Why Treebeard "doesn’t like AI art,
he thinks it’s crap"

Blazing Reader,

"Want to say something, but don’t think it’s important enough to bother investing your own time, thought, and energy into saying it? Boy, have we got the answer for you!” says Jordan Henderson (the cover artist of my two novels).

As I'm sure you've guessed, he's referring to using AI to generate content like art, books and articles.

"The purpose of writing isn’t content generation, it’s communication," says Jordan in his latest essay, "Treebeard's Razor: The Ents Weigh in on AI Art & Writing," where he communicates why a fantastical talking tree from Lord of the Rings "doesn’t like AI art, he thinks it’s crap."

In Jordan's witty, thorough and slightly biased essay, he explains the many reasons why AI art and writing have little social significance, including:

"Imagine someone creating a machine that can churn out semi-plausible sounding gibberish and using it to fill books with plagiarism and derivative hackwork, and then putting nice sounding titles on them and stuffing a library with them. Patrons would then have to sort through all the junk to get to the original works, thereby making the library less useful. That’s the equivalent of having AI generate content and then diluting the original work on the internet with the AI derivatives."

Now, while Jordan refers to ChatGPT as a "state-of-the-art junk generator," he does concede that:

"While not all uses of AI art are damnable offenses (maybe just purgatory), any attempt, though, to place machine made derivative art images alongside natural intelligence, man made art, is a crude insult to human agency and organic sources of inspiration."

You can read Jordan Henderson's unapologetically snobbish essay, "Treebeard's Razor: The Ents Weigh in on AI Art & Writing," on his Substack (which includes over twenty 100% organic paintings that'll stir you in a way AI slop cannot even attempt).

—John C.A. Manley

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.