Tag Archives: art

The Professional Incubus and Indie Publishing – HP Lovecraft’s essay on amateur writing in 1924 vs. today

“The Professional Incubus” was an essay written by H.P. Lovecraft in 1924 in The National Amateur, a magazine he self-published. In the essay, Lovecraft wrote about “amateur literature,” or what would now be known as “indie publishing,” AKA self-publishing. Not much has changed in the century since, except that indie publishing has become much more widespread and easier to do. Using excerpted quotes from Lovecraft’s essay, I will explore how amateur literature in the past relates to indie publishing today.

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The AI Art Crown in the Slop Gutter

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I don’t know how people can so brazenly dismiss AI art (for writing, music, images, and videos) when no one even fully knows the capacity of current models, let alone future ones. They say AI is not that good at X (be it writing fiction or making movies), when it is impossible for anyone to have fully explored the potential of AI at doing X. And that potential is growing by the day as each new LLM model is released.

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Why Writers Hate AI (From a Writer Who Doesn’t)

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The anti-AI sentiment within the writing community is rabid. Many writers say that all AI writing is slop, and you should never use it. But I think that’s mostly denial and cope. LLMs are getting better by the day, and while I still mostly stand by this piece about the limits of ChatGPT at writing fiction, AI (Claude in particular) has gotten orders of magnitude better at writing fiction over the two and a half years since I wrote that—and it will only get better in the future. If you think AI cannot contribute to good writing, you’re not trying hard enough (or prompting well enough).

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Flawed But Vital Films

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Consider some of the classic great movies from the past, such as the monster movies of the 50s, the Spaghetti westerns of the 60s, the action thrillers of the 70s, and the horror slashers of the 80s. These movies were not great technically. Often the acting was mediocre, the ADR dialog was not synced, the lighting and color were off, and the special effects were cheap and cheesy. The monster was often a man in a suit—or a rubber shark that constantly malfunctioned. Yet the best King Kong is still the original from 1933, despite newer versions having much more realistic-looking giant apes. These movies are considered great despite their technical flaws because they were full of originality, creativity, and most of all vitality.

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Judge a Human Book by its AI Cover

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“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a classic saying that I mostly disagree with. You can’t help but judge a book by its cover, and more often than not, the cover is accurately representative of the vibe of the book. I unabashedly judge books by their covers, and my initial thoughts are almost always correct. Covers that I am aesthetically drawn to inevitably have a story inside that I am aesthetically drawn to. It’s actually a good rule of thumb to judge a book by its cover. If you think the cover of a book looks appealing, you’ll usually like the contents of the book as well.

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The Ceramic Jet

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When I was in the seventh grade, we had an art class assignment to make a small sculpture out of clay. It could be anything we wanted. I was fascinated by fighter jets at the time, partly inspired by the recent movie Independence Day, so I decided to make an F-16. We had art class one day a week, so I molded the clay over several weeks into a fighter jet about the size of my hand. Once it was hardened I painted it. After the paint dried, my work of art was completed and ready to be taken home.

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Human Creativity Beats AI in the Future

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In the future, only creative people will survive. There will be no jobs. Even art could be better done by robots and AI. But humans can still be creative. And they can find purpose in creating art or music or businesses or hobbies. Anyone who is not creative will essentially be a human robot (but a less productive version of the actual robots).

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When AI Creates “Perfect” Art for You

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In the future, it may be possible for AI to create art (including books, movies, music, and videogames) that is so perfectly attuned to an individual’s preferences, perhaps even directly using brain scans to determine the precise ingredients that will give the person the ultimate entertainment experience (like from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest), whatever that may be for the particular individual. This AI would essentially create better art than humans—not that it would be objectively better than anything created by humans, but it would be subjectively better to that one particular human for whom the artwork is specifically created for. And AI could conceivably do this for every single human in the world: create unique works of art tailored to be the best work of art for that individual (whatever the criteria for “best” is for them). How could human artists compete with that?

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Putting Messages in Fiction

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People often say that if you want to include a didactic message in your fiction story, then you should just write an essay. Which is true—but not because essays are better, or because art can’t have a message. But messages should be put in essays rather than art, more due to the audience of the medium than the medium itself.

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On Titles and Naming Things

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“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything.” — Oscar Wilde

One of my favorite parts of writing a piece of fiction is coming up with the title. I agree with Oscar Wilde: Naming a work of art is an art in itself and should always be treated as such. The name that is given to a work of art is massively influential on how that work is received. As a result, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the titles of my books (and the names of my characters, but that’s a topic for another day).

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