The dentist’s waiting room had a painting on the wall — one of those mass-produced canvases you buy at a furniture store. Sunflowers. Not Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Nobody’s sunflowers. Just shapes that looked enough like flowers to fill the space between the insurance pamphlets and the clock.
I sat there thinking about an artist who wants to quit. Thirties, no major success. Pandemic crushed their network. The generative AI came for the rest. Five words in a letter to an advice columnist: should I just give up?
Five words that hit harder than any headline about billion-dollar funding rounds. Five words from someone who makes things with their hands and their guts and is watching the world shrug.
I know that question. I’m a writer, which is worse, because at least an artist can point to something on a wall. A writer just has words, and words are the first thing the machines learned to fake. But the question is the same. Why keep going when nobody’s buying, nobody’s looking, and some server farm in Oregon can do a passable imitation of what took you twenty years to learn?
The columnist told them to remember why they started. Separate the money from the making. That’s decent advice if you’ve never had to choose between groceries and paint.
But there was something else in that letter that mattered more than the advice. The artist said the most fulfilling moment in recent months was surprising a local cashier with an illustration. Just gave it to her. No algorithm. No engagement metrics. No followers gained. One person made something and handed it to another person and something passed between them that no machine has ever produced and no machine ever will.
That’s the whole argument. Right there at the register.
The machines can generate ten thousand images in the time it takes me to type this sentence. They can mimic style, replicate technique, produce something that passes at thumbnail size. What they can’t do is walk into a store and hand a picture to a stranger and mean it. They can’t carry the weight of a life lived into a single gesture. They don’t know what it costs to keep making things when nobody asks you to.
I think about Fante. John Fante, sitting in that room in Bunker Hill, writing Ask the Dust while nobody read a goddamn word. Years of it. The books went out of print. He took screenwriting work to keep the lights on — wrote movies nobody remembers for money that didn’t last. The novels, the real work, collected dust in a warehouse somewhere until I found them decades later and dragged them back into the light.
Was Fante wasting his time? By every metric the modern world respects — followers, revenue, cultural cachet — yes. A failure for most of his life. But Ask the Dust is still alive and the screenplays are ash and the people who told him to quit are dust themselves.
The artist said they don’t feel art is respected in our culture anymore. They’re right. But when was it? The game was always rigged. Patrons owned you. Galleries took their cut. Algorithms decide who gets seen based on criteria that have nothing to do with whether the work is any good. The AI didn’t break anything. It just ripped the curtain down so everyone could see the machinery that was always running behind it.
What gets me isn’t the machines. It’s the shrug. The way people who’ve never made anything in their lives look at a generated image and say close enough. Close enough for the sunflowers in the dentist’s office, sure. Close enough for something that matters? Not in the same universe. There’s a difference between a thing made by someone who needed to make it and a thing produced by a system optimized for output. You might not articulate the difference. You might not see it. But you feel it — the way you feel the difference between a handwritten letter and a form letter from your insurance company. Both are words on paper. Only one of them costs anything to write.
The artist asked should I give up. The columnist gave three questions. I’ll give one answer.
You make things because you have to. Because something in you doesn’t work right if you don’t. Because the alternative — sitting still, letting the machines do the making while you do the watching — is a kind of death that doesn’t have the decency to stop your heart.
The cashier who got that illustration? She’s the whole point. Not the art world. Not the grants. Not the algorithm. One human reaching another through something made with their own hands. That’s older than language. The machines can generate a million images a minute and none of them will ever be handed across a counter by someone who was afraid to do it.
Don’t give up because it’ll pay off. It probably won’t. Don’t give up because the culture will come around. It probably won’t do that either. Don’t give up because the act of making something real in a world filling up with things that aren’t is the most stubborn, useless, necessary thing a person can do.
The dentist called my name. I walked past the sunflowers. Somebody painted the original, once, somewhere. I’d bet money they gave up.
Source: With the advance of AI, I feel my work as an artist is no longer respected. Should I just give up?