lately i have been thinking about these kids i tutored

& what it has to do with ai art / or: skill issue

Sometime in 2020 (or maybe it was 2021), during the dog days of the early pandemic, when nothing was happening, my mother, specifically, got restless enough to recommend her daughter as an English tutor for parents in my brother’s tennis community who were looking for one. When ur daughter is an editor, she must be willing and able to edit 13 year olds, hey?

She should not have done this and I should have been firmer in my refusal, but I was eventually worn down enough to say fine, fuck it, why not. What is the worst that can happen. These parents had kids who were otherwise doing well in school, but wanted to strengthen their grades in English. And my mom—never one for modesty where her children are concerned, except to our faces—said something to the extent of well MY daughter’s great at English or MY daughter always had A’s in her humanities courses or MY daughter works on books, she can help! (This, of course, was not previously cleared with me; my interest, or lack thereof, was utterly immaterial.)

But when the tutoring sessions started, though I found the boys themselves to be generally curious, sweet-natured, and open to trying new things, their parents struck me as having that particular kind of Asian parent STEMpilled brainrot that believes that plugging the right variables into a predetermined algorithm will get you the result you want. The tutoring sessions were not to develop their children’s proficiency in skills like analysis, critical thinking, or writing, or to broaden their range of talents to include the humanities, but because they believed that lower grades + tutoring = A, and straight As + college applications = Ivies. They constantly demanded deliverables, wanted me to assign essays and then to edit them throughout the week under the belief that tracking minutiae of grammar was the way to track improvement in quality of analysis and prose, and when I wouldn’t, when I insisted that the boys needed to learn how to read critically first, when I said that it is more important at this stage for them to learn how to elucidate and identify core themes and arguments and engage emotionally with Text, I was summarily fired.¹

Which I’d been kind of hoping for, as I was largely doing this as a favour for my mom and importantly, do not actually enjoy teaching. But I have been thinking a lot about those Four Weeks in Summer lately because I saw the tweets on the TL about Prosecraft.io (which has since been taken down), and the two struck me as being ideologically intertwined, particularly in their dismissive attitudes toward the criticality of time, breadth, cultivating interest, and allowing failure towards developing any kind of skill, their obsession with Objective Measurement of Quality and Progress, and both reflective of a pervasively capitalistic, “optimising,” metrics-driven approach towards the humanities. (Towards STEM as well, if I’m honest, but that is much less my lane.)

Proscraft.io self described as a “reliable measurement of the different aspects of your prose, like vividness or passive-voice, and lets you compare those measurements with authors you admire. It helps you answer some of the nagging questions you might have about the quality and style of your own writing, so that you can create more more compelling stories and be more expressive with your prose.”

The girlies were in a tizzy, the publishers were in a fuss, because like, what is measurement? How can it be applied to art? What is the point of it? Are there credible sources that speak to this being a useful metric for how humans interact with or think about art? What does “quality of style” look like—is this a definable thing? (Do we understand the words we’re using?) Is Tara Gilesbie superior to William Shakespeare because she uses 29% more active voice? What if you told me that Georges Seurat is objectively better than, say, Gustav Klimt because he uses 17% more pastels and I, Symbolist-inclined in my own particularity, as a result of my own particular life, said “fuck you, Klimt slaps and Seurat is a loser”?²

Hyperbolic strawmanning aside, the problem with playing this kind of numbers game is that art is…personal. It is wholistic. You cannot strip it into parts because it is only coherent as a whole. It requires of you all your years, all the experiences and influences that shape and define your taste, your thinking, your view of the world before you ever begin to make—or engage with—anything at all. Everyone has creativity, yes. I hold firmly to this. I also believe everyone has the capacity for artmaking. But the difference between “capacity” and “ability” lies in application of skill. AI—and the STEM-pilled parent—wants there to be a shortcut from point A to point B, wants to get good without the getting good, but that is the exact wrong lesson to take away.

I return often to Monet Refuses the Operation, by the late poet Liesl Mueller. It opens:

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty four years, she continues, before Monet is able to see Rouen Cathedral as being made up of parallel shafts of sun and, presumably, so paint it. It took him every single one of those years to develop into the kind of person who can, who is able, because here is the thing—it is about process, not product. It is the result of a life in whole, and you cannot “hack” that in any way that is meaningful. As audiences we see result, we engage with result, but that is not why humans are compelled to make or to do.

We are our years of life, as is our art, which is what makes it dynamic and exciting and uniquely our own. Plugging keywords into a mechanized trend synthesizer and trusting in the algorithm for a Deliverable will never be the same as making compositional choices, choices in medium, palette, tone, character, point of view, etc. etc. etc.—because art starts with the artist, and exists in the becoming. The only thing AI could make out of 19th century Realist painting is more Realism. The thing Monet and his peers could create was Impressionism.

I’ve gone through a fair range of a pretty varied arts education, so I feel pretty confident in the claim that the majority of what you is preparatory. It is training, skill development, and that is what you have to love if you want to have fun, or make something beautiful. There is a love of learning that goes into it, a curiosity and exploration that is stymied when you focus only on the result. There is no joy in myopia.

My ballet schools usually had two performances a year—The Nutcracker for fall/winter and something else for spring—but the bulk of our actual time was spent in class. I have done more barre, centre, petit and grand allegro than I’ve ever done Waltz of the Flowers, and even when we were performing, it was two months of rehearsal for a mere two hours onstage, for two weekends if you were lucky. In skating, I had only a few programs that I competed before an audience a skint few times. But I spent years in classes and summer intensives, refining my axels over and over and doing off-ice conditioning to make sure I was building the muscles that I needed. In art class I spent more time working on studies and sketches and mark-making than I did any final piece, in band I had to know my scales and arpeggios before I ever touched, say, Saint-Saëns.

And importantly, skill recedes when not attended to. I am a much less able artist than I was in high school. I no longer have the strength or flexibility for a six o’clock penchée. I used to be a first chair flautist, now I can barely produce a round, full sound (and, to be fair, was never passionate enough about the practice of music to be a good player of it anyway). And while I still kind of know my way around a rink, the days of a Biellmann or a Kerrigan spiral are far, far, far behind me. I no longer consider myself a figure skater, because I have not kept the requisite level of ability to do any of the things that made me one. I no longer think of myself as a flautist because my scales creak with rust. Art is not an inborn trait, it is something you learn, something you maintain. It is also, crucially, something you can pick up again and polish up. I have the choice to pick up a flute or lace up my skates any time I wanted, budget permitting.

Skill cannot be rushed. Craft cannot be cheated. You are developing it or you are not. You are maintaining it or you are not. Humans are capable of a truly impressive number of things, but much of it requires you to put in commensurate time and dedication. There is no shortcut to “getting better,” and you certainly won’t get there by plugging data into an algorithm. It is a mercenary approach to learning that will never reward you. You categorically cannot become a better writer without becoming a better reader first. Even Picasso, famed child prodigy, did not get to Cubism immediately—the slow development of his style and visual language is famously traceable, periodised.

It is only capitalism that decries the long process of artistic refinement, the years it takes to build. It demands efficiency, getting the “best” (or, I suppose, most usable) product for the least amount of effort, and it treats humans as an interchangeable part of this calculation, best mined for the maximum amount of productive years. There is no room for experimentation, no room for deviation, no room for failure—and failure is so absolutely vital if you mean to produce something great. But capitalism always defaults to the milquetoast in its race to the lowest common consumer and the highest possible profit. The thing it steals from us is time. People are rushed to publish before they’re ready, rushed to put themselves on a market that will forget them in five years, rushed to be successful immediately or else never see another marketing dollar, but that is not a sustainable, human timescale, and you cannot optimise your way out of a system like this.³

AI apologists claim that it is a supplemental “tool”—and indeed, so too did the creator of that Prosecraft website—but if that is the case, lack of access should not impede your ability to execute a skill to such an extent. Without pointe shoes I can still pique. Without Procreate I still draw a beautiful line. Without Midjourney…do the AI “artists” have the ability to artmake? And even when they have it to crunch data for them—does that help them develop an eye? The ability to understand and identify what makes an interesting image vs. an uninteresting one? And if it does, why is all the AI art flooding my feed big titty anime girlfriends with sixteen fingers and techbros copeposting about how “AI will replace Hollywood”, replete with some of the most horrifyingly uncanny (and, more sinfully, boring) moving stills to be manifested upon god’s green earth? And if Prosecraft is a “tool” for “authors”, can you tell me what “11% more vivid”⁴ looks like in concrete terms, how it can materially be implemented? Does it really, actually, help you develop an analysis of other authors’ work, or work out why and how their prose is successful? Sure, in the best case you may get a surface level analysis of an artist’s style and voice—but can you apply it? Do you know why they use it? Can you synthesize it into your own work?

(compare to actual Wes Anderson trailer, actual Star Wars trailer, actual Great Gatsby trailer—Wes Anderson is such a great case study because his style seems so twee and imitable, but does anyone actually capture the emotional heft of his storytelling as it exists as a function of his style? Or are they mimcking shape without substance? And if your art is all surfaces, is that actually going to resonate with an increasingly alienated people?)

The Prosecraft conversation (and general AI discourse, frankly) have been reminding me of this tutoring situation specifically because they’re all driven by an obsession with product, with result.⁵ Because product is what sells, product is the thing that feeds the self-justifying logic of the market. Product allows you to post the Insta, to make the TikTok, to sell the aesthetic, to build your platform and drive engagement and mine for social clout or whatever the dominant language of social media metrics is, and increasingly, it feels like people are in such a rush to make the profit off the commodity that they forget that making the thing is the more creatively rewarding endeavour.⁶

But you know what? The best, most satisfying art I’ve ever created has been fanfiction, which can never be monetized, and which my own name will never be attached to. Because yes, while art can be a commodity and while it certainly has been commodified, it is not utilitarian. There is enjoyment in it, and pleasure too. And how sad is it that we feel we cannot languish in the joy of the doing and must take the shortest possible path to the having done? Half the happiness in life is the getting there, the curiosity, the—yes—failure, the learning, the broad and interesting world before you, the watching yourself slowly improve until you are able to do the things you once thought were impossible.

Because—genuinely, I ask this in the best possible faith—does the cheating really feel that good? Can you be secure in your own abilities for your own sake? In your heart of hearts, are you ever confident that you can get there yourself? Can you ever feel pride, real pride, at what you’ve accomplished—do you think you have accomplished anything at all?

I’ll end with this—I have a suspicion AI techbros online lash out and make the claims they make and are so reactive to pushback because they are ashamed of themselves, but are too terrified to accept the cringe and the vulnerability that comes with being bad at something before you can be good at it. You must risk something, and they’d rather steal than to be hurt by the gap between their ability and the art they long to create. But bad art is not shameful. Amateur art is not shameful. Talent is not inherent, it is cultivated, it is learned. It is labour, it is a craft, if one that is undertaken willingly and loved.

If you really, truly, want to be an artist, the resources are there. There are free PDFs online, tutorials, reference photos, walkthroughs, critiques, playlists—and paper and pencil are certainly much cheaper than the pricing plans Midjourney is going to implement. When you’re priced out, why don’t you try cultivating the skill you want to have? No one can take that away, and you don’t even have to share it if you don’t want to. Enjoy the process. It is much more rewarding, and at the end you will have something inalienable.

1. To be fair, this is just my own impression of the interaction, it could just be that I was a bad teacher, or the boys themselves felt they weren’t getting what they wanted, or any number of other reasons—it’s just that this came up as a memory, prompted by Prosecraft.io. But I still maintain that if you can’t even identify an argument within a text, you can’t write adequately in a format that demands you to put forward an argument yourself. Don’t ask me to build a house with no foundation, don’t ask me to teach writing before I teach reading!

2. I feel compelled to say I do actually like Seurat an okay amount!!! But also…my liking him only an okay amount does not devalue his artistic achievements!

3. I think quite a lot (much more than I should) about a throwaway bit in Andor, where the character Karis Nemik says, of an outdated piece of tech he has been fixing, “Something breaks, you can fix it. [Cassian Andor: “Hard to learn.”] Yes, but once you’ve mastered it, you’re free. We’ve grown reliant on Imperial tech, and we’ve made ourselves vulnerable. There’s a growing list of things we’ve known and forgotten, things they’ve pushed us to forget.”

Part of the way empire, corporations, all these brutal systems of exploitation and control, make themselves indispensable to us is by stripping away once-basic skills that threaten their bottom line. Shein depends on people not knowing how to repair clothes (or what the expected quality of a piece of fabric ought to be, or how much labour goes into the creation of clothing, or what a reasonable price to pay for that labour and material should be…), Apple relies on people not knowing how to fix a phone that planned to be obsolete. In the same way, this push for AI to do your writing, your art, for you also relies on a wider social push for people to forget how to write, how to draw, and to not only become reliant on their programs, but also to never say or make anything outside of the bounds of what is palatable or acceptable. It depends on marketing itself as too complicated (ethically or technically) to clearly understand, depends on the consumer outsourcing their own capacity for thought and creation onto a corporation—it takes from you, and sells it back to you as though this were a favour.

4. The assumption is, of course, that more vivid is necessarily a good thing—this is not always the case! Vivid is not always what serves a work best! These are choices made from a place of knowledge and experience. These are arbitrary quantitative assessments of qualitative things!

5. Would also argue that this mentality is what’s plaguing the crisis of arts and humanities funding in schools, but that’s a whole other can of worms

6. I have tangential thoughts about this as a disease of the internet and of a consumption-driven capitalist society writ large—it’s starter pack culture, it’s “call yourself punk because you wear the costume without actually doing anything punk or participating in punk communities” culture, it’s aesthetic culture, corecore, it’s “identifying as a feminist but having no feminist analysis" culture, consumption-driven prescriptivist girlhood culture, instant success culture, it’s dating app screenshot during a loneliness/intimacy crisis culture, it’s contentification culture………

Surface without substance, destination without journey, projection without embodiment, that’s Baudrillard, baby! Can’t believe that old French man called this. Not to blame everything on capitalism, but………I’m Harrier du Bois communism vision questing it.