You might be interested in “The Nature and Art of Workmanship” by David Pye.
It deals with the differences between work of the hand and work of the machine, and the philosophical differences between them. He calls it the workmanship of risk versus the workmanship of certainty.
This also sounds like the stereotypical literary / genre fiction distinction.
And it sounds like the Romantic craft / art distinction. The concepts of human creativity, and of visual art as something creative or original rather than as craftsmanship or expertise, were both invented in France and England around 1800. Before then, for most of history in most places, there was no art/craft distinction. A medieval court artist might paint portraits or build chairs. As far as I’ve been able to determine, no one in the Western world but madmen and children ever drew a picture of an original story, which they made up themselves, before William Blake—and everybody knows he was mad.
This distinction was inverted with the modern art revolution. The history of modern art that you’ll find in books and museums today is largely bunk. It was not a reaction to WW1 (modern art was already well-developed by 1914). It was a violent, revolutionary, Platonist spiritualist movement, and its foundational belief was the rejection of the Romantic conception of originality and creativity as the invention of new stories, to be replaced by a return to the Platonist and post-modernist belief that there was no such thing as creativity, only divine inspiration granting the Artist direct access to Platonic forms. Hence the devaluation of representational art, with its elevation of the creation of new narratives and new ideas, to be replaced by the elevation of new styles and new media; and also the acceptance of the revolutionary Hegelian doctrine that you don’t need to have a plan to have a revolution, because construction of something new is impossible. In Hegel, all that is possible, and all that is needed, to improve art or society, is to destroy it. This is evident in eg Ezra Pound’s BLAST! and the Dada Manifesto. Modern artists weren’t reacting to WW1; they helped start it.
Some chickens will be coming home to roost now that the only part of art that AI isn’t good at—that of creating new ideas and new stories that aren’t just remixes of the old—is that part which modern art explicitly rejected.
You are correct insofar as art goes, but that’s why the distinction of workmanship is important. The justification for art is its own thing, however the justification for workmanship is needs driven.
The method of meeting the need is the core of the LLM writing discussion.
You might be interested in “The Nature and Art of Workmanship” by David Pye.
It deals with the differences between work of the hand and work of the machine, and the philosophical differences between them. He calls it the workmanship of risk versus the workmanship of certainty.
The concept applies very well to LLM writing.
This also sounds like the stereotypical literary / genre fiction distinction.
And it sounds like the Romantic craft / art distinction. The concepts of human creativity, and of visual art as something creative or original rather than as craftsmanship or expertise, were both invented in France and England around 1800. Before then, for most of history in most places, there was no art/craft distinction. A medieval court artist might paint portraits or build chairs. As far as I’ve been able to determine, no one in the Western world but madmen and children ever drew a picture of an original story, which they made up themselves, before William Blake—and everybody knows he was mad.
This distinction was inverted with the modern art revolution. The history of modern art that you’ll find in books and museums today is largely bunk. It was not a reaction to WW1 (modern art was already well-developed by 1914). It was a violent, revolutionary, Platonist spiritualist movement, and its foundational belief was the rejection of the Romantic conception of originality and creativity as the invention of new stories, to be replaced by a return to the Platonist and post-modernist belief that there was no such thing as creativity, only divine inspiration granting the Artist direct access to Platonic forms. Hence the devaluation of representational art, with its elevation of the creation of new narratives and new ideas, to be replaced by the elevation of new styles and new media; and also the acceptance of the revolutionary Hegelian doctrine that you don’t need to have a plan to have a revolution, because construction of something new is impossible. In Hegel, all that is possible, and all that is needed, to improve art or society, is to destroy it. This is evident in eg Ezra Pound’s BLAST! and the Dada Manifesto. Modern artists weren’t reacting to WW1; they helped start it.
References for these claims are in
The Creativity Revolution
Modernist Manifestos & WW1: We Didn’t Start the Fire—Oh, Wait, we Totally Did
Some chickens will be coming home to roost now that the only part of art that AI isn’t good at—that of creating new ideas and new stories that aren’t just remixes of the old—is that part which modern art explicitly rejected.
You are correct insofar as art goes, but that’s why the distinction of workmanship is important. The justification for art is its own thing, however the justification for workmanship is needs driven.
The method of meeting the need is the core of the LLM writing discussion.