Originality is the only game left

I will never beat the algorithm.

Practically none of us who create will — whether we’re writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, acrobats, comedians, dancers, or anything else. I’m tired of trying.

I will never be more efficient than generative AI. I will never be able to buy enough digital ads to break through, nor will I ever be chosen by a publisher who vaults me to relevance. I will never be able to bullshit and write something I don’t believe just because I know people want to hear it.

Some say AI will ruin art and bankrupt creators. I’m actually excited for the effect AI will have on art and artists.

For us human beings, there’s only one play left in the playbook: be ourselves — our plain old original selves.

We can’t beat the computer on any other front. No one else, and no machine, can be us. The game is over, and it seems like the one remaining edge we have is to stop playing the game - of catering to the zeitgeist or waxing sensational - and be original.

What little leeway we had to optimize our way into an audience will vanish as AI-generated expression floods every medium and every distribution channel — cheaper and faster than any human artist.

But I think that’s liberating.

Why bother chameleoning who we are as artists if we can’t win doing that anyway? It’s better to just do our thing and create for the audience that values our thumbprint and voice.

I can only speak for myself — an amateur but extremely serious artist on the margins — but I’ve felt a kind of permission I’ve never felt before: to just let it rip. No more anxiety, self-editing, and asking my ChatGPT editor to reassure me of my chops as a writer. The new playbook is to listen deeply inward and just write.

So why not? I’ll never beat AI at its game — being more efficient, more personalized, and telling people what they want to hear — so why play? My guess is that anyone who sees themselves as an artist, rather than an entertainer, feels this at some level. If this is what the marginal artist feels, I think that’s great.

If those of us — like me — who feel the pressure to chase clicks just throw in the towel on beating AI, it might lead to the greatest wave of original work the world has seen in generations.

If AI has left us no choice but to be original, damn am I excited.