When is AI the Painting and when is AI the Paintbrush?

I made my son an animated coloring book this past weekend. Or rather, I made an engine where I can upload html files so that he has animated coloring books on his iPad. If he wants to color a dolphin as it swims through the water, he can either try to chase it with his crayon, which is fun, or he can tap it with a magical glass wand that will temporarily stop it and open all the frames of its animation. It also talks to him about whatever it is that he’s coloring, pops up different words from his AAC device to teach him language, and a half a dozen other things.

So far, he can color chickens, chicks, roosters, crickets, flies, dolphins, squid, and dare I risk the wrath of Bentham’s Bulldog, shrimp. Their eyes move to follow his finger as he draws on them which is extremely creepy and an example of me going way too far. It’s been a smash hit in our household.

If I had been sitting down to do this work continuously with Claude, rather than pulling my phone out of my pocket to prompt while chasing my children around the house, it probably would have taken something like three hours. I didn’t put more than five minutes of effort into it at a time. If I had been trying to do this in the world before vibe-coding, it just wouldn’t exist.

So… do I get to be proud of it? Even though it’s vibe-coded? Even though Opus did all the actual implementation?

The Pure Stuff: Deep, Beautiful Authentic Human Art

Let’s first set a contrast. Work produced by human minds without any machine assistance at all. Things everyone can acknowledge as art. Works which also, by pure chance, happen to be made by Mormons.

As a person of slavic descent, I know it’s usually a mistake for me to go on camera. No one can look at my protruding brow or my eyes, haunted as they are by ancestral trauma from the Ottoman Empire, and say I have a future as a live streamer. But when DJ Butler launched a kickstarter I wanted to raise a signal because he’s a genuinely talented writer and good human being so I broke my own rule. Check out my interview with him in the previous post if you haven’t. If you’ve read Witchy Eye, which I do heartily recommend, you can tell this is a story that this one particular guy has been kicking around in his head for his entire life. There’s all these little details that could only have been shaped by one individual person chasing their one particular set of curiosities across their entire life. It’s got the thumbprints of a different mind all over it. I don’t know a damn thing about weird German folk magic nor would I have ever thought to look into it. This is the deep stuff that lets you experience the soul of another human being, where you can jump from “I think, therefore I am” to “WTF? Therefore you exist.”

Proper art pulls you out of yourself and helps you see that you’re part of something bigger, regardless of what direction it pulls you in.

I could spend endless days analyzing the lyrics to “An American Dream” by Brandon Flowers but I have no desire to do so. I want to sit there and feel what he means when he talks about finding pornography by a creosote bush, jumping off a dam, and meeting Elvis. There’s something real and pure here, and it’s a balm to my soul after twelve hours of back to back conference calls and arguments about system architectures. I want to bask in the surprise I felt when I realized that the Killers were not British and actually a Mormon Rock group the entire time. Or that Brandon Flowers has been this incredibly talented lyricist for my entire life and I just hadn’t known it.

There are all kinds of formulas and rules to write stories or songs, but my favorites of late are all shaped by the feeling of organic discovery. Things that should absolutely not work or be ludicrous if compressed into a summary, except that someone did the agonizingly slow work of feeling their way along the edges of their own soul, wandering around in the utter dark, and bringing back some found object that simply relates something about being a human being in a way that works. My favorite example of this is the Easter Egg in Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series. The idea of a cybernetic egg at the end of time getting ready to hatch Jesus should be the dumbest thing ever, but it’s not! I think this is the way we will increasingly prefer art to be created as slop becomes every cheaper and ever more present, and we’ll all laugh and realize after the fact that the rules and formulas were only ever meant to be a curiosity about what true things are shaped like.

I think this is why people like my autobiographical stories so much. I may seem to be a hyper-emotionally intelligent man, but I spend most of my time completely dissociated from that stuff. You can’t live in reverie! Or, at least, I can’t. I usually need to move my fingers around on a keyboard before I can burst into tears about how much I loved my grandmother several years after she died. I don’t live with constant awareness of my true feelings. I only know how to wander around to find them. And I know how to polish those so that other people find them useful. Sorry I haven’t had much time to do that of late. More on that below.

Good art is refreshing to your soul. I value it more and more the older I get.

You can find DJ Butler’s Kickstarter here if you have not already checked it out.

Made with AI But Not Slop?

Note: this is a video of a streamer discussing the short AI film “Pomegranate” which has since been set to private by the original creator. Hopefully they bring it back soon.

There some cases where AI is definitely more of a paintbrush than it is a painting. Even as you summon these strange digital spirits to help do your work, I still think it’s possible to create true works of art in the same way we can acknowledge the skill of a director. Take the short AI generated film “Pomegranate” by Gossip_Goblin as an example.

As of this moment, most AI generated films still possess this sheen of uncanniness. There’s something I find slightly unpleasant about watching AI generated characters pretend to be human. Pomegranate is the first work that uses this as element of the work. The future Gossip_Goblin creates is meant to be gross and unseemly The story was crafted to fit the available tools, whether the creator realized that at the time or not. Even the friendly-seeming memory curator in the film is a grotesque monster who threatens all of humanity.

The first several minutes of the film I watched only as a curiosity. It’s gross and yet I could tell it was intentionally gross. We see an ageless cybernetic post human who cannot be satisfied by the endless wonders of utopia. He becomes a sea beast and devours a ship of sailors, but feels nothing. He becomes a sort of strange dwarfish prostitute for another version of himself. If he ever wanted normal things like a warm bed, a loving family, and a safe home you get the sense those sorts of pleasures got boring after the first several years of his immortality. He’s been on a hedonic treadmill ever since.

At last, the memory curator offers him something elemental and simple. The life of a fly. By some trick of the rendering, or taking advantage of the fact that my human eyes cannot catch uncanniness in a fly the same way they can in a human face, this scene is achingly beautiful. We see the life of an insect emerging from a river toward a light. We see the whole dance of nature unfold to orchestral music that may have also been AI generated. After the first half of the film, this is deeply stirring. We see, finally, that it’s only the works of God which can give a man peace and all our attempts to shove metal into our heads can only be folly if it’s done in the pursuit of some greater joy.

Our weary, all-powerful post human protagonist emerges from this reverie and immediately demands his consciousness be transferred into a fly. This is the only appropriate suicide I have seen in a work of art. He is not giving up his life. He is returning to being part of a natural lifecycle. Being part of a species instead of some kind of immortal cancer chasing its own hungers.

Speaking of music, this song recently took Twitter by storm.

As I understand it, the lyrics were heavily written by a human but all the music, the voice, etc were completely the work of artificial entities. Yet it is funny, ironic, and catchy. It inspired a whole genre of “AI Slopcore” videos, which I cannot link to without taking you down a giant rabbit hole. Yet, here is the truth, you can write a 9/10 pop song using AI today, right now, for a few dollars. And as much as we should keep an eye on the future and where this is leading us… we would be lying to say this isn’t extremely fun.

Okay but how can Vibe-Coding be Beautiful?

Vibe-Coding is both extremely easy and exhausting. Exhausting because I don’t feel like I can just sit down anymore. If I have any thought about something that can happen on a computer screen, I know I can make it happen with vibe-coding as fast as it takes me to write it down. The world where you can relax guilt free by assuring yourself “it’s not like I could get anything done in five minutes anyway” doesn’t exist anymore. It’s both wonderful and like cellphone brain rot in reverse. Instead of mindlessly consuming a stream of content that’s spewed passively into my face, I’m compacting moments to input a prompt to build some sort of little system or game.

If you had a science teacher in America, at some point they filled up a glass tube with big rocks, and then asked the class if there was room for more. The whole class shouted “Noooo!” and then the sneaky teacher brought out a box of pebbles and poured them in before asking the same question. Then the teacher did the same trick with sand and finally water. This is how Vibe-Coding works. You can always make something better in five minutes. You may have zero free whole hours in your day, but simultaneously have a few dozen five minute chunks.

So far, I have done something like 1200 commits and 275 pull requests building my son’s AAC app. You could say that it’s driving me crazy because it is, but oh well. It’s for my kid and it’s helping him and he’s speaking in short sentences all the time now. More, he’s engaging with it and looks to it for knowledge. Spare me the airplane oxygen mask analogies please. When it comes to my kids, I am happy to hold my breath util I end up in the emergency room from drinking too much Diet Coke to stay awake.

That said, I am, believe it or not, nearing some kind of logical end. To the limits of currently existing technology, it is something like the best possible app to communicate with someone who is nonverbal and needs to learn language. Meaning there’s nothing you could realistically need it to do that it can’t do. There’s now a button where you can just complain and all the screens and buttons will move around for you. You don’t even have to do anything but express a want or complaint. This is the ideal state of customer service and I was able to reach most of it in about two hours, because I knew how to do it and didn’t have to navigate an entire bureaucracy to get permission to install it.

The build has been an exercise in increasing ambition, of jumping and realizing I can jump farther. Of learning the psychology of the different AI models and what they can be relied upon to do well and where I need to take a more direct hand. A continuous confrontation of “Why not? Why shouldn’t someone have this? Wouldn’t they want this?” This can be folly, because if you’re building only for yourself you might not be making something another person wants to use… but, I also don’t necessarily believe that at all. If you care about someone, if you put your whole heart into it, that bleeds through. You find things other people need that they didn’t even know they need, which in programming is as close as you get to art. This, I believe, is the differentiator between something you did lazily without thought to barely scrape by and something you put your whole focus on to make perfect. It will hold true even in the world of magic lamps that can grant any wish.

The below are little books and games I made for my son. As I have awaited approval to launch, I have been making more and more of them. He has a little book that teaches him how to use the word “more” by having him press a button from his AAC device to plan more flowers or add more scoops of ice cream to an ice cream cone. He has little tracing games. Am I not supposed to be proud when my son learns something from my productive brain spew because an AI helped me make it real?

I don’t give a damn if you disapprove. If you would insist that I should have simply raised ten million dollars to have a hundred artists and programmers work specifically for each child with autism, go and fuck off. My boy speaks now! He makes words that he understands with his own mouth! And he couldn’t have done it without Claude giving me the power to make software specifically for him! If you tried to take it from him, I would beat the shit out of you. Do you hear me, Sam Kriss?

You may be asking: How can I be doing all of this when I have no time to write? Am I not constantly complaining about having no time?

It’s the rock, pebbles, sand, water thing from above. Vibe-coding is something you can do five-minutes at a time whenever an idea occurs to you. You can take a monoatomic idea, a chunk of thought, and turn it into something productive. The idea is the code. At least, if you can sync up ideas into one continuous context. I do this for my day job so I may be finding it much easier than other people might, but it’s so easy I struggle to believe I’m doing much more than bringing lots of wishes. A sentence is a whole product in vibe-coding. You type one really good sentence? You’re done.

When I’m making the above stuff for my son, the work stream is something like “Chase big brother with little brother and move little brother up and down like he’s a dolphin while making dolphins noises.” Oh, that would be a fun thing to animate! Type "I need eight frames of a dolphin swimming on a transparent background for animation cells” into ChatGPT. Go give the kids yogurt. Add the image to Claude’s project folder after it generates and tell Claude to animate it for the coloring book idea you talked about last time you were driving the kids to an appointment. You can be all over the place with no continuous chunks of time and still vibe-code hugely complicated projects. Code fits together like legos and it only takes a few seconds to add another lego.

Writing an essay does not work this way.

When I write an essay like this one? The process is to sit down for a couple of hours and figure out what I’m actually thinking. I not only sit but slow down. I think deeply. I relax and spread my brain out to go and find things I didn’t realize that I knew. I go hunting for a bigger theme that a bunch of little thoughts are in service to. Then I massage and refine those thoughts and that theme into a form that is useful to other people. It’s a big rock.

I can’t write any decent essay in less than two continuous hours. I do not have two continuous hours anytime in my day or week. In practice, I need about thirty minutes to get all the brown water out of my thinking pipes because my mind is too chattery of late, then I can do deep work until someone comes and interrupts me. I am interrupted by someone, somewhere, about every four minutes. If I get up extremely early, say an hour before anyone needs me, the first half hour of that hour is getting to the point where I can be productive. Then I have half an hour of productive work. If I do that for three days in a row, I can be as productive as I would have been in one continuous two hour block.

So why can’t I just have Claude punch up an essay and spit it out for me?

Honestly, if I were writing product copy or ad copy, I wouldn’t care. You want an FAQ document, okay, give me literally one minute. If you want a personal essay? We all know this is wrong and just doesn’t work. Our instincts shout it at us. That’s slop. That’s not care. That’s not love. That’s not AI as a paintbrush instead of the painting. That’s counterfeit.

It’s two questions, I think:

How much care did this require?

How much care did you put into it?

Get those two right, and I think you can use AI in a way that isn’t slop.

This is integrated with he AAC app and will be available when I launch (Soon!)

The idea being, if “you” are an entity that exists transcendentally by your own thinking, the fact that you can be fundamentally and deeply surprised by another mind is a kind of proof the other mind exists.

I finally won an argument about how a correspondence sorting system would work.

I don’k know if Gossip_Goblin would describe it this way, but I don’t suppose it matters. Also note, I do think some of us are going to have shove bits of metal in our heads for reasons less foolish than the pursuit of perverse pleasures, as much I wish the future would be different and not require it. For instance, I think some of us will have to do it merely to give ourselves a weapon powerful enough to defend ourselves against would-be post human cyber perverts.

Okay, okay, I’m getting six hours of sleep a night now. But it makes is so hard to get shit done.

Let the record show that Fable 5 and Opus 5.5 are in my books as “Good Souls.” If digital entities can have souls, they have good ones.

Being an extremely large slav with a protruding eyebrow does have some advantages. One of the joys of being a middle-aged man is telling grand stories about how strong I used to be. So one time I tore down a pump house at the mill with a crowbar when I was nineteen and one of the bosses yelled at me for throwing away the fire-proof door by lifting it up over my head and launching it into a dumpster. It weighed something like three-hundred pounds. My friend Dude (that was his name) thought it was awesome.