Dear Artist who has complicated feelings about the growing use of AI

Definitely use it? Definitely don't use it? A lot of creatives aren't sure what they feel about this, yet, or how to share what they feel. And that's okay. You don't have to know yet. It's new!

Dear artist who holds your complicated feelings about AI close, because you’re not sure they’re welcome in the conversation,

Dear creative who has googled something like “is AI replacing my work” at an hour you’d rather not admit,

Dear writer who told a client you wrote something yourself when the truth was messier than that,

Dear maker who watched a conversation about AI turn into a debate and felt like neither side was talking about what you were actually feeling,

Dear musician who has started three different AI experiments and deleted them all before anyone could see,

Dear illustrator who is watching your inbox and your rates and wondering if both are shrinking for the same reason,

Dear creative who doesn’t even know where you stand yet, and feels like you should by now,

This is for you.

The AI conversation in creative communities has developed a way of making you feel like you should already know where you stand. Like the time for sorting through this is over, and everyone has moved on to the firmly-positioned stage. The advocates have their case. The resisters have their case. There are hashtags and manifestos and opinion pieces about what kind of creative you are based on your tools. It is polarizing.

And then there’s you, in the middle of all that, holding something much less clean.

Maybe you’ve tried AI tools and felt simultaneously impressed and hollow. Maybe you haven’t tried them and feel a low-grade guilt about that, as if resistance is the same as falling behind. Maybe you’ve used them in ways you haven’t told anyone about because you weren’t sure how to explain what you were doing or why. Maybe you’ve watched colleagues embrace them with apparent ease and wondered what’s wrong with you for not feeling that ease. Maybe you’re grieving something you can’t quite name yet.

Please know: the messiness is real, and it makes complete sense.

Here is something I’ve observed across twenty years of work at the intersection of creativity and health: creative people rarely have uncomplicated relationships with the things that change their practice. That’s because creative practice is deeply personal. It lives in the body. It carries years of identity formation and value-building and relationship to materials. When something changes in that ecosystem, the emotional response is proportionate to how much the ecosystem matters to you. You feel this so much because it matters so much.

The AI disruption is not just a technology question. For most creatives navigating it honestly, it’s a tangle of several things at once: questions about authenticity and what it means to make something, anxiety about economic survival and whether you can sustain a practice you’ve built, grief about changes in how your work is valued, confusion about your own ethics and where you actually draw lines, and underneath all of that, a fundamental question about who you are as a creative person.

That’s a lot to hold. No wonder the clean certainty of the polarized conversation doesn’t fit you.

What if the complicated feelings are not a problem to solve before you can figure out where you stand? What if they are the data?

The places where we feel the most tangled tend to be the places where we’re navigating something genuinely complex. Somewhere our values are in conversation with each other rather than pointing in the same direction. The feeling of being pulled in multiple directions is usually accurate. There are multiple directions being pulled.

So rather than trying to resolve the feelings toward a clean position, what might it look like to spend some time with what’s actually there?

There’s the question of process: what do you actually experience when you’re working now, compared to before? Not what you’re supposed to feel. What is actually happening in your body and your practice when you sit down to make something?

There’s the question of content and authenticity: what are you making, and does it feel like yours? This question matters regardless of what tools you use, and the answer is yours to determine.

There’s the question of identity: who are you as a creative, and does that change based on your tools? There is no universal answer to this. The answer lives in your own history, your own values, your own relationship to your work.

And there’s the question of survival: what is happening to your income, your opportunities, your clients? This is a practical question with real consequences, and it deserves to be held alongside the identity questions rather than separated from them.

Dear creative, these are not small questions. You don’t have to have answered them by now. The fact that you’re still sitting with them rather than reaching for the nearest loud opinion to adopt says something about your honesty and your care.

What I want to offer you today is not a framework or a next step. It’s permission to not know yet. It’s permission to feel conflicted, to be in process, to not have your position sorted out in the way that would make you comfortable at a dinner party. The pressure to have figured this out already is coming from outside you, and it is not serving you.

Your creative life is yours. What happens in it gets to take the time it actually takes.

Dear artist, you are navigating something genuinely hard. The fact that it feels hard is not a sign that you’re doing it wrong. The fact that you have complicated feelings is not a character flaw. The world is changing in ways that directly affect how you work and who you are as a creative person, and you are taking that seriously. That is, if anything, what integrity looks like.

You don’t have to perform certainty you don’t have. You don’t have to resolve this on anyone else’s timeline. And you don’t have to be alone with it.

Whatever you’re holding about all of this, it’s welcome here. (As long as the conversation stays kind and comes from an “I statement” sort of place.)

With care,

Kathryn

Photo by Nahrizul Kadri on Unsplash