Quoting Gil Crouch, Joel Miller writes:
“The idea of the gift economy is fundamental in how we create social bonds, form and maintain relationships, deep or just transactional, such as with a brand through marketing activities like advertising,” says Crouch. “Writing poems, sonnets, novels, non-fiction books, articles, blog posts, all are forms of this moral and social gift-giving. The writer creates a book and publishes it because they want to tell a story. When we read the book, we are reciprocating the gift by reading it.”
A piece of writing is a pact between the writer and reader. It’s a contract, and we feel betrayed or cheated when we discover the writer didn’t invest their work with the effort, intent, or skill we expected. It’s like buying a bag of chips and finding out the package is mostly air. We feel ripped off.
Deepening this dynamic, Ruth Gaskovski and Peco recently discussed the “I” of the creator. “There is an ‘I’ behind a work of art,” they write. Ruth mentions her first encounter in the Louvre with Monet’s painting The Luncheon, examining the brushstrokes. “Even though I was well over a century removed, I felt that his hand was somehow within my reach, hovering in the same physical space that I was now occupying.” She was communing with the artist’s residual presence in the work.
But what if there’s no real artist involved? What if the giver is passing off something other than the gift we assume we’re getting? Our answers to those questions are behind why a book gets canceled or a deal falls through when AI use is flagged or suspected; it’s not just about cringy writing or copyright issues (AI-generated prose can’t be copyrighted, so it buggers the publishing model). It’s about the feeling that there’s no “I” on the other side of the exchange. That’s part of the let-down when we find an artist has used AI in the production of a work.r
Comments
Post a Comment