AI Art Is the Least of Our Problems

Tony Russo
5 min readJan 23, 2023
Photo by Rabah Al Shammary on Unsplash

I don’t think about AI a lot, but it’s on my radar. If you haven’t been following along at all, ChatGPT has gotten some people orgasmic and others screamingly anxious about the possibilities of AI-assisted writing. The shortest version I can give here is that if you give the right AI machine the right premise, it can cobble together a story or help compose an outline. It also can fix or elaborate upon one of yours.

Because it’s on the internet AI has become a divisive topic, which is why it bores me. Once everyone has planted their flags and made hating or loving a thing part of their personality, it’s not worth talking about. I’ve gone over all of this before.

In writing, there’s a future where you feed all of a genre-writers works (say, Robert Ludlum or James Patterson) into AI and it continues writing their novels for them. No grad students needed and no real loss to the culture.

The only reason I wanted to bring up AI today is because I saw two vaguely connected things that have made me rethink art.

The first was this Tweet:

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Tony Russo

Pencil-sharpening enthusiast, journalist, author of “Dragged Into the Light” https://amzn.to/3bLQ0Wi