What has been on my mind lately? Some of you are going to be able to guess. In April 2010, film critic Roger Gert he made an infamous claim. He said, "Video games can never be art." Yeah, I know. I know. His uh blog post set off this firestorm of discussion. I was there back then on the internet. I'm old. And uh yeah, everyone was talking about it, talking about kind of how he's an outofouch old man yelling at clouds, maybe yelling at clouds that were actually shrubs. Mario joke. Um, some of you old-timers know that I disagree profoundly with Mr. Eert, but he was an intelligent, articulate scholar, and he had a better point than this clickbaity quote might imply. His army argument was this. games are about mechanics and winning, not about aesthetic enjoyment. So, if I'm going to summarize him too briefly, and he wrote a long blog post on this two years later, you can still look up on his website. I essentially said that while video games can contain art, such as an amazing digital painting, they are not at their core art because their focus is on obstacles to overcome in order to win. by being victory focused. He argued they were an innately commercial product like a toaster and not able to be considered arts. Now, I'm not going to spend this speech taking down an old essay by a man who's been dead for over a decade now. Anyone who deeply loves video games will know his argument just fails to understand what gaming is on a fundamental level. Those of us who are gamers know that the mechanics themselves can be part of the art. And in fact, video games let us tell stories that you couldn't tell in any other medium because the mechanics are part of that artistic experience. Winning isn't the art, but the emotions of winning can be part of it. Why do I bring this up? Well, my goal today is to tackle a few questions that Mr. Eert raised, which I think are more important today than they've ever been. Right? Because my goal is to talk about what is art and why we make it. Now, I know some of you are flinching right now and you're thinking Brandon's going to winge about AI art again, but no, I'm going to winge about AI art again with slides. So, it's different in a more relevant way. I want to dig into my own feelings on this topic from a philosophical standpoint. Right? The surge of large language models and generative AI raises questions that are fascinating. And even if I dislike how the movement is going and relating to writing and art, I want to learn from the experience of what's happening. We're being forced to ask ourselves about art in a way we never have before. Now, some do say we're in an AI bubble. Perhaps a collapse is coming. But even if it does come, I think what has happened so far is enough to force us to confront these questions of what is art? Why do we make it? Now I explore my ideas through writing. And so I ask you to join me for, you know, these next 20 minutes or so as I explore this idea and in so doing help me figure out why I, Brandon Sanderson, rebel so strongly against the idea of AI art. And it was in writing this essay that I kind of figured it out. Anyone heard this song? This was pretty big a few weeks back. This is uh Walk My Walk. It's an AI generated song. It was number one song on Billboard's digital country songs list a couple of weeks ago. Uh when it happened, everyone was like, "Wait, an AI song is number one." Billboard admitted that there had been six in the last few months that had topped their charts that have been generated by AI. In addition, earlier this year, author Mark Lawrence, uh, one of my colleagues is a fantasy novelist. He did a series of tests where he had AI write a passage and then had novelists do the same thing. Pretty short passages, but the test included our friend Robin Hob, friend of the convention and fantastic writer, among others, including uh, Mark Lawrence himself. He posted all of these passages without attributions and had people see if they could figure out which were written by authors and which he had had the generative AI create and the results which you can find on his blog indicate that the audience couldn't tell the difference. Now this he quickly explains this isn't a very scientific test and AI is pretty bad at long form storytelling right now. If you ask it to write a book, it does very poorly. But if it writes a passage, it can in some situations write pros that we can't tell. So this is why I say we are there. Even if the bubble happens and this all collapsed, we are there. We have to be asking these questions right now because it can already imitate some of your favorite authors. When I hear of these two examples, walk my walk and the Mark Lawrence thing, my stomach turns. And I am worried genuinely that I'm against AIRIR just because it's new and unfamiliar, that I am the Roger Eert in this case. And he was just in the the last in a long line of artistic disbelievers when pros began to you be used for storytelling a lot instead of poetry. Some considered its practitioners, many of whom were women, I'm sure that was just a coincidence, uh to be creating lesser art than those who wrote poetry. In the 1800s, critics explained that photography shouldn't count as art because it merely captured what already existed in the world. And in the early 1900s, some highprofile critics argued that film shouldn't be considered art because of how base a form of entertainment it was. And that's an argument I'm pretty sure that Mr. Eert would have disagreed with vehemently. It stands to reason if all these critics were wrong just as Mr. Eert was wrong about video games, then maybe I'm wrong about AI. Isn't it just another form of expression? Some people certainly think so. What is art? Why do we make it? And why do I rebel against the use of it? Let me examine a few common objections. I I want to start there, right? Do I dislike AI because of the economic and environmental impacts? Well, they do concern me, but if I'm answering honestly, I would still have a problem with with it even if AI were not so resource hungry, right? Do I dislike it because the model's been trained uh on the works of artists in ways I consider unethical? Well, I don't like that. But even if it were trained using no copyrighted work, I'd still be concerned, right? I think we all would be. They're valid objections, but they don't get to the soul of it for me. Maybe I just hate the idea of a machine replacing a person. For a while, I've imagined that if we needed a heroic symbol of resistance against AI art, we actually have the perfect choice in American folklore. It's John Henry. Do you guys know the story of John Henry? John Henry is an American folk hero. He's a steel driver. Steel driver was this job where they would have to cut holes through thick rock and make a tunnel for a railroad. And they do that by pounding a spike drill into a stone with a hammer and making a spot and then people could put dynamite in that. Right? So John Henry, the myth of John Henry is of this man who was the best steel driver ever. And then a steam powered drill came along. And he challenged that drill to a contest to drill a tunnel through stone and see who could do it faster. You might have seen the Disney interpretation of this. I watched it when I was a little kid. So he did it right. John Henry was able to steel drive better than the drill and then he died from exertion. This is a result I circle around because it seems the story illustrates what I have to acknowledge. John Henry beat the steam powered drill, but it cost him his life. And while he proved he could beat a steam powered drill personally, he didn't change the world. We respect him, but as a society, we chose the steam drill, right? And I would too. I mean, let's be honest. I'm not sure that I fully dislike AI just because it's replacing a human. It's getting closer to the reason, but there's more. Truth is, I'm more than happy to have steam engines drilling tunnels for me to drive through. I don't even dislike AI because it's poorly done. Because, as we've shown, not all AI can I even tell what is good and what isn't. What is machine and what isn't. I hope I can tell what is good. I've listened to Walk My Walk and it's catchy. I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between it and a humanmade song. I read the Mark Lawrence test and I couldn't tell which one was Robin Hob and which one was AI. So why Why does it bother me so much? Like a lot of things, we can look to Star Trek for help. I am a nerd after all. So, my Star Trek was Next Generation. I'd stay up late at night and I'd watch it because it was at 11:00 and my mom would want me to turn off my TV because it was 11 o'clock Sunday. So, there was school the next day and I would not cuz I was watching Star Trek. Got to watch my Star Trek. In Star Trek Next Generation, we got Data, right? He's an android and a lot of his character arcs were about exploring what it means to be human. One of the recurring themes in the show was his attempts to create art. Painting, poetry, music, become a comedian. Take my warf, please. Classic line. I rooted for data, a synthetic being without emotions, trying so hard to understand the human experience. And I still do. I have no problem with data creating art. If he were real, I'd applaud him. Why do I empathize with data yet not the AI large language models? This question, this starts to get to the core of the issue for me. One of my favorite essays comes from the preface to the picture of Dorian Gray. In it, Oscar Wild with characteristic wit argues about a great number of things. I recommend it. It's only a page long. The book is fantastic, too, but I've always preferred the prologue to almost anything else he's written. It ends with these lines. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. Now, of course, this is Oscar Wild being a little bit silly. He tended to do that. He took lobsters on walks. But if you look at this idea, there is a point to making art that doesn't have to do with its usefulness. It doesn't have to do with what you can sell it for. It has to do with the intrinsic need to make art. I do think that part of the reason I dislike AI is because it is too focused on the product and not the process. Yes, the message is journey before destination. It is always journey before destination, but there's a specific take on it this time. This is a page in my first book. We we had these on display at the World Hopper Ball. I don't know if they're out this year, but they might be. I wrote them longhand uh in these giant notebooks in Korea. We call this White Sand Prime. I started on it when I was 19 and it's not very good. It's one part ripoff of Dune, one part ripoff of Lay Miz Rob, and one part ripoff of The Wheel of Time. But I wrote it. I did it myself. First word to last word. And there's a seed of something there that is all me. Part of this tale is the story of a young man or a man who is weaker at magic than everyone else and has to learn to win by finesse and understanding how said magic works instead of by raw power. And that's a very Brandon sort of thing, isn't it? I would much later write a better version of this story which we turned into the white sand graphic novel. That said, I have no question that using the language models currently released, everyone in this audience could prompt AI to create a book that is better than white sand prime. It is truly awful. But here, this is a picture of my second book, Stars End. Isaac actually made me a print edition of it at one point just as kind of a gift to me. This book also leans along on authors I'd read before, but the me is more apparent. In my third book, I return to the world of wet white sand and suddenly it starts to feel original. The plots are tighter and the characterization is more solid. The world building goes beyond its influences. In my fourth book, Nightlife, I experimented with twists and started to develop my style of The Sander Lanch. And in my fifth book, The Sixth Incarnation of Pandora, I started experimenting with theme, specifically in relation to the books I'd read before, laying the foundation for me telling stories that are in conversation with the legacy of science fiction fantasy I'd read, rather than just copying that legacy. Finally, we reach Alantress, where I brought all this together. This is when I emerged for the first time as the author I would become, a fully realized fantasy epic, applying all the lessons I'd learned so far. After Elantress, I started to create the Cosmir, eventually landing at Misborn and the Stormlight Archive. Maybe someday the language modules will be able to write books better than I can. But here's the thing, using those models in such a way absolutely misses the point because it looks at art only as a product. Why did I write White Sand Prime? It wasn't to produce a book to sell. I knew at the time that I wasn't going to write a book that was going to sell. It was for the satisfaction of having written a novel and feeling the accomplishment in learning how to do it. I tell you right now, if you've never finished a project on this level, it's one of the most sweet and beautiful and transcendent moments in my life was holding that manuscript, thinking to myself, I did it. I did it. This is the difference between data and a large language model. At least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become something. He wanted to understand art is the means by which we become what we want to be. The purpose of writing all those books in my earlier years wasn't to produce something I could sell. It was to turn me into someone who could create great art. It took an amateur and it made him a professional. I think this is why I rebel against the AI art product so much because they steal the opportunity for for growth from us. When pros came along, people didn't stop writing poetry. Photography didn't kill painting and film didn't kill the stage play. Video might have killed the radio star. Video games didn't kill film, but how many steel driving men do you see these days? John Henry died and was replaced by a machine that could do his job, but he proves something important about the human spirit. Where will we go when there is no room for humans in art? You might say, well, if the egg gets good enough and the product is the same, what's the difference? The difference is that the books aren't the product. They aren't the art. Not completely. And this is the point. The most important thing to understand is that the process of creating art makes art of you. My friends, let me repeat that. The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It's important, but in a way, it's a receipt. It's a diploma. The book you write, the painting you create, the music you compose is important and artistic, but it's also a mark of proof that you have done the work to learn because in the end of it all, you are the art. >> >> The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you. The most important emotions are the ones you feel when writing that story and holding the completed work. I don't care if the AI can create something that is better than what we can create because it cannot be changed by that creation. Writing a prompt for an LLM, even refining what it spits out, will not make an artist of you. Because if you haven't done the hard part, if you haven't watched a book spiral completely out of control, if you haven't written something you thought was wonderful and then had readers get completely lost because your narrative chops aren't strong enough, if you haven't beat your head against the wall of dead ends on a story day after day until you break it down and find the unexpected path, you're not going to have the skill to refine that prompt. The machine will have done the hard part for you and it doesn't care. It could be writing a shopping list or a story about the death of a family member. It cannot be changed. It can be changed by feeding it more copyrighted material. But creating the new new work will not change it. It will not learn. It will not grow. It will not care. Art is useless as Oscar Wild said. Therefore, we have the power here and not the machine. For it was created to try to make something useful, but it cannot admire what it made. For a long while, I thought our position was the same as John Henry, that we were inevitably going to lose. But I'm starting to think that we don't have to. 15 years ago, Roger Eert made a well-reasoned but ultimately uninformed statement. How many of you here think he was wrong that video games can be art? You're right. Not because I say it, but because we as a society say it. That's the great thing about art. We define it and we give it meaning. The machines can spit out manuscript after manuscript after manuscript. They compile them to the pillars of heaven itself. But all we have to do is say no. If we do, they lose. John Henry couldn't ultimately stop the steam powered machine. But we can fight the battle and we can win because we get to choose what victory looks like. What is art? Art is what we define it to be. Why do we make art? Well, remember art is not just the story. It is not just the painting or the sculpture or whatever else you love to create. It's also the process of creation and what that process did to you. We make art because we can't help it. It's part of us. We understand what it is. We are drawn to it because we are of the same substance. We are the arts. Thank you.