Inspiration vs participation

So many good and well-told ideas from Ted Chiang’s essay that I keep referring to it. It’s the phenomenon that having a name for something makes you see it so much more.

In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.

Name? #

I misread a line of his quote when coming up with the name for this note but honestly I think “participation” is a word that reflects how universal the phenomenon is. Is there an accepted term for this? The best I’ve come up with is “Armchair expert,” but that’s a podcast more than an official term. Here are some things it’s not quite:

• Dunning-Kruger: has to do with perceived skill doing a task, where this is imagining a task is easy without ever doing it
• Armchair theorizing: has to do with novel academic contributions, not ordinary work (e.g., I’d count something like plumbing in what I’m talking about)

Examples #

This was sufficiently interesting to think about w.r.t. art. But what’s so captivating to me is this comes up over and over in totally non-art things. Stuff that seems totally AI-able and then is really hard. I wanted to collect examples.

• How someone fills out a form

  • Crossing things out, initialing errors, accidentally repeating information, something as delicate as using clear 4s and 9s to decipher unclear 4s vs 9s

• What a call center employee does

  • Even in a call to another call center employee