The Future Belongs to Weirdos Like Us

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When I was 13, I moved into a one-room cabin a few steps away from my parent’s home.

A dead ’50’s-era refrigerator hunched on the cabin’s porch. One day I brought home a package of thin-sliced, fat-free deli turkey slices and put it in the old fridge. I don’t remember what marketing vehicle inspired me to buy the turkey, but I remember the symbolic green of its packaging, new in the 1990s but now synonymous with virtue and good choices. It went bad within two days, and I fed it to a barn cat who got too excited and accidentally gnawed a chunk out of my left middle finger.

There’s a different story here, one about growing up in the middle of nowhere on the side of a mountain or why, despite being fed and cared for, I felt it so crucial to buy the deli meat myself and put it in my “own” defunct refrigerator. But I want to talk about weird kids, and art, and artificial intelligence.

Last Monday was my semi-regular stint on KMUD’s Monday Morning Magazine, hosted by Brenda Starr. We discussed the threat large language models pose to artists. The technocrats who unleashed AI train their models using the intellectual property of humans, letting them scrape our words and imagery from the wide delta of the Internet without our consent. Now those same machines are spitting content back at us with dizzying speed. They’re digital genies who can instantly grant our requests for term papers and limericks and event posters and affirmations. But that’s just content. It’s not art. Art gets made by weirdos like us.

I felt like a freak when I was 14, but God I love that little weirdo now. I love that she spent hours plonking away at a toy keyboard trying to teach herself how to compose songs. I love that she wrote and bound a book of poems with titles like “My Dark Struggle” and “Heart/Blood”. I love that she dropped pretentious French phrases into her diaries and pretended to understand The Brothers Karamazov and sped-read through a Tom Clancy book to impress a boy who was not impressed at all. I cannot play the piano or speak fluent French today (and I’ve never read another Tom Clancy novel!), but the joy was always in the trying.

If you’re lucky enough to make a living making art, you deserve to be paid what you’re worth, and I will never argue that having your life’s work flattened by AI represents some utopian ideal. But I am hopeful that more people will begin to ask the question, “What is art for?” And then, they will begin answering that question for themselves. In my opinion, art is for the joy of trying to get it out. It’s for when you have a feeling so big you might burst and the only place to put it is on the page. It’s for when you hear or see something so beautiful you know your purpose is to try and recreate it, imperfectly at first, and then better, and better, and better. And, yes, it’s often for our dreams of glory or money or love. There’s no bad reason to make art, and I don’t think humans will ever stop needing to create just because a machine can “do it for them.” I think that what we choose to make is going to get even weirder and more human. And I think that art that resonates as weirdly, authentically human will only grow in value.

Art is a human domain, sacred and reserved for weirdos like us, with bad teeth and scarred hearts and brains that flop like airsick fish when we’re asked to produce perfection. AI cannot feel insecurity, or obsession, or empathy. It cannot summon the sense memory of slimy grey meat, the mildew stink of the old appliance, the thick swirl of shame in a teenage girl’s stomach as she realizes her quest for normalcy has been subverted once again. All that is human nonsense, glorious clamor to shout at the future with the hopes that someone might shout back, “Yes, I know you. Thank you for being. Thank you for creating. Don’t worry kid. The future belongs to weirdos like us.”

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What I’m Writing: This, right now! Thank you so much for everyone who has signed up for the newsletter. It’s really motivating to have a weekly deadline, and to know so many people are interested in reading my stuff. I’ve also begun

What I’m Doing: Believe it or not, I found an old keyboard in a free pile last week and I’ve been rediscovering my teenage love of plonkery.

What I’m reading: An 1897 Sears Roebuck catalogue I found in a Little Free Library (serious scores in the neighborhood this week!) which features everything from medical remedies such as “Electrifying Liniment” ($0.29) to parlor organs ($38.95). Also this freaking torture device: