by, and how exactly proposed model bans would protect anyone.)
No, the cause of this decline is anticipation. Of lemons, and spam.
It is anticipation because as fast as user numbers for Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT have grown, it’s still a very small percentage of web connected humanity that even knows either of these exist. The number that has gone deep enough into the work to realize how laughable the soulless slot machine / push button creativity accusations are is so small still, it’s almost embarrassing.
It’s anticipation of the coming decline that is causing the decline. And this time, what’s seen as coming up ahead is a new online reality where making content so great, is so easy, that we are all flooded with social feeds filled with too much impossibly great eye candy that all looks so much the same that we can’t price anything. We can’t decide anything. It’s all a lemon. Because we can’t tell what’s what. It’s all spam.
And there’s the hint to the upside for those watching closely.
If everyone can do it, it’s not different. What we decide is good continues to change. Markets will always want creative people who can offer a new and different way to communicate what stands out from the rest.
This brings us back to where we started. Why do you create?
There are as many reasons to create as there are people who have ever walked this Earth, or ever will.
A few that are more relevant to us here:
- Create to sell,
- Create to say something,
- Create for its own sake,
- Create to push ahead and change the accepted meaning of what’s possible,
- Create to inspire,
- Create to limit what others can say, think, feel, and do with a legal trap you’ve claimed first,
- Create because we can, because we are free
If you’re like us, you’ve probably felt a mix of these in different times and situations. Only one is not like the others, as common as it is to feel it. If there’s no other model to value yourself and creative works at hand.
The brighter view is that we’re in a lucky time. The tools for AI assisted creativity are free and open source. We can use them to craft a message, to market it, to print, mint, and wear whatever we shape from our imagination. In teams or on our own. We can give creative works new uses, forms, and means of distribution, through virtual worlds and the user owned social web.
We use these tools to discover each other and what we have to say.
It’s that desire for status, to be different, to look different, stand out, make more with the materials we have at hand that drives commerce. Seen for what they are, beyond the noise and speculation, all arguments limiting the spread of art reflect a fear our value will be lost somehow in the process. That we won’t be valued, that our work won’t be valued. That we don’t know how to sell. And sales depend on creativity. It’s all creative commerce.
