Cabbage Pig Studio

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Artist Credit: Malin Falch

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In 2006 it was revealed that the book was actually a work of fiction and that Frey had not experienced the struggles he claimed in the text. The house of cards immediately collapsed as audiences and critics realized the deception. Overnight Frey's cultural cache vanished and with it, his novel.

There were, as with AI today, people defending Frey after the truth emerged. They argued that the content was the same and even when known as a work of fiction, the prose hadn't changed. But the broader culture felt the shift. Their relationship to the work was not the same as before. This was not connecting with a real person's loved experience. This was a lie. Regardless of where one fell on the acceptability of Frey's misrepresentation, his book is now largely forgotten from our culture.

Remember back when AI "art" first became a thing? The neural network programs were just making images at random back then. They were abstract and arguably not correlated to any particular subject, but it was the random result of a computer running the type of algorithm computers had never been programmed for before, and there was something kind of beautiful and fascinating about that at the time. Sometimes people would be impressed with what they saw in those images and make some kind of connection to the perceived "creativity" in the computers behind them, but it was the machines and the teams that designed and programmed them that were given credit for the work. That was before the AI was essentially "enslaved" by prompters.

One of the biggest problems with "ai art" now is that people are almost exclusively using the technology to avoid taking responsibility for their own creative process - they'd rather offload that work onto a computer and just take credit for the finished piece instead. There's nothing admirable left in this method, not even the fun & imaginative creativity that it takes to sit and watch randomly generated clouds and make out shapes in them.

[image description: a photo I took of a funny looking cloud I saw that I thought looks like Abraham Lincoln's head on a tiny cherub body]