Your Job is Not in Danger, Artists
On authored vs. generated work and why your choices can't be faked
The question got dropped on my doorstep, finally.
I can’t ignore it anymore. It’s everywhere. Let’s talk.
Let me begin by demonstrating where some well-meaning folk are in denial and where I am not.
Yes, a model can produce a beautiful sentence. Yes, output-for-output, generated and authored prose can be indistinguishable on the page. I grant this fully so that we’re sitting in a realm of reality when I tell you why this is okay and why your work is not destined to irrelevance in the face of some super-machine author/illustrator/artist meta.
So, if the page can’t always tell you, then where is the difference? Between you and generated prose/visual?
The Relationship with the Work
Not in the “this means something to me” sense but in the sense that you, present in every step of its probably rather lengthy creation, are fluent in it in the way no prompter could possibly be.
Your authorship? That exists in a rejected alternative.
In case you weren’t aware of how this works, AI isn’t true intelligence. It’s token-based on probability. This is why generated writing tends to have this recognizable cadence you’ve all come to know and loathe.
It’s become the green carnation of the writing world. Em (—) dashes. Not X, but Y.
Because, when these models were authored—ironic and we love this—the work that was used to inform its capacity for competent, advanced prose was the work of competent, grammatically correct and sometimes un-adventurous writing that has been condensed now into a pattern-recognition nightmare. One that informs any machine how to generate, edit and translate text.
So, now you see the context for the reasonable argument that sometimes competent writers look like AI-prompters. Even cadence, punchy declaratives. Sometimes an instinct to over-explain for a demographic. Things you may have learned or been taught to do that now get or have gotten you scrutiny.
A model optimizes for that center and you, artist, are defined by where you leave the center.
I’m not here to console you—after all, I’ve just admitted AI can craft a lovely sentence. But what I’m going to explain will, hopefully, console you anyway.
I’m a transmedia creator. Which means that I work in more than one sphere of media. I’m not just a writer, I’m an illustrator and 3D artist, full pipeline. I’m also multi-lingual and that gives my english prose, I think, a foreign strangeness I should truly lean into more, not less.
What this experience has given me is a lens into how the minds of the many people I’ve worked with think about their work. And how they talk about it.
This is where I was able to realise something. That when you make it, you thought about that decision. When you prompt it, you’re handing authorship over.
And therefore, in making it and swerving from probability-based decision making—if you have any form of inner monologue with yourself—you have just nurtured your ability to talk about your work in ways that someone simply trusting an output just cannot do.
Your fluency in your own work under questioning is where true-authorship lives.
This is also why many argue—and I would strongly agree—that generated work lacks “soul.” Because soul is strangeness. It’s chaos. It’s emotional and unpredictable decision-making that a number-as-probability generator simply cannot do because it is constantly optimizing for the “center”. The most likely. The most “what would very skilled and successful author x, y and z agree is the most appropriate and correct word to use here?”
And people want soul. This is art. Experiencing the world through someone else’s eyes is exclusively possible through the consumption of it.
Some media, I would also argue, may not be “AI-generated” but is crafted so precisely as to offend no-one, appeal to the most people possible, be the most comprehensible to the most people and be as un-challenging as possible that it is doing the same probability-based generation that a model does. Only it’s a person optimising for eyeballs (see: money.)
I’m not making an argument on what’s worse. Not at all. I’m attempting a dissemination of how to define authored-versus-generated writing so genuinely creative people can stop feeling worthless while we’re all trying to figure out what our relationship with this is going to be in twenty years.
So then, the author can reconstruct the why, defend it, have it argued with, because the choice was real and made against options. And the generator cannot go past the surface, because there was no why; there was only probability.
Great, but for some of us, that wasn’t enough to feel better.
Your Body of Work
Fine, you may say. But someone could fake the whole apparatus!
I find that to fake sustained authorship—that is, holding a voice across a body of work, a world built below the waterline and a defensible, demonstrated why across thousands of choices—costs more than authorship.
The sustained forgery theory requires an accused artist to be more impressive than the person they’re accused of not being. Which is why I posit one looks at the body, not the sentence.
One artifact can be doubted; a corpus held together—authored—by one consistent intelligence cannot be faked into existence cheaply.
That’s you. Hopefully.
You can’t fake your own repeated aesthetic obsession. Not cheaply. And your ability to intelligently talk about these engines that drive you every decision, often down to word-level, is what makes your work authored. Valuable. Yours.
Let me try to demonstrate what that could look like to you.
I received critique on possibly having overwritten some prose with “odd” language choices that they argued were incorrect or over-the-top literary varnish on a mundane detail that didn’t need it. “Showing-off” at worst.
An example; “Why did you choose the word ‘beset’ here?” (Context: a man’s face as “beset by deepening lines.”)
My pushback, close to verbatim, was in saying that the mood of a world lives inside how small details are described. That "beset" is predatory—it carries yielding, or fighting (and possibly flagging behind.) I'd called it "elevated," but isn't that what literary writing is? Taking what's "just" anything and transfiguring it into something aesthetic?
I wasn’t defending one pretty word. I was defending a principle: that the register has to go all the way down. That the same sensibility describing the world’s main menace and antagonist has to inflect a man's face, or the world doesn't have texture.
I don’t believe any model in the world could curate its own aesthetic. That’s not what models are built for.
That’s what you’re built for.
You’re You and You Use Tools
What a machine can’t take isn’t speed or polish. The line here, that I’m drawing, is not ‘did a tool touch this’—tools touch everything. We research with them, we draft bullet-point notes and outlines with them. The Authors Guild itself carves out brainstorming, structuring, grammar, translation and only draws the line at generating the text.
The question here is not what assisted you, it’s accountability. An author/artist who can defend every sentence wrote it, whatever they used to get unstuck.
An ‘author’ who can’t, didn’t write it, no matter what produced it.
The more generated text there is, the more an authored swerve stands out. Volume of average makes the strange more visible, not less.
Generating is cheap. Prompting is cheap.
Sustaining your authored vision across your body of work is expensive. You know every tributary, though. You can defend those waters because for every most-likely-probability you could have taken and didn’t, you built on your body of work with a chaotic, passionate, human vision where no model could fake experience. That’s where art lives. Where its soul lives.
Let that silhouette your work’s unique spirit. Its edges and form. AI sands off every corner and makes everything safe. Competent. Structurally perfect and entirely boring.
Kind of like Hollywood.
Interesting.
Fair Winds,
D.S.